The MPs will ask defense minister Elias Murr on Tuesday to authorize the Lebanese army to take strict measures in order to remove illegal weapons from the capital, the London-based Al-Quds Al-‘Arabi reported.
The move comes two days after a Lebanese woman was killed by gunfire in factional clashes in the capital.
Banning illegal weapons in Beirut will be a positive step forward, but it is only one part of a larger predicament, Fadi Abi Allam, president of the Lebanese Permanent Peace Movement, told The Media Line.
“The problem is mainly in the villages,” he said. “In every house there are at least one or more kinds of small arms.”
The Permanent Peace Movement is a non-political organization fighting against the abundance of illegal small arms in Lebanese society.
Abi Allam estimates the number of small arms in Lebanon is around two million – a staggering number considering the whole Lebanese population consists of just over four million.
The drive to ban illegal weapons in the capital was likely prompted by the death on Sunday of a 30-year-old woman in the ‘Aisha Bakkar neighborhood in west Beirut when fighting broke out between Sunni supporters of Prime Minister-designate, Sa’ad Al-Hariri, and Shi’ite supporters of the Hizbullah bloc.
Both parties reportedly used small arms, automatic rifles, mortars and rockets.
“The abundance of illegal weapons in the streets of Beirut breaks civil peace and causes great damage to national unity,” Ammar Houri, an MP with the Lebanon First party told the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal. “We insist that the state’s weapons be the only weapons in the capital.”
The problem is not just the illegal possession of weapons, Abi Allam said, but also the use of these weapons as a cultural norm at emotional occasions, such as weddings.
After the Taif Agreement was signed, effectively providing a basis for the end of the 1975-1990 civil war in Lebanon, the government collected heavy and medium weapons but not small arms, Abi Allam said.
This has remained a problem ever since.
Most of the weapons entered Lebanon through the black market by sea, or through the various armed forces that have come to Lebanon over the past three decades.
Abi Allam said collecting illegal weapons was a “very sensitive issue” and has not been tackled adequately by successive Lebanese governments.
Some Lebanese groups say they need weapons for self defense, and this makes it harder for the Lebanese government to clamp down on them, he said.
The Shi’ite Hizbullah organization, designated a terror organization by the United States, upholds its right to possess weapons in order to defend Lebanon from Israel. The organization says it will never lay down its arms and the previous government failed to enforce Hizbullah’s disarmament.
With a new government in formation in Beirut, Abi Allam said this was an opportunity to address the illegal arms situation in the country.
Sa’ad Al-Hariri is in the process of forming a government that will preside over the deeply divided country.
Al-Hariri’s Western-backed Future bloc won the June 7 elections, with 71 seats of the 128 seats up for grabs. The Iran and Syrian backed opposition bloc, which includes Hizbullah, won 57 seats.