Word: lebanons
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...hardly Royal's first ham-handed approach to foreign policy, which is any French president's principal brief. Last month, she sat idly by in Lebanon when the Israeli government was compared to Nazis, then seemed to express approval for the security wall Israel is building in the West Bank. She has stuck to her internationally unique position that Iran should be denied access even to civilian nuclear power, and even praised the "swiftness" of Chinese justice on a visit this month to China. Diplomacy, then, is not her forte...
...started with an argument in a university cafeteria between Shi'ite and Sunni students, and ended in a violent riot that engulfed several Muslim districts of Beirut, leaving four people dead and the city locked down under a nighttime curfew. Lebanon's bickering political bosses have released the genie of sectarian rage, and it is by no means certain that it can be coaxed back into the bottle...
...Lebanon's political crisis has slowly intensified since last December when the Hizballah-led opposition launched its campaign to unseat the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. A general strike earlier in the week had turned violent, with rival Christian factions battling north of Beirut, while Sunni government supporters and Shi'ite partisans of the opposition fought each other with stones and clubs...
...Thursday's campus violence was the first spontaneous outburst unprompted by political leaders - and that underlined just how poisonous relations between Lebanon's Sunnis and Shi'ites have become...
...always so: Indeed, the Sunni-Shi'ite hostility in Lebanon is a new phenomenon, now overshadowing the more traditional Christian-Muslim divide. When Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, the Shi'ites were confined mainly to the impoverished rural south and east, politically and economically marginalized by the Christian and Sunni elite in the coastal cities and ruled over by a handful of feudal landlords...