What Next In Lebanon.

The rift between the rival camps in Lebanon deepened on May 31, with the opposition slamming UNSC Resolution 1757 as a "violation" of the country's constitution and sovereignty, and the ruling majority launching a national initiative to solve the crisis. Reading out a statement agreed upon by March 14 leaders in Qoreitem, Hariri's HQ in West Beirut, former President Amin Gemayel said: "It is time that Lebanon and Syria fix their relations. Syria (which has long wanted to annex Lebanon) needs to recognise Lebanon's sovereignty and establish diplomatic relations and demarcate its border with Lebanon".

Gemayel, reading out part of the ruling coaltion's "national plan", offered talks with the opposition, saying: "We reject any form of tutelage over Lebanon" - subtly implying that Beirut would not be under joint Iranian-Syrian control or US-led control. He added: "Lebanon will not be used as a battlefield for settling scores".

The points of the initiative included having presidential elections on time as planned for the autumn, followed by a government of national unity and re-uniting Lebanon against "any sectarian and religious strife". Gemayel stressed the return of Lebanese detainees held in Syrian jails as a critical step towards repairing relations between Beirut and Damascus.

Hariri told Reuters Syria could ignite trouble in Lebanon in response to the UN decision, asking: "How could the tribunal affect the security of Lebanon? How could punishing the people who killed Rafiq Hariri...affect the security of Lebanon?" He added: "If Lebanon is going to be unstable, it is the doing of those who say that Lebanon is going to be unstable. They won't be able to destabilise us, because they tried before and they have failed. We hope the tribunal of an international character will not be, in the way in which its statutes have been approved, a reason for more distance between the Lebanese".

Speaker Berri on May 31 said the UNSC had ignored the country's constitution in its voting procedure to set up the tribunal, telling his March 14 opponents: "You have picked internationalisation instead of the state". Berri said the UNSC had also ignored a need for Lebanese consensus on the court, which was established by a 10-0 vote with China, Russia, Qatar, South Africa and Indonesia abstaining.

Hizbullah said: "The [UNSC] resolution, as much as it constitutes a violation of the Lebanese state and an attack on its internal affairs, is contrary to the legal rules and the charters and principles of the United Nations and the objectives it was established to achieve. Therefore, [1757] amounts to a flagrant violation that makes the resolution illegal and illegitimate at the national and international level".

French Ambassador to Beirut Bernard Emie on May 31 visited Siniora, Hariri and Berri separately. After his meeting with Siniora, Emie said 1757 was a message to certain regional players, telling reporters: "This decision by the UN Security Council is a warning to those trying to destabilise the country".

Siniora also met with Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) leader and Druze MP Walid Jumblatt, who hailed 1757, saying: "This decision came about because of the determination of the Lebanese government led by PM...Siniora and the support of Arab and international forces".

The UN commission probing into Hariri's assassination has been collecting water and soil samples from Saudi Arabia's Zalim area. A team of investigators began collecting the samples on May 28 from Zalim, about 250 km north-east of Ta'if, said a report in the Lebanese daily an-Nahar which cited the Saudi daily al-Watan.

Al-Watan said the team, made up of Saudi specialists as well as German, Canadian and Egyptian geological experts, has begun work in Zalim and will take samples from three other regions in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi daily quoted Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Mansour al-Turki as saying the work was "part of the kingdom's co-operation with international resolutions' requirements, as well as to back the commission's efforts in finding the culprit or culprits" in Hariri's killing.

Al-Watan quoted a "Saudi security source" as saying the panel's collection of samples "does not mean that it is suspecting any Saudi citizen" of involvement in the killing, but that its work could help in identifying the suspected suicide bomber. Chief UN investigator Serge Brammertz said in the commission's seventh report, issued in March, that DNA tests of body parts in the blast scene revealed that the suicide truck-bomber did not spend his youth in Lebanon and arrived in the country two or three months before his death.

The report said "the man had significant exposure to lead pollution in an urban environment up to the age of about 12, and that such exposure was low during the last 10 years of his life, possibly indicating that he lived in a more rural environment during this period". It said "the commission has collected a total of 112 samples from 28 locations in Syria and Lebanon. Over the coming weeks, it will collect samples in three other countries in the region, and further countries are identified for another series of sampling missions".

President Assad has repeatedly made clear that he will not co-operate with the UNSC-backed court. Walid al-Mu'allem, his foreign minister, told the Guardian there was a "contradiction" between Washington's desire to improve its troubled relations with Damascus and its insistence on the tribunal, which he said undermined Lebanon's sovereignty, adding: "This is a political tribunal, not a criminal one, and will be used for political reasons. If it was a truly criminal one, everyone in Lebanon would support it".

UN investigations, now led by Belgian prosecutor Brammertz, implicated senior Lebanese and Syrian security officials in the February 2005 killing of Hariri and 22 others in a massive truck bombing. Syria denies any involvement.

The UNSC acted because of the political deadlock in Lebanon, where Syria's allies, including Hizbullah, blocked approval of the court in the parliament. Supporters of Hariri hailed the UN decision, handing out flowers and sweets labelled "justice". PM Siniora called the tribunal "a triumph for Lebanon against injustice, crime and tyranny".

The resolution gives the parliament a last chance to establish the tribunal itself. But if it fails to act by June 10, the decision will automatically enter into force. Western diplomats in Damascus see no sign of Syrian readiness to do a deal over the affair, but Syrian sources privately say that is now the only likely way out of the impasse.

UNSC's 1757 has striking parallels with attempts to try the two Libyan agents accused of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. It raises tough questions about the level of any Syrian involvement. Ghazi Kan'an, who ran Syrian intelligence in Lebanon and then became interior minister, died in October 2005. The Syrian authorities immediately said he had "committed suicide". Assad's Syrian and Lebanese opponents said Kan'an was assassinated because he was one of the serious candidates to succeed Bashar al-Assad  in a coup d'etat. The Kan'an drama was days before the release of a UN report into the affair.

Attention has also focused Assad's brother-in-law Shawkat and on another former intelligence chief, Maj Gen Rustom Ghazaleh, Kan'an's successor of Syria's viceroy in Lebanon who is said to have been "kicked upstairs" and banned from travelling abroad. But surrendering anyone for trial outside Syria would be a severe blow to Assad's security establishment.

Nervousness about the affair at one point triggered a flight of capital from Syria in case sanctions were imposed. That is unlikely to happen, because of Russian and Chinese opposition. Syria is already under US sanctions, imposed because of its support for Hizbullah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Hoss On Chapter 7: Lebanon's former PM Salim al-Hoss on May 17 repeated his objections to the UNSC establishing the Hariri tribunal under Chapter 7, after a meeting in Damascus with Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Shara'. The two then met to discuss the tribunal. Hoss told reporters: "The Chapter 7 status [for the tribunal] would allow the court to begin work without the approval of parliament. Chapter 7 will cause further divisions and conflict in Lebanon... The court being created by the UNSC infringes on Lebanon's sovereignty".

Hoss on May 17 also met with Syrian PM Muhammad Naji Ottri. SANA said their talks focused on the "pressures that dominant international powers are using to interfere in the region's affairs, control its resources and destabilise it".

Lebanese Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh, who in early October 2004 escaped an assassination attempt blamed on Syria, on May 17 told The Daily Star of Beirut that the March 14 Forces were drafting a "national plan" - which on May 31 was read by Gemayel - setting the terms for a deal with the opposition and Syria (see above).