Syrian troop leaves Lebanon

The Hundreds of thousands people turned out for a Hizbollah rally against the United States on Sunday, even as a U.N. envoy met the Lebanese president to press demands for a Syrian pullout. In Washington, the leading calls for Syria today withdraw its forces from the country, and said it welcomed the promises by Damascus to do so but wanted to see deeds and not just words.

Many placards at Hizbollah’s demonstration in the southern town of Nabatiyeh said “No to foreign intervention,” but were aimed at the United States and Israel, not Syria. Earlier, Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud said a joint Syrian-Lebanese military commission would set the “duration, time and location” for the completion of the withdrawal. A senior Syrian officer said the meeting would be held on April 7.

The announcements came after a flurry of diplomatic activity over the weekend. U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen held back-to-back sessions yesterday with top Lebanese officials, a day after meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Karami had been prime minister until resigning this month after large numbers of demonstrators protested the assassination of his predecessor, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an opponent of the Syrian troop presence and Syrian dominance of Lebanese political affairs.

Last week, however, Mr. Karami was asked to form a government, a task likely to prove extremely difficult because of Lebanon’s turbulent politics. Under a pact that ended the civil war in 1990, the Lebanese presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian, the prime minister is supposed to be a Sunni Muslim and the president of the chamber of deputies a Shiite. While he could not give specifics on what he called the “historic” move, diplomat Terje Roed-Larsen said after meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad, he was heading back to the U.N.’s headquarters in New York on Monday to report the details to Secretary General Kofi Annan.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday while she hadn’t had a chance to talk to the diplomat , she saw “positive elements” coming out of that meeting. Syrian officials say they are following U.N. Resolution 1559 as well as the Taif Accord, signed in 1989, which legitimized Syria’s presence in Lebanon at the end of a bitter civil war there but called for a later withdrawal.