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South Lebanon Back to Polls for First Time in Decades
TYRE, Lebanon, Sept 8 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The people of southern Lebanon will have a chance to vote in municipal elections Sunday for the first time since 1963, following decades of Israeli occupation, civil war and other troubles, news agencies reported.
The rest of the country went to polls in 1998, nearly a decade after Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war ended, but the south had yet to be given the same opportunity.
South Lebanon was occupied by Israeli troops for 22 years. Israel withdrew in May 2000, harried by two Muslim resistance groups, Hizbollah and Amal.
The vote also comes amid unprecedented debate throughout Lebanon over the future role of the country's neighbor and effective power, Syria.
Damascus continues to maintain thousands of troops in Lebanon, first deployed there during the civil war.
But while 115 towns and cities will be electing new municipal councils for the first time since 1963, the situation on the ground since the Israeli withdrawal remains tense, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
The central government has refused to assume full control over the area, which has been left to Hizbollah and Amal by default.
As in the case of national legislative elections held last year, Hizbollah and Amal have formed an alliance in this region of some 500,000 people, where their partisans make up the majority of the population.
The two groups are well established in the south because of their extensive charity work and their efforts in reconstructing the region - underway since the Israeli withdrawal.
Amal is the leading member of the Council of the South, a state organization charged with redevelopment and the indemnification of people who suffered losses during the war to eject Israeli occupation troops from this traditionally short-changed region.
But a number of political formations, notably the Democratic Forum of leftist Christians and Muslims, have criticized the Hizbollah-Amal alliance, saying it is reducing the electoral process to nothing more than the handpicking of office holders.
The Democratic Forum claims that the central government's refusal to deploy the Lebanese army along the borders of territories occupied by Israel has turned that part of the south into a private fiefdom for the two groups.
Elsewhere in the region, however, electoral battles can be expected in towns and villages where the majority of inhabitants are either Christian or Druze.
The Christian constituency of Jezzine forecasts that partisans of Lebanon's Maronite Christian patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, will outpoll candidates backed by MP Samir Azar, a member of the bloc led by parliamentary speaker and Amal head, Nabih Berri.
The partisans of Cardinal Sfeir, a leading critic of Syria's influence in Lebanon, have gained popularity since the patriarch denounced prison sentences handed down to about a hundred of the 3,000 Christian anti-Syrians charged with collaboration with Israeli occupation forces.
There is also expected to be a stiff contest in predominantly Druze-inhabited areas, with battle lines drawn between supporters of the Progressive Socialist Party of anti-Syrian Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and those of Talal Arslan, who is backed by pro-Syrian political parties.
Israeli occupation forces continue to occupy the Lebanese Sheba'a farms region, claimed by both Lebanon and Syria, and located on the western slopes of Mount Hermon.
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