Introduction to the evening news 27-10-2011

24 hours after the Arab ministerial committee’s meeting with President Bashar Assad, they are still hung on questions that may not even crystallize during their second meeting next Sunday.   

The Arab committee led by Qatar was able to pierce the Syrian armor and have its say in the solution for Syria. But did the Syrian leadership accept all of the initiative’s items?   

Will it accept to hold a dialogue in Cairo or Doha? Or will it stick to Damascus? With which opposition faction does the Syrian leadership want to hold talks? Will the opposition’s national council accept to negotiate with the regime, even if the talks are held under the Arab League’s umbrella? What are the dialogue’s limits given that the foreign and domestic opposition have set the toppling of the regime as a precondition? Is the Arab League’s initiative sponsored by the U.S. and Europe?   

In light of all these questions, the regime was flexing its popular support muscles for the second day in a row, while mines were planted along the border with Northern Lebanon under the pretext of preventing arms smuggling. Meanwhile, Syria’s delegate to the U.N. Bashar Jaafari sent a letter to both the U.N. Secretary General and the Security Council’s president commenting on Ban Ki Moon’s report on the implementation of resolution 1559. In his letter, he stressed that no Syrian soldier entered the Lebanese territories and that most of the information included in the report were adopted by misleading media sources, accusing the Lebanese of thwarting Syria’s stability.    

In Lebanon, as we expected last week, the State Shura Council rejected the draft decree to determine and implement minimum wage and cost of living legislation. This decision raises in turn a series of questions: is the State Shura Council’s decision bind the cabinet in any way? Will the General Labor Union accept to reexamine the wage increase despite the fact that the Shura Council, through its decision, agreed with it on the necessity to include workers earning more than 1.8 million LBP per month in the increase? Will the Union resort, once again, to a strike, or will it enter a new vicious cycle of political and syndical negotiations?    

In any case, this pressing item has been tabled, by the cabinet that is currently convening in Baabda, along with the compromise reached by the minister of education and the Lebanese University full-time professors’ league. However, a possible trap is buried in the issue of the judicial agreement signed between Lebanon and France, more specifically on the issue of banking secrecy.