DAMASCUS - Syria's official media warned Sunday that the promised withdrawal of all its remaining troops from Lebanon would not solve its neighbour's woes, in particular the sensitive Palestinian refugee problem.
"The issue goes much deeper than a Syrian troop pullout from Lebanon, as the coming days will show," the government's mouthpiece daily Tishrin said in an editorial headlined: "Why all the fuss?"
"One can already say that one of the aims of this hullabaloo is to harm relations between Syria and Lebanon ... They want to see the two countries estranged from each other... in a 'Greater Middle East' subjected to Israel."
The last was an allusion to a US move to push Western-style democratic reforms in the region, that was originally dubbed the Greater Middle East Initiative.
"They want to settle the Palestinian problem according to their own wishes and not according to international law, and in particular to deny Palestinian refugees their right of return (to homes in what is now Israel)", Tishrin said.
The fate of Lebanon's estimated 400,000 Palestinian refugees, most of whom live in 12 camps that are off-limits to the security forces, is one of the country's most sensitive problems.
Lebanon has always insisted that the refugees must return home and has denied them the sort of civic rights that they enjoy in Jordan for fear that it would upset the delicate sectarian balance between Christians and Muslims.
But, despite a UN resolution passed in 1948, Israel opposes the return of any refugees, which it argues would tip the ethnic balance of the Jewish state.
The United States, which has been one of the main champions of a Syrian pullout from Lebanon, backs the Israeli position.
03/13/2005 10:12 GMT