Global Arab Network | Saad Hariri refuses any deal with Hezbollah

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Saad Hariri refuses any deal with Hezbollah

Saad al-Hariri, the leader of Lebanon's Future movement, has said he will refuse to join a Hezbollah-led coalition government should the Shia party and its allies win the country's forthcoming elections.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Tuesday, al-Hariri said that a win for Hezbollah could have "consequences" for Lebanon, but said he was confident his party and its March 14 alliance allies would win.

He told Al Jazeera's James Bays that if Hezbollah won the election on June 7 he would be "in the opposition".

"If Hezbollah wins and its coalition - the 8th March - I think it will have consequences on the country," he said, although he would not specify what those consequences might be.

"But I have faith in God and the people of Lebanon. I'm not thinking of losing. I didn't run in this election to lose."

He said that his party and its allies, a coalition broadly opposed to Syrian influence on the country and named after the date of Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, were campaigning on economic issues. "We want to give every single Lebanese a job," he said.

According Xinhua agency, there is a real chance that Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian allies will win the June general election in Lebanon, ousting the anti-Syrian alliance that currently holds the reigns of power.

Ahead of the national poll, Hezbollah has been up its anti-Israel rhetoric. The movement's Chief Hassan Nasrallah accused Israel of being behind a Saturday report in German weekly Der Spiegel that suggested international investigators now believe Hezbollah, rather than Syria as previously thought, was behind the Feb. 14, 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Nasrallah said the report in Der Spiegel was an "act of Israeli provocation against the Shiites."

Yet experts in Lebanon and those who closely follow the Levant are minimizing the impact of the Hariri claims of the German publication on Israel-Hezbollah relations.

"Whether or not Hezbollah was in fact involved, the timing of the Der Spiegel story raises concerns about the politicization of the tribunal process," Michael P. Scharf, a law professor at the U.S. Case Western Reserve University, told Xinhua.

"With Hezbollah poised to potentially make significant gains in Lebanese national elections next week, the leak from the Lebanon tribunal, if the information did come from a tribunal insider, seems timed to affect the election," said Scharf, adding that he does not believe the Der Spiegel report had anything to do with Israel.

On the Israeli side, reports in local media suggest that the Israel Defense Forces is concerned Hezbollah could choose to attack Israel if it loses the election.

On the German side, the German embassy in Beirut said Monday that its government has no information about the report of a German weekly on Hezbollah's involvement in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, local Elnashra website reported.

The International Tribunal is independent, said the statement of the embassy, denying any information on what was published in German weekly magazine Der Spiegel.

The English version of the German weekly published Saturday a report that the UN commission investigating the Hariri murder had new evidence that the Lebanese Shiite armed group Hezbollah, not Syria, planned and executed the Beirut car bombing on Feb. 14, 2005, which killed Hariri and 22 others. (AFP, Xinhua, Aljazeera)

Global Arab Network‎‎‎

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