Posted on 01/13/2002 6:17:26 PM PST by Orion78
Iranian president Mohammed Khatami promised continued Iranian support for Palestinian opposition groups. Khatami met with the leaders of several radical groups at the Iranian embassy in Damascus on 13 May as part of a diplomatic tour of the Arab countries.
Iran "supports the forces of Palestinian revolution" The meeting was attended by George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Ahmed Jibril of the PFLP-General Command, Ramadan Abdullah, head of the Islamic Jihad movement and representatives of Hamas and other radical groups.
Conspicuous in his absence was Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Hawatmeh caused considerable uproar last February when he shook hands with Israeli President Ezer Weizman at the funeral of Jordan's King Hussein. He was strongly censured for this action by Palestinian radicals. According to PFLP spokesman al-Taher, Hawatmeh was not invited to the meeting with Khatami.
PFLP spokesman Maher al-Taher said that Khatami pledged to continue Iran's policy of support for Palestinian groups opposed to the peace process. "President Khatami affirmed Iran’s support to the forces of the Palestinian revolution in their struggle to materialize the objectives of the Palestinian people," he said. He did not say what form such support might take.
"The future will be in favor of you and everyone else who rejects hegemony. Your stance and our stance on the issue of Palestine is based on a belief, and our demand is the realization of the natural rights of five million Palestinian refugees--that is, they should have the right to live in their motherland," said Khatami. Al-Taher said that Khatami had invited the opposition leaders to visit Iran and that they accepted the invitation.
One day later Khatami met with Hizballah General Secretary Nasrallah and Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the movement's spiritual leader. Khatami praised the group's activities, calling Hizballah "an ideological and humanitarian movement that seeks liberation and independence."
Symbiosis: Iranian support to Hizballah Iranian support to Hizballah takes the form of financial assistance, training, and arms shipments, as well as considerable political and logistical support. Hizballah in turn occasionally acts as a deniable arm of Iranian foreign operations. In the 1980s, Hizballah activists were involved in the kidnapping of Western citizens in Lebanon whom they held as hostages. In some cases, this was done on Iranian orders, for the purpose of obtaining economic or political concessions from Western governments, such as the release of Iranian or Lebanese terrorists imprisoned in Western Europe. The organization is also suspected of carrying out the bombings of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in 1994.
Iran has been Hizballah's main weapons supplier since its establishment. Iranian arms shipments include a wide range of weapons and ammunition, such as mortars, Sagger anti-tank rockets, mines, explosives and small arms. The largest single arms consignment sent by Iran to Lebanon is thought to have been in February/March 1992. Since then there have been no significant arms consignments by air. However six trucks carrying arms from Iran to Lebanon were apprehended in Turkey in mid-January 1996. Thus it can be assumed that Iran now uses the land route to transfer arms to Hizballah. Syrian support of this traffic is critical to Hizballah.
Khatami's pledge of support to terrorist groups is not well received by the United States. The U.S. State Department's Mideast envoy, Martin Indyk, was quoted as saying by the Lebanese daily as-Safir as saying, "It is hard not to conclude that Iran is still strongly opposed to the peace process and backs these organizations that adopt the policy of violence against the process."
A. Cricket
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