Tra Lebanon Trap

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The Arab League's "peacekeeping" formulae for the Lebanon are in reality a trap for the destruction of the Palestinian Liberation forces: This stark fact, which looms over all the comings and goings between Beirut, Damascus, Cairo and Saudi Arabia was hammered home at the weekend.

The Lebanese-Christian rightwing entrenched in East Beirut and egged on by Israeli statements of support launched a mammoth rocket and artillery bombardment of three of the main Palestinian refugee camps to the east of the city.

In their primitive corrugated iron huts live around 50,000 refugees, most of them civilians.

And as the fighting continued the Arab League's "peace keeping" forces folded their arms and stood by.

It is not hard to understand why. The large majority of them Their armed presence is politically decorated by purely token forces from Libya with a few more due from Saudi Arabia.

The Syrian "withdrawal" promised for last weekend, against which the PLO leadership agreed to a truce in the interests of"Arab unity" is á cynical farce. • In most cases the sane forces remain in position digging themselves in and pretending to change their role with a dab of paint.

The Palestinian forces are thus trapped - facing alternate military blows from the Syrians and from the right-wing Lebanese militias.

The reliance of PLO leader Yassir Arafat on the "support" of "sympathetic" Arab states such as Libya and Egypt opens up enormous dangers to the Palestinian movement.

While Israel openly demands the strangling of the Palestinians in the Lebanon, Egypt and syna are now rapidly sinking their ditterences at the Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) conference and Arab commentators are now openly speculating that Arafat ..:11 1 This, coupled with a level of white emigration which is the highest for twelve years, is putting severe strain on the economy.

It is against this backdrop, and specifically that of Soweto, that Kissinger met Vorster in Bavaria