by Nayla Razzouk
BEIRUT - Some 6,000 Syrian troops began redeploying toward the eastern Bekaa Valley on Tuesday, as Lebanon's pro-Syrian camp staged a massive show of force at a rally by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Beirut.
Outgoing Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Murad said the redeployment would take between a week and 10 days.
The withdrawal will also cover Syrian intelligence personnel, including their headquarters in Beirut, a senior Lebanese military official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The start of the redeployment came after a meeting in Damascus of a joint Lebanese-Syrian military committee.
The committee, in a statement, said that the redeployment was being carried out in line with the Saudi-brokered Taef accord which ended Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.
It said the Syrian troops were being pulled back from Tuesday to the Bekaa Valley and to Dahr al-Baidar at the entrance to West Bekaa, along the arc of Hammana, Mdairej and Ain Dara on a ridge overlooking Beirut.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Monday pledged to pull back his country's remaining 14,000 troops in Lebanon towards the Bekaa, where most of the troops are already based, by the end of March.
But he stopped short of announcing a full withdrawal.
Under the Taef accord, the Syrian and Lebanese governments are to decide the strength of the Syrian force remaining in the Bekaa and when they would be withdrawn beyond the nearby border into Syria.
Earlier Tuesday, demonstrators swarmed the heart of Beirut amid a sea of red-and-white Lebanese flags as Syria prepared for the redeployment.
Hassan Nasrallah, head of the powerful Shiite movement Hezbollah, warned Washington, which has been leading demands for a Syrian pullout, not to interfere in Lebanon.
But US President George W. Bush repeated in a Washington speech his demands.
"The time has come for Syria to fully implement (UN) Security Council Resolution 1559," he said. "All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair."
Nasrallah repeated Hezbollah's rejection of international demands for an end to Syria's military presence under the resolution, which also calls for the disarming of Hezbollah's fighters.
"We are united here to above all thank Syria, the Syrian people and the Syrian army which has stayed by our side for many long years and is still with us."
Hezbollah, which is designated as a terrorist organization by Washington, spearheaded an armed campaign that led to Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 after more than two decades of occupation.
Nasrallah called for dialogue to end the political crisis in Lebanon, which has been gripped by political paralysis since the assassination of ex-premier Rafiq Hariri that the opposition blamed on the pro-Syrian regime and Damascus.
Mirroring the demonstrations by tens of thousands of their anti-Syrian rivals since the February 14 murder of Hariri, the crowds marked a minute's silence for the slain billionaire and sang the national anthem.
The rally coincided with the anniversary of the Baath party's rise to power in Syria, which has pulled the strings in political and military life in Lebanon for almost three decades.
Huge traffic jams built up at the entrances to Beirut, where lines of cars and buses were unable to reach the centre of the capital for their passengers to join the demonstration.
The size of the demonstration highlighted the political divisions over the future of the country that still bears the scars of the civil war.
Lebanese army jeeps and armoured vehicles were lined up to separate the pro-Syrian demonstrators from neighbouring Martyrs' Square, which has been filled almost daily with rival opposition supporters chanting "Syria out."
The massive pro-Syrian crowd gathered the day after Syrian and Lebanese leaders agreed on a two-stage pullback of Syrian troops in Lebanon but stopped short of announcing a complete withdrawal.
The troops entered Lebanon in 1976 under an Arab League mandate to try to restore peace during the war.

03/08/2005 18:52 GMT