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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Kouchner warns Syria over political vacuum in Lebanon |
| 2007-11-04 |
| French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned Syria Friday that the international community could not "remain indifferent" to the current political vacuum in Lebanon. "We have made it very clear to Syria ... that a political vacuum in Lebanon could destabilize the entire region and would not be in Syria's interest," Kouchner said following talks in Istanbul with his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem. Their meeting on the sidelines of a conference on Iraqi security marked the first high-level contact between the two countries since the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Former French president Jacques Chirac suspended high-level talks with Syria after his friend Hariri was killed in Beirut. An initial UN inquiry implicated Damascus. Lebanon's ruling coalition has accused Damascus of being behind the killing of Lebanese MP Antoine Ghanem in a car bomb in a Beirut suburb in September, a charge rejected by the Syrians. Friday's talks on the sidelines of an international conference on Iraq in Istanbul came after Kouchner canceled a September meeting in New York in response to the assassination of a Lebanese anti-Syrian MP. |
| Posted by:Fred |