| Lebanon awaits peace, and Iran threatens Israel The adoption of the UN Security Council resolution on Lebanon, as predicted by the Vremya Novostei newspaper, is postponed. This was announced yesterday by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and US Deputy Secretary of State Nicholas Burns. The British First Deputy Secretary General of the UN, Mark Malloch-Brown, spoke yesterday about the possibility of the UN Security Council adopting even two resolutions - on a “stop of hostilities” and on the mandate of peacekeepers.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, confirming yesterday that there would be no resolution until next week, announced that Israel is “very close” to achieving its goals in southern Lebanon and will not leave until at least 15,000 peacekeepers arrive. These “should not be pensioners who came to idle around,” but “real soldiers, ready to implement UN Security Council resolutions” on the disarmament of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement. And also “control the Lebanese-Syrian border to prevent the smuggling of weapons for Hezbollah.” Olmert stressed that Israel “reserves the right to respond to aggression even after the deployment of peacekeepers.”
Despite the fact that the Israeli army has fired at UN military observers in southern Lebanon at least five times in the last 24 hours, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and Pakistan have announced their intention to include their soldiers in the future peacekeeping corps. This happened at a meeting of the executive committee of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), urgently convened yesterday in Malaysia at the request of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He called on Islamic countries to "isolate the US, Britain and other governments that support Israel." And also “to immediately break open and hidden ties with the Zionist regime, the elimination of which is the true solution to the current conflict.”
Representatives of 21 of the 57 OIC member countries arrived in Malaysia. They expressed disappointment at the “inaction of the UN Security Council” and called on it to adopt a resolution on a truce in Lebanon as soon as possible, ensuring its implementation by sending peacekeepers there. Alexander SAMOKHOTKIN |
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