Friday, January 26, 2007

Fisk today: Robert Fisk: Money can't close the sectarian divide in Lebanon

Published: 26 January 2007

If only money could buy peace - or was the £4bn handed out to Lebanon's Prime Minister in Paris yesterday supposed to help him defeat America's Hizbollah enemies in Beirut's increasingly savage street battles?

For, even as President Jacques Chirac of France was taking the applause for leading Lebanon's debt conference - the US itself pledged £405m, Lebanese troops were fighting to control the worst sectarian fighting so far in the capital. At least four students, one of them a Sunni Muslim government supporter, were killed, apparently by gunfire.

At one point yesterday, thousands of Hizbollah and Amal Shia Muslims were taken by truck from the southern suburbs to the campus of the Lebanese Arab University in Tarek el-Jdeideh. There, students - the Sunnis siding with the government, the Shias with the Hizbollah - were fighting in the lecture theatres. Many local Sunnis feared that the Shias were going to drive them from their homes, and Lebanese troops had to evacuate Sunni students in their own army trucks.

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