— Sen. Edward Kennedy (D. Mass.) urged the Reagan Administration today to call for the withdrawal of Syrian forces and the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon. “On this, the sixth anniversary of the war in Lebanon, the U.S. must press for a full cease-fire, an end to the seige of Zahle and the withdrawal of Syrian and PLO forces from Lebanon,” Kennedy said in a statement issued here.
“We must not permit a peacekeeping force to be transformed into a force for keeping up the violence,” he declared. Kennedy also said that the U.S. and other countries “must condemn in the strongest terms the Syrian and PLO violence against the Christian community in Lebanon.”
He accused the Syrian military forces which, he noted, had gone into Lebanon as a peacekeeping force, of having “remained in fact to occupy the land and to cruelly shell the Christian sections of Beirut and the Christian city of Zahle. They have joined with the PLO in a brutal assault on the very integrity of Lebanon and its people.”
Kennedy added that the U.S. must do all it can “to ensure that this war-torn country becomes again a secure, stable and pro-Western democracy in the Middle East.”
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