The final attempt to form a government in Beirut may depend on two speeches that will be made in the next few days on opposite sides of Beirut. On Feb. 14, the primary Sunni leader in Lebanon, former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, will give a speech; this will be followed by an address on Feb. 16 by the primary Shiite leader in Lebanon, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.
Both speeches will in part be commemoration and memorial. Hariri will be talking on the ninth anniversary of the assassination of his father, the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which occurred on Feb. 14, 2005, in the heart of Beirut. Nasrallah will be talking on the anniversary of the assassination of two key Hezbollah officials: Sheikh Ragheb Harb, who was killed in south Lebanon by the Israeli army on Feb. 16, 1984, and Sayyed Abbas al-Mousawi, Hezbollah’s former secretary-general whom the Israelis assassinated in south Lebanon on the same day in 1992 by an air-to-surface rocket during a commemoration of Harb’s assassination. Also, on Feb. 12, 2008, Hezbollah military official Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated by a car bomb in Damascus.
