Beirut was under military curfew last night after reports that four students had been killed in violent street protests between supporters of the Lebanese Government and the radical Shia Hezbollah movement.
The rioting came hard on the heels of a general strike called by Hezbollah two days earlier. Last night one of the deaths was confirmed.
Violence erupted between pro-Syrian opposition and government supporters at the main campus of Beirut Arab University on the southern outskirts of the Lebanese capital. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, urged his followers to respect the orders of the Lebanese Army and observe the curfew. “We are using a fatwa . . . in the interests of the country and civil peace .. . everyone should evacuate the streets, remain calm and leave the stage for the Lebanese Army and security forces,” he said.
The riots demonstrated how Lebanon’s political power struggle between the Government and the Hezbollah-led Opposition is spreading into the streets. “We are witnessing scenes that remind us of the civil war,” said Nabih Berri, the parliamentary Speaker, urging restraint on both sides. “We must go back to talks. There is no other solution.”
“It started in the cafeteria at lunchtime. Two students, one of them with the (pro-government) Future Movement and the other with the Opposition, got in a fight. Within a few minutes it had spread all across campus,” a student said.
The campus fight quickly swelled into unrest across mainly Muslim districts of the capital, both Sunni and Shia, as youths threw rocks, set fire to tyres to block traffic, torched cars and smashed windshields as the rattle of gunshots pierced the air.
Armoured vehicles rolled through the streets and troops fired into the air to disperse the crowds. Soldiers used military trucks to rescue scores of civilians trapped on the streets by the violence. Rival television stations blamed each other’s camps for the fighting.
Witnesses reported shots fired at the students from rooftops in the mainly Sunni areas and attacks by a Shia mob on a Sunni-run school in another part of the capital.
A medical worker said: “I just carried away three injured people, two civilians and a soldier, who had been hit by rocks.” The general strike on Tuesday was the first significant escalation by the Opposition since its supporters began a sit-in outside government offices in Beirut last month after the resignation of six pro-Syrian ministers.
The Opposition is demanding a new national unity government in which it has a veto.
Aid pledged
PARIS Thirty-seven countries, including Britain and the US, joined a conference to help Lebanon, which has a debt of $41billion (£21billion), to stave off economic crisis. Pledges made at the start of the summit had reacdhed "a little more than $7.6billion" Jacques Chirac, the French President said. (Reuters)
