Jean Chrétien was criticized yesterday for speaking to an audience in Beirut that included Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Islamist organization Hezbollah, and brushing off a tirade of anti-Israeli comments at the summit of francophone leaders.
The leader of Hezbollah, which the United States has put on its "A-team" of terrorist groups, sat in the summit's front row as Prime Minister Chrétien, a few metres away, delivered his address.
Asked later by reporters about Sheik Nasrallah's presence at the summit, the Prime Minister asked, "Who is [he] I don't know."
Many Lebanese regard Hezbollah as liberators of the southern section of their country that Israel occupied for 20 years. Its campaign of guerrilla warfare, often supplemented with outright terrorism, certainly contributed to Israel's abrupt withdrawal from Lebanon two years ago.
Hezbollah's military wing, which Sheik Nasrallah leads, has been condemned by both Washington and Ottawa, as well as other governments, for carrying out terrorist activities in the Middle East.
Canadian officials said that they did not know of Sheik Nasrallah's presence in the hall, nor had they inquired about the guest list beforehand. When they asked after the fact, Lebanese officials said the Hezbollah leader was there as one of many religious leaders invited to the opening ceremony of the summit. He was seated between two Orthodox Christian bishops.
Mr. Chrétien's presence in the same room, albeit unwittingly, highlights some of the complications and ambiguities of the war on terror, which the United States has characterized as a sharp division between friends and foes.
When a reporter explained, Mr. Chrétien dismissed the matter. "We're in a country," he said. "They invite people. We're civilized. You know I'm not asking [for]passports and CVs of anybody. So I look at them, and if they shake hands, I shake hands."
He later clarified that he had not met Sheik Nasrallah personally.
The Prime Minister's comments came after a tense day at the summit, where a French journalist was besieged by dozens of Lebanese reporters after they heard him speak Hebrew.
The summit's host, Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, speaking to an audience growing increasingly hostile toward Israel, referred to "odious massacres" carried out by the Israeli military, and said the occupation of Palestinian territories "perpetuates the most perverse form of terrorism: state terrorism."
Mr. Chrétien later told reporters that he was not perturbed by the strength of President Lahoud's language. "We are here in the Middle East, and it is a platform for people to express their views," he said. "We don't agree with everything they say, and probably they don't agree with everything I say. It is a dialogue."
Stockwell Day, the Canadian Alliance's foreign-affairs critic, said "it is astonishing" that Mr. Chrétien would not have known about Hezbollah's participation in the Beirut meeting.
David Cooper, a spokesman for the Canada-Israel Committee, said Sheik Nasrallah's attendance "is no more or less obscene than Syria's seat on the (UN) Security Council or Libya's chairmanship of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
"They all reflect a distortion of what internationalism was intended to be and an exploitation of the democratic process."
Hezbollah, which means Party of God, has long been considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. Its military wing is not allowed to operate in Canada, though Ottawa allows Hezbollah's social agencies to raise money for the many schools and clinics they run in Palestinian refugee camps.
Canada continues to maintain contacts with the organization's parliamentary wing, officials travelling with Mr. Chrétien said.
In recent remarks, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said that "Hezbollah made the A-team of terrorists; maybe al-Qaeda is actually the B-team." Chrétien's gaffes This isn't the first time miscues in the Middle East have troubled Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. On his last trip to the region in April of 2000, he was criticized at home for three gaffes:
In Israel, he refused an invitation by an important Palestinian leader to visit East Jerusalem. When asked why, Mr. Chrétien tried to make a joke of it. He said he did not know what part of Jerusalem he was in, north, south, east or west. The division of Jerusalem is a key point of contention between Israel and the Palestinians. His aides later blamed jet lag.
The next day in Gaza, Mr. Chrétien appeared to endorse the threat of a unilateral declaration of independence as a legitimate negotiating tactic by the Palestinians in peace talks with Israel, signalling a Canadian tilt toward the Palestinians and stirring the Quebec sovereignty debate.
He tried to mitigate the damage shortly after by telling reporters such a declaration was okay for Palestinians but not for Quebec separatists.
One day later in Nazareth, Mr. Chrétien got an obvious question about the Syrian-Israeli border dispute over the Sea of Galilee, and flubbed it. Rather than remain neutral, he offered the opinion that the Israelis were right to want to keep direct access to the fresh-water sea. The status of this important source of water is a central issue in the peace talks between Syria and Israel.