Last Wednesday, May 25, was the fifth anniversary of the intriguing victory that lebanon’s Hizbullah won when all the positions of the Israeli-puppet “South Lebanon Army” strung along the (in-)security zone that Israel maintained inside south Lebanon collapsed within a period of a few short hours.
The collapse of the SLA threw the Israeli forces that were still in the zone into a big tizzy, and as a result the withdrawal the IDF undertook back to their own country was much more hurried and much, much less dignified than they had planned for.
The “bloodbath” that the Israelis had long openly warned might befall the Christians of south Lebanon after an IDFwithdrawal never occurred. Most of those Lebanese– Christians and Shiites– who had worked with the SLA turned themselves in to Hizbullah and the Lebanese army and received two- to three-year sentences for treason in the Lebanese military courts. Some had fled to Israel; but over the months that followed most of them returned to Lebanon.
The most amazing thing about Liberation Day was that it nearly all happened because of a largely unarmed mass demonstration by Hizbullah-organized Lebanese villagers.
Here is an account of that day given in an interview last week by Timur Goksel, the longtime spokesman for (and political advisor to) the UN’s long-running Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL. It appeared in the “Liberation Day supplement” published last week by the Lebanese daily As-Safir. The translation is by a friend.
[Headline:] Events prior to and after the liberation…
Goksel: UN resolution 1559 is unrealistic and nobody knows who will