* Long-planned visit takes place amid rising tension
* Benedict says nobody advised cancelling trip
* All religious groups approve, including militant Shi’ite
Hezbollah
By Tom Heneghan and Dominic Evans
BEIRUT, Sept 14 (Reuters) – Pope Benedict’s visit to Lebanon
ranked as potentially his most dangerous even before this week’s
protests in the Middle East raised the stakes, but he said on
Friday he never considered calling it off for safety reasons.
Syria’s civil war rages only 50 km (30 miles) east of Beirut
and the Sunni-Shi’ite tensions it unleashed have sometimes
spilled over the border to spark clashes that could upset the
fragile peace Lebanon has had since its own war ended in 1990.
In addition, protests against a U.S.-made film Muslims say
insults the Prophet Mohammad continued in Egypt and Yemen and
spread to Malaysia, Bangladesh and Iraq. Islamist militants
killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi on Thursday.
But Lebanon, despite its violent history, is a unique corner
of the Arab world where many religious groups live in a shaky
balance. The government and all the main groups supported the
pope’s visit, mostly confined to Christian areas of Beirut and
its surroundings.
“Nobody has advised me to cancel this voyage,” Benedict told
journalists on the plane from Rome.
“I never thought of it because I know that the more
complicated a situation becomes, the more necessary it is to
send this signal of fraternity, encouragement and solidarity.”
A Christian woman outside his meeting with Christian clergy
in Harissa northeast of Beirut said the rising tensions in the
region were not the best atmosphere for the long-planned visit.
“But he can’t not come,” said the woman who gave her name
only as Isabelle. “This was a big plan and it would be very
defeating if he didn’t come.”
Security personnel were deployed in force along Benedict’s
route from the airport into Beirut, amid welcoming posters
including several from the militant Shi’ite group Hezbollah.
ASSURANCES
Hezbollah, the strongest armed force in the country, gave
several assurances in advance that it supported the visit.
“In the name of the party and people of Hezbollah, we
welcome the pope’s visit to Lebanon and will treat it as an
exceptional and historic visit, as do the other Muslims and the
Christians,” its Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said.
With these assurances in Beirut, the main wild card would be
militant Sunni Muslims, a minority centred in Tripoli 70 km (40
miles) to the north and Sidon 40 km (25 miles) to the south.
Violence broke out in Tripoli on Friday, with one protester
killed and two others wounded in clashes with security forces in
protests over the U.S. film and against the pope’s visit.
Rev Samir Khalil Samir, a Beirut-based Jesuit and one of the
Vatican’s leading experts on Islam, said before the pope’s
arrival that the visit had a high psychological significance as
a sign of the Church’s solidarity with the region’s Christians.
“By coming here, he tells them that he shares their
concerns. I am with you, don’t be afraid, he’s saying,” Samir
said, noting the fears many Christians had of growing Islamist
influence in Arab countries where uprisings overturned
dictatorships.
The pope was due to meet Islamic religious leaders on
Saturday. Early in his papacy, he angered Muslims by suggesting
Islam was violent and irrational, but visits to Turkey in 2006
and Jordan in 2009 mostly eased those initial strains.
Questions about security for the visit arose in mid-August
when, amid rising sectarian tensions because of Syria, Shi’ite
gunmen kidnapped more than 20 people in retaliation for the
capture of one of their kinsmen in Syria.
Despite the tensions, all the main religious communities had
reassured the Vatican that they welcomed Benedict’s visit,
according to Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, papal envoy to Beirut.
The prominent Shi’ite cleric Sayyed Ali Fadlallah followed
up on this in his Friday sermon by urging his followers to
express their anger at the controversial film with restraint.
Caccia said the Vatican always had to be alert to the danger
of attacks during papal trips. “But the current context seems to
give us reasonable guarantees, otherwise the trip would not have
gone ahead,” he told Reuters on Monday.
“I am as tranquil as humanly possible,” he said, because of
“reasonable guarantees” the Church had received that the visit
would not be disrupted.
(Editing by Alison Williams)
