Tension escalates between Hezbollah and Sunni Arab tribes in southern Beirut
Some sentences pronounced by the Military Court have fuelled the escalation between Sunnis and Shiites. From the Arab tribes an ultimatum to freeze them or there will be a new 'escalation'. The verdicts concern arrests of clan members in 2021, following the death of a leader of the 'party of God'.
Beirut (AsiaNews) - In Khaldé, the southern gateway to Beirut, the fire is smouldering under the ashes. Some 30 members of the region's Sunni "Arab tribes" have been sentenced by military court judges, causing serious unrest. The tribes threatened the government with further 'escalation' and sent an ultimatum of a few days for the verdicts to be at least frozen.
The recently issued verdicts concern clan members arrested in August 2021 in the aftermath of the murder of a leading Hezbollah personality, Ali Chebli, and an ambush set in the following days during his funeral, in which three other people died. The attack had been planned to avenge Hassan Ghosn, a teenager from the Arab clans who was killed during street clashes with Hezbollah in August 2020 and whose murder went unpunished.
The harshest sentence, handed down by General Court President Khalil Jaber, concerns Omar Ghosn, a sheikh of the Salafist faith considered to be among the leaders of the faction hostile to Hezbollah in the Khaldé region. The latter will have to serve a sentence of seven years at hard labour. At the same time, the court issued nine death sentences in absentia and several other prison sentences.
In protest against the military court verdict, the Southern Highway passing through Khaldé - a vital artery for the economy - was blocked on several occasions. On a political level, a chorus of voices rose against the verdict within the anti-Hizbollah parties that also promoted a solidarity initiative.
For MP Ghayath Yazbeck (Lebanese Forces), the sentences passed 'prove once again that the military court is under the control of Hezbollah'. For its part, Walid Joumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party emphasised the importance of a policy of 'reconciliation' and demanded that the military court be limited to judging only and exclusively cases involving army personnel.
Descendants of Sunni Bedouin tribes that settled on the coast south of Beirut long before the area became the dense suburb that it is today, the Arabs of Khaldé are part of a larger network that migrated to Lebanon over the centuries and then dispersed throughout the country.
In August 2020, clashes broke out when Hezbollah leader Ali Chebli, in a provocative gesture, hung a giant portrait of Salim Ayyache, one of the alleged assassins of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri (14 February 2005), on the façade of a Khaldé shopping centre he owned. The man had been identified and convicted in absentia by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL).
Later, Salim Ayache's portrait had been ripped off and the shopping centre set on fire, during the ensuing clashes with automatic weapons and rocket launchers. And it was during these street battles that Hassan Ghosn, a teenager belonging to Arab tribesmen, had been targeted and killed.
About a year later, on 30 July 2021, seeing that justice was slow in coming, the victim's brother, Ahmad Ghosn had taken it upon himself to take revenge by killing Ali Chebli with a bullet fired during a wedding.
Moreover, the next day, clan members ambushed Ali Chebli's funeral procession, killing five other people, including three Hezbollah members. In order to prevent the settling of scores from spreading like wildfire and to perpetuate the climate of personal revenge, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had relied on military justice, calling for the arrest of all those involved in what he called a 'massacre'.
Indeed, the army had very quickly identified the perpetrators of the ambush and arrested them. After the heavy sentences pronounced last week, one of the leaders, Sheikh Riad 'Abou Zeidan' Daher, said in essence that the Arab tribes had been forced to take justice into their own hands. "If (Hezbollah)," he said, "had handed over Ali Chebli" to the authorities after the murder of young Hassan Ghosn [during the 2020 clashes], the case "would have been solved".
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02/08/2021 10:34
06/02/2007
