Envoys flee Beirut

Press, 17 March 1982, Page 8

Envoys flee Beirut

NZPA Beirut Kuwait’s Ambassador to Lebanon, his staff, and their families have left Beirut hurriedly, Jordan has recalled its last diplomat in Beirut and closed down its news agency office, and Arab airlines were reported to be planning to suspend flights to Beirut. The sudden exodus this week was attributed by both the Jordanian and Kuwaiti governments to “security consideration” — possibly synonymous with “dangerous conditions” in a country where central Government authority has long been eroded and power lie§ with the more than 40 private armies funded by rival Arab regimes.

One Western diplomat who declined to be identified cited "terror.” “The Kuwaiti Ambassador left in a hurry because he felt threatened. The Saudi Ambassador has not been seen here in the past three months and we have definite information that the Algerian Embassy has received threats by anonymous' telephone callers,” he said.

The Kuwait Ambassador (Mr Abdul-Hamid Buaijan) left with his staff and their families so quickly that even the Lebanese Foreign Ministry was not notified. A Kuwaiti newspaper had reported that the envoy had discovered a kidnap plot against him. The Kuwaiti Government later acknow-

ledged that he had left for security reasons. A week earlier, Muslim Shiite gunmen seized a Kuwaiti airliner with 105 passengers on board shortly after it landed in Beirut. The hostages were released unharmed after a 14-hour siege. Kuwaiti Airways subsequently announced the suspension of its flights to Beirut until further notice.

The assault on the plane occurred after Kuwait’s decision to withhold its share of the SUSISM budget of the Arab Deterrent Force, an all-Syrian Army of 22.000 men policing Lebanon's five-year-old civil war armistice under a mandate from the Arab League.