The Foreign Ministry publicly rejected yesterday a statement by the World Council of Churches (WCC), blaming Israel for the plight of the refugees and homeless and demanding immediate lifting of Israel’s siege of west Beirut where 5,000 to 6,000 Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists are dug in awaiting the-outcome of United States-Arab negotiations to get them out of Lebanon.
The Foreign Ministry said that “it is incomprehensible to us that the World Council chose not to name those responsible for the Lebanese tragedy — the terrorist organization called the PLO and the Syrian occupation forces.” The Ministry also asserted that the demand of the WCC for the immediate lifting of the siege of west Beirut “should have been addressed to the PLO which is holding as hostages tens of thousands” of residents.
The Foreign Ministry also declared that the WCC had been misled about “the alleged barring of humanitarian agencies from extending help to the needy” in Lebanon and the Red Cross from visiting camps where terrorists are detained.
Dismissing the charges as “simply untrue,” the Ministry declared that Red Cross representatives have visited the detention camps “and testified to the satisfactory human conditions prevailing” in the camps. It added that the WCC commission “Also failed to be informed about the extensive reconstruction and rehabilitation underway in liberated south Lebanon.
The WCC, comprising 400 churches of the Protestant, Greek Orthodox and Catholic faiths, based its charges against Israel on a report by a five-member delegation which the WCC had sent to Lebanon. The report was made to an assembly of the member churches held at the WCC’s headquarters in Geneva last week.
Most of the WCC officials denounced Israel in discussing the report of the delegation. The unanimity of the anti-Israel stance expressed at the session was shattered by one of the WCC officials, Armenian Archbishop Agamia, and by sharp and sceptical questioning by reporters at a press conference on the delegation report.
Agamia said it was “strange” that one of the WCC representatives found “fit to mention” the 20,000 Christians he said were killed and the 200,000 Lebanese civilians who lost their homes long before Israeli forces pushed into Lebanon last June 6. He chided his fellow clerics for ignoring the hardships suffered by the Lebanese as a consequence of the PLO actions in Lebanon.
REPORTERS CHALLENGE WCC CHARGES
Several of the correspondents challenged the critical comments about Israel, pointing out that the Commission of the International Red Cross had declared publicly that commission members had been allowed to visit the detention camps and that the international relief agencies had declared that food and medicine were being permitted to get through to west Beirut. The reporters responded to the WCC charges, that homeless refugees had been forbidden by Israeli military authorities to erect tents, by quoting UNICEF officials as declaring that many tents had been distributed to the refugees and were being used by them.
Members of the delegation were obviously embarrassed and could not refute the critical responses of the journalists. One Swiss journalist said, after hearing the delegation members, “I am not going to report on their allegations because I can see they are biased.”
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