Lebanon: Politicized power cuts behind deadly riots?

Speaker Nabih Berri hosted both the LAF's commander, General Michel Suleiman, and its intelligence chief, Brigadier George Khoury, at his residence in Ain al-Tineh Monday. Suleiman offered his condolences to Berri over those killed in Sunday's clashes, including Ali Hassan Hamza, an official with the speaker's Amal party.

The LAF commander told Berri that the military was launching a "serious and effective" investigation into the matter. Berri reportedly cleared his agenda of meetings for the next two days to focus exclusively on and follow up the investigations, meeting Monday with State Prosecutor Said Mirza.

Unidentified snipers fired at protesters and army troops Sunday afternoon at the Mar Mikhael intersection in Shiyyah as the army was moving in to disperse protesters and clear the road of burning tires. Politically, the incident spurred rival factions to trade accusations, each accusing the other of shooting at demonstrators.

A security source told The Daily Star that the army had detained three men, suspected snipers, who were seen atop one building located behind the Moallem gas station and the Mar Mikhael Church in Shiyyah.

A judicial source said that close to 50 protesters were rounded up on Sunday, but only 23 were officially arrested - for attacking army soldiers and pelting them with stones as they were trying to disperse protesters in Mar Mikhael. Some were arrested for trying to take weapons from soldiers and others for carrying weapons themselves, the source added.

"The army has been dragged into the conflict ... and is now stuck between a rock and a hard place," particularly with Suleiman's name linked to the presidency, said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb of the Carnegie Middle East Center.

Two Hizbullah members were among at least six Shiites killed Sunday along the former 1975-90 Civil War "green line" between Christian and Muslim areas of Beirut.

Hizbullah, and the Shiite Amal party, an ally which also lost two of its members in the riots, have demanded a "serious" army probe into the bloodshed.

"Having [eight] young men killed in one night, all of them from one religious sect, is not going to go down very easy," said Oussama Safa, head of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies.

"There is some agent provocateur, somewhere in the groups, trying to push this escalation further and ... to squeeze General Suleiman and indirectly tarnish his image.

"His chances to become president are getting slimmer by the day," said Safa.

Both analysts agreed that an investigation and swift results would have to be a priority if the anger that swept the streets of Beirut's mainly Shiite southern suburbs were to be defused.

But Saad-Ghorayeb warned of problems ahead, amid repeated accusations among the opposition that army soldiers fired on protestors during Sunday's riots.

FIRST PERSON BY MARC J. SIROIS

One of the only certainties regarding Sunday night's bloodshed in Beirut's southern suburbs is that Lebanon is infected with a culture of impunity, the economic, political and social equivalent of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. When HIV causes a patient to develop what is known as "full-blown" AIDS, his or her susceptibility to all manner of ailments - from cancer to pneumonia - is progressively worsened because the disease destroys the immune system's ability to respond. Even with treatment, AIDS is eventually fatal, but modern medicine has allowed many patients to survive a decade or more, lending hope that at least some of the people living with AIDS today might be around long enough to receive an eventual cure.

Lebanon's condition is so worrisome because while its case of impunity has yet to escalate into full-blown chaos, almost nothing is being done in terms of either controlling the virus or formulating a cure. Worse yet, those who gain from the prevalence of impunity have found a way to use Lebanon's other insidious affliction, sectarianism, to prevent useful treatment.

Both generally and specifically, Sunday's rioting exhibited all the hallmarks of societal illness