The Daily Star - Sunni, Shiite religious leaders voice opposing views on STL - March 05, 2011

By Hussein Dakroub
Daily Star staff
Monday, March 07, 2011

The voice of the mosque’s imam delivering Friday’s sermon in a neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs, better known as Dahiyeh, reverberated through a loudspeaker during the noon rush hour while motorists were trapped in a traffic jam at a key intersection: “The international tribunal is a conspiracy that must be confronted …”

At nearly the same time and on the same occasion, Grand Mufti Sheikh Mohammad Rashid Qabbani delivered Friday’s sermon at the Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque in Downtown Beirut calling for achieving justice in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

“Lebanon is going through a delicate stage that calls on all of us to show more wisdom, consciousness and rallying around the state institutions. We have to be united in order to confront the forthcoming developments away from gossiping and spreading rumors which cause strife and sectarian tension,” Qabbani said.

“Ensuring justice, security and stability is the duty of the state.”

Qabbani was apparently referring to the impending indictment expected to be issued soon by the U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which is investigating Hariri’s assassination.

The indictment is widely expected to implicate some Hezbollah members in the assassination, raising fears of sectarian strife. The Netherlands-based STL has been at the root of rising political tension between March 8 and March 14 groups for months, threatening to destabilize Lebanon.

Now the tension over the STL has shifted to the country’s Sunni and Shiite religious authorities, with all the risks it carries of a potential sectarian clash between followers of the two sects.

Qabbani strongly supports the STL to attain justice in Hariri’s killing. Qabbani chaired Saturday a meeting of the Islamic Religious Council, Lebanon’s highest Sunni body, which called in a statement on rival Lebanese factions to avoid “any action that can obstruct the international tribunal’s work.”

In another statement issued after its meeting on Feb. 10 chaired by Qabbani, the Islamic Religious Council called on Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati to uphold ties with the STL and implicitly accused Hezbollah of using its weapons to achieve political ends. It warned against impeding the course of justice in Hariri’s assassination by cutting ties with the STL.

But in a diametrically conflicting position, Lebanon’s highest Shiite religious authority has slammed the STL as a political tool designed to target Hezbollah and called on the Lebanese government not to cooperate with it.

A statement issued after a meeting of the Higher Shiite Islamic Council’s religious and executive committees chaired last month by the council’s vice president, Sheikh Abdul Amir Qabalan, said the council considered the STL as “null and void.”