January 19, 2006	Thursday	Zilhaj 18, 1426

BEIRUT, Jan 18: The chief of Lebanon’s pro-Syrian Hezbollah movement issued a ‘final appeal’ for Arab help in defusing tensions between Beirut and Damascus, in an interview published on Wednesday.

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah also slammed those whom he accused of fuelling tensions between the two neighbours and said the current political crisis in Beirut proved the difficulty of the Lebanese governing themselves.

“The situation in Lebanon is bad and has dangerous repercussions,” Sheikh Nasrallah told the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat. “We launch our final appeal for the intervention of our Arab brothers.”

The Hezbollah chief was speaking a day after news that Saudi Arabia had delivered to the two sides a plan for rapprochement.

The involvement of other Arabs is necessary ‘not only to ask them to help Lebanon and Syria to surmount the crisis, but we also need the intervention of wise Arab leaders to overcome our internal problems’.

Lebanon’s government has been nearly paralysed since Dec 12 when Hezbollah and the country’s other Syrian-backed Shia movement, Amal, ordered their cabinet members not to participate.

Sheikh Nasrallah said this crisis ‘proves that it is difficult for the Lebanese to manage their own affairs’. He came down hard in defending Damascus against the accusations of involvement in the series of high-profile murders that have soured bilateral relations.

The first of these was the assassination of popular former premier Rafik Hariri.—AFP