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Lebanese-Libyan Row Over Shiite Cleric's Disappearance Grows
by Selim Yassine
BEIRUT (AFP) - A row between Libya and Lebanon heated up Wednesday over the disappearance in 1978 of a Lebanese Shiite Muslim cleric after Libya blamed a leading Shiite politician in Lebanon for the disappearance.
"It's the Lebanese parliament speaker and current Amal leader, Nabih Berri, who caused Mussa Sadr's disappearance so that he could take his place at the head of Amal," a Shiite movement, Libya's official JANA news agency said.
Lebanon's Shiite leaders, however, have always accused Tripoli of Imam Sadr's disappearance along with two companions after they visited Libya.
Berri, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and another Shiite leader, Abdel Amir Kabalan had earlier rejected as false Libyan claims that Sadr did not disappear in Libya but after he left it for Italy.
They even urged the Lebanese government Sunday to take the case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands.
Libya had already recalled its ambassador from Beirut to protest the fact that he was the only diplomat not invited by Berri to the opening session of the new parliament on October 17th.
The hardening of the Shiite position has torpedoed reconciliation efforts by Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, who met in Tripoli on November 20th with Libyan leader Moamer Ghaddafi to prevent threatened reprisals against 5,000 Lebanese workers in Libya.
The London-published Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat, quoting a source close to the Sadr family, said Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, whose wife is Sadr's niece, had proposed to Ghaddafi a joint commission to investigate the cleric's disappearance.
Neither Tripoli nor Tehran has officially confirmed the report, which said Ghaddafi had agreed to the probe. Iran had pledged to publish the commission's findings and clear Libya if the evidence pointed to it, it added.
An Iranian envoy, Hojatoleslam Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, head of Khatami's office, visited Libya last week to meet with Ghaddafi, but Libya did not announce the visit.
In early November, Iran's deputy foreign minister, Mohammad Sadr, nephew of the imam Mussa Sadr, also traveled to Lebanon, according to Iranian sources.
According to the Sadr Foundation, Sadr's family originally came from the village of Shuhr in south Lebanon, and was forced to flee to Iran at the end of the 19th century because of persecution under the Ottoman Empire.
Sadr returned to Lebanon in 1959 to assume the duties of imam for the region of Tyre, in southern Lebanon, and obtained Lebanese nationality by presidential decree in 1966.
In 1969, he founded the "Movement of the Disinherited," producing a political awakening among the large Lebanese Shiite population and brushing aside the influence of feudal Shiite community leaders.
Amid the popular fervor that he stirred, the Lebanese authorities accepted the formation of a High Shiite Council, of which he became chairman.
When the Lebanese civil war erupted in 1975, he created the Amal movement, with grass-roots self-defense brigades against Israeli attacks in south Lebanon.
Experts said Amal was then trained and financed by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, which held the upper hand in Lebanon, and the movement received Libyan funds through the Palestinians.
But in April 1978, Amal militiamen prevented Palestinian fighters from recovering positions lost in south Lebanon after the first Israeli invasion, facilitating the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers.
Mussa Sadr disappeared three months later amid bad blood between Arafat and Amal, which along with Hezbollah, fought a lengthy war against Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in May with the Israeli withdrawal.
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