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Amanpour

Lebanon Calls for Help to Avert Another Civil War; Fighting to Slow Climate Change

Aired June 20, 2013 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.

An urgent message from Lebanon to the world: the war in Syria is threatening to take it down. It's not just the spillover from the increasing rocket attacks from Syria or indeed the 1.2 million Syrian refugees who've spilled into Lebanon. They're seeking help. They're also boosting the population in Lebanon by a whopping 50 percent.

But it is the specter of another political explosion there, with memories still fresh from the 15 years civil war that shattered Lebanon back in the '70s and '80s. It's a nation that's split between Sunnis and Shiites. Therefore, the Lebanese have deeply divided alliances, some to Syria's Shiite President Bashar al-Assad and others to the Sunni-led opposition.

Lebanon's Shiite militia, Hezbollah, has fully entered the fight on Assad's side, helping win back the crucial Syrian town of Qusayr just this month and menacing Lebanon's fragile political balance. Now the country's president, Michel Suleiman, has had enough, and he's begging Hezbollah to pull out of Syria.

The former prime minister says Hezbollah is stronger than the state and bluntly warns the state could collapse. And the Lebanese government is in crisis itself. It's managed right now by a caretaker prime minister. He's Najib Mikati. He was prime minister before he resigned over all of this a few months ago, and he's calling on the Lebanese to stay out of Syria's war.

My conversation with Mr. Mikati in just a moment. But first, a look at the other stories we're covering tonight.

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AMANPOUR (voice-over): Lebanon and Syria's other neighbors struggle with refugees fleeing Syria's war.

Superstar actress Angelina Jolie is supporting women and children with no home and no voice.

ANGELINA JOLIE, ACTRESS AND ACTIVIST: And they target the woman in revenge.

AMANPOUR (voice-over): She files a moving report for us on the human cost of this war.

And Singapore is choking on smog and blaming its next-door neighbor, Indonesia. A diplomatic tussle?

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AMANPOUR: We'll get to that in a bit, but first Lebanon's struggle to stop Syria's violence from spilling over its borders. Lebanese caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati joined me earlier from his country.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Mr. Prime Minister, welcome to the program.

NAJIB MIKATI, LEBANESE PM: Thank you.

AMANPOUR: Hezbollah has now joined the fight in Syria on behalf of President Assad. And there's retaliation in terms of rocket strikes and other such things, even into Lebanon.

How dangerous is it for Lebanon that Hezbollah has got itself into this fight?

MIKATI: We are calling not to interfere in Syria because interfering in Syria has an aggressive (ph) implication in Lebanon. He is to interfere to support the uprising or to support the regime.

AMANPOUR: Yes, I hear you saying you want to make sure your country doesn't interfere and you want to stay neutral.

How realistic is that, given that it's become a sectarian war inside Syria and that, you know, the Shiite population in Lebanon sympathizes with one group and the Sunni population sympathizes with another group in Syria.

How difficult is it to keep this balance, this neutrality inside Lebanon right now?

MIKATI: I am, in fact, I am betting that the one, the parties that are having fought in Syria, they will discover soon that this -- it's not to the benefit of Lebanon or their presence in Lebanon.

AMANPOUR: Now former prime minister Siniora (ph) says that Hezbollah is stronger even than the state. First of all, do you agree with that?

And second, why would Hezbollah want to pull out of Syria since many people say the very survival of Hezbollah depends on Assad remaining in power?

MIKATI: First of all, as you know, I am the prime minister of Lebanon and always I am betting on the state. And I believe nobody is stronger than the state. So the state would be strong and we have to work altogether to make the strength of the state.

Second, definitely Hezbollah has a priority and their priority today is to maybe to assist or to support the Syrian regime. But in my opinion, the Hezbollah has going -- they are going to discover sooner or later than in their top priority should preserve Lebanon. And that's what I'm calling for.

AMANPOUR: You understand why so many people are worried, looking in at Lebanon because of the civil war that really devastated your country that started in 1975 and many people looking in, especially from the West, worry that that could happen again.

Are you -- could it?

MIKATI: No, no, as I'm sure, that even Hezbollah, when they are (inaudible) calling, they say let us be in good terms in Lebanon and if there is any way to fight in Syria, even I don't accept this.

But if that -- they are keen, all parties, and I'm sure to keep the stability in Lebanon and sorry to say, during my -- all my -- when -- my (inaudible) as prime minister, I worked very hard to keep stability and to keep Lebanon away from the conflict in Syria. And that's the most important. We are so related with Syria.

Geopolitics (ph) is working. Please let us be awake from what's going in Syria. If our interfering will not change anything, and there Assad could be very negative in Lebanon.

Now just also I'm really worried not from any conflict as I am worried from the flow and the newcomer of refugees and displaced people in Lebanon. Today we are -- we achieved around 500,000, 550,000 as just refugees. They are requesting and asking for full support (inaudible). And we have another 700,000, they are living here and they are not asking support.

We are on the range of 1.2 million Syrians today in Lebanon. Imagine if United States, you have newcomers of 90 million overnight or in the Iraqi kingdom you have 20 million overnight. So this, it's beyond our capacity and I call the international community really to support and to help Lebanon.

So (inaudible) --

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: Are you getting any help?

MIKATI: -- very, very important. And what .

In fact, so far they are not fulfilling the commitment that down in Kuwait (ph), in Kuwait (ph) summit. They allocate 1.6 million (ph) for the refugees and for the city of refugees in Turkey and Lebanon and Jordan. So far, Lebanon is getting less than the parts we are requesting. But things are getting worse from November when -- or from February, where the Kuwait (ph) conference and today.

If I may say just this data from (inaudible), today the red spot where the Syrians exist in Lebanon, we are expecting around 1 million by year end if it will still going in Syria. And if you look by year end, the red dot here almost the whole -- our whole country will be populated by the Syrian refugees.

And this, it will create a kind of unbalance in our social economic infrastructure. It will create a lot of pressure on our budget because we are subsidizing the most necessary things for living and it will create further and higher budget deficit.

So, really, Lebanon is in need to help for this issue. We open our door and we are still committed to open our door for our brothers in Syria. But doesn't mean that we should not keep alone. The international community should really -- should really share Lebanon the numbers of refugees and share Lebanon the cost of their living.

AMANPOUR: Prime Minister Mikati, thank you very much for joining me.

MIKATI: Thank you very much. Thanks for CNN and all for all international journalists as they care for Lebanon.

Thank you.

AMANPOUR: And we will continue, obviously, to keep an eye on the continuing spillover from Syria's civil war.

And of course after a break, we'll turn from the humanitarian crisis in Lebanon to an environmental disaster in Asia.

That there is the Singapore skyline, shrouded in a virulent smog that's blanketed the city-state. And the unusually toxic air isn't just hazardous breathe, it is also polluting relations with neighboring Indonesia. The diplomatic fallout of climate change when we come back.

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

Singapore today is choking on haze and it's causing a diplomatic incident with neighboring Indonesia, where raging forest fires are billowing over into the city-state. Singapore officials are demanding Jakarta do more to prevent these frequent fires, which are actually started by farmers as a cheap way to clear their plantations.

We all know about the environmental crisis plaguing our planet. But this smoky crisis shows how often the problems facing us are indeed manmade.

Just yesterday President Obama used a major speech in Berlin to call on all nations to take bold action to slow down climate change.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Peace with justice means refusing to condemn our children to a harsher, less hospitable planet. This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late.

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AMANPOUR: And joining me to discuss this scourge is Professor Richard Alley. He's a Nobel Prize winning paleoclimatologist, who's devoted his life's work to battling this, and he joins me now from Pennsylvania.

Professor, thank you very much indeed for joining me.

I know --

PROF. RICHARD ALLEY, NOBEL PRIZE WINNING CLIMATOLOGIST: It's a pleasure to be here.

AMANPOUR: -- thank you. I know that what happened in Singapore is manmade and it's come from a neighboring country. But tell me how these manmade climate disturbances are effective.

Right. So it is very clear that climate change itself does not cause a lot of problems but it sometimes makes them worse. We've always had heat waves with a warming climate. We get bigger, longer ones.

These particular fires in Singapore probably only have a little tiny bit to do with climate change. This is mostly people trying to get their land cleared so that they can grow their crops.

But very clearly, climate change is contributing to fires in parts of the globe and the smoke from those fires does circle on to other countries.

AMANPOUR: Well, exactly.

So tell me, you're a paleoclimatologist. So that means you are into the history of our planet and the history of the climate. I was struck by an article that came out a few weeks ago, saying that a critical level has been passed. For the first time in history, the concentration of carbon dioxide has passed the milestone level, it says, of 400 parts.

What will be the consequence of this? How bad is it?

ALLEY: So the 400 is mostly a psychological line for us. But we have moved to a higher level now than human civilization has experienced before. What that does ultimately is turn up the thermostat on the planet. It is pushing us to a warmer level. And that has a number of consequences.

There's easy ones to see. The average temperature of the globe is warmer. We have more heat waves, fewer cold snaps. We have more moisture in the air, so when it's right to rain, the rains tend to be more intense. And that favors flooding.

But warmer temperatures can dry things out more rapidly and the circulations are changing in ways that are probably increasing droughts in some places. And we see that the snow and ice that care about temperature are showing melting in much of the world.

Clearly -50 in the middle of East Antarctica has not warmed up the melting, but the seasonal snow in the spring, the mountain glaciers and others, we see melting.

AMANPOUR: You did just talk about flooding a moment ago, and obviously we've seen a lot of flooding in Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, it's been very, very bad. How much of that do you attribute to the issues with the climate?

ALLEY: It's probably at least a little with a huge asterisk that this is ongoing. So science is working very, very hard to try to attribute events. What we know at this point is if you think about playing a game with dice, you always can come up double sixes. But if the dice are loaded, double sixes come up more likely.

(CROSSTALK)

ALLEY: (Inaudible) playing the game with someone and they kept coming up with double sixes, and then you found that the dice were loaded, you would raise an eyebrow at least.

AMANPOUR: Yes, indeed.

ALLEY: We've loaded the dice in some directions and really the scientific front here in much of this has been how much is due to us, what is really controlling these very odd-looking events that seem to be becoming more common.

AMANPOUR: Well, then, of course, that is the perennial question and there's still people who insist that man has very little to do with this.

You just heard what we played from President Obama, his speech in Berlin yesterday, talked about how we must make sure that we avert a final climate disaster.

So how much, in your mind, is it due to us?

And what can one do to follow what President Obama says, basically make it better?

ALLEY: Right, so the warming that we've been seeing is -- the best science says it's mostly due to us. Nature is actually the sun has dimmed just a little over the satellite era, the last 30 years or so. We have put up particles, including some from fires, that are blocking the sun, which tend to cool us. And we have cut dark forests and replaced them with more reflective grasslands that tend to cool us.

And yet the temperature is going up. And so the influence of our greenhouse gases on the temperature, there's a fingerprint there which is very clear. And the scholarship shows with high confidence that most or all or even more than that of the warming is due to us.

The floods, the record heat, probably you could see the human fingerprint on that. But there's more work to be done. But in general, what you're seeing is that we've seen enough change that it validates the fundamental science that we've known for a very long time.

AMANPOUR: Let me ask --

ALLEY: The warming influence --

AMANPOUR: No, no, I fully understand what you're saying, and I want to ask you something.

You said that in terms of it being visible, the rich are likely to see this and notice this less than the poor.

What do you mean by that?

ALLEY: In general, if you live in a cold place, and you have an air conditioner, you can work in the summer. You see fewer closures of your airport in the winter. And in the short term, you're not hurting very much.

If you are a poor person living in a hot place and you don't have an air conditioner and you don't have winter, making your world warmer is not doing much good for you.

The first degree of warming for much of the world's economy gives you winners and losers. The first degree of warming for many of the world's people is not helping anything.

As the changes become bigger and bigger, then who is losing from the climate change spreads to encompass more and more of the world's population.

AMANPOUR: And finally, you know, everybody's trying to game the system.

How long do we have in order to turn this around and save our planet?

How long do we have?

ALLEY: I think the best analogy would be saving for retirement in that all delay is costly. If you don't start when you're 30, you're going to have a harder time saving. But whenever you do start, it helps you. And that's what the scholarship on climate change shows, is that all delay is costly, but we can help ourselves whenever we start.

AMANPOUR: Professor Alley, that is a very clear way to put it, and I get it. And I appreciate your insights.

ALLEY: Thank you so much.

AMANPOUR: Thank you very much for joining me.

And after a quick break, on this World Refugee Day, we'll take another look at the Syrian refugee crisis through the eyes of Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie. She's there in the camps, far from Hollywood's glamor, to tell the stories of women and children who have no voice of their own.

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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, as Lebanon, already drowning in Syrian refugees, braces for a million more, imagine a world where the human tide is also overflowing into all of Syria's neighbors, including Turkey and Jordan.

Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie is in Jordan as the U.N.'s special envoy, giving voice to the tens of thousands of women and children who've been left homeless by the Syrian War. And so on World Refugee Day, she's filing this moving report for us.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOLIE (voice-over): Less than one year ago, Zaatari Refugee Camp was desert and dust. It was meant to house 20,000 refugees. Now Zaatari is home to more than 120,000, the second largest refugee camp in the world. It is also Jordan's fifth largest city.

But the majority of refugees live elsewhere. Those not in camps are invisible. Refugees struggling to survive in villages, towns and cities across the region.

Ahmehamet (ph) is an example of courage in war.

AHMEHAMET (PH) (from captions): The person that was brought to my house was my neighbor. He was injuried; his foot was gone. I didn't know what to do. So I went to the pharmacist and I said, hypothetically speaking, if my son or husband had this injury, what should I do?

He taught me how to sterilize a wound and how to use sodium (inaudible) and I started working.

JOLIE: What do you think about your mother starting to work as a nurse suddenly? You must be very proud of her.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): She's very strong.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (Inaudible)?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She's very strong.

JOLIE: Have women been facing much abuse inside (inaudible)?

AHMEHAMET (PH) (from captions): Yes, especially women whose husbands or sons are detained.

JOLIE: And they target the woman in revenge?

AHMEHAMET (PH) (from captions): If that husband is not there, they take the wife. They interrogate her. They ask, "Where is your husband?" They may even take the children. They terrorize, beat and rape them. They have no limits.

Why is no one standing by the Syrian people?

No one is helping us. They all say they want to support us, but nothing is being done. They have conferences and make statements ,but it is worth nothing.

We want the situation to get better so we can go home. The most important thing is to go home. The situation is bad here. At least here my kids and husband are safe.

JOLIE (voice-over): Syria's children have suffered the most. Over 50 percent of refugees are children. Hundreds of thousands are traumatized and thousands have died.

MUMINAT, SYRIAN REFUGEE (from captions): This is him as a boy. He's older here. Basel was everything to me. I loved him so much that after he died, everyone thought I wouldn't be able to go on living without him.

It's hard to believe. I still don't believe that he's gone. I can still hear his laughter ringing in my ears. I still can't accept that he's not with me. But in the end I know that he went to a better place.

JOLIE (voice-over): Every 14 seconds, someone crosses Syria's border and becomes a refugee. And by the end of this year, half of Syria's population, 10 million people, will be in desperate need of food, shelter and assistance.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: That is truly a staggering fact, half of Syria's population will be in desperate need and may even be on the move by the end of this year.

Now obviously, Jordan and Turkey, which have taken in hundreds of thousands, are already themselves under terrible strain. You've heard Lebanon. You've heard the prime minister tell me that the refugee crisis is testing the very fabric of his country as well.

CNN has been covering this terrible crisis from the very beginning and correspondent Arwa Damon has a special report this weekend.

Here she is with a glimpse of another dark reality in those camps: young refugee girls forced to marry and have children in order to survive.

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ARWA DAMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Families struggling to cope see marriage as the only way to protect their daughters from something worse. But the social protection of marriage comes at a price. Not only are these girls unprepared emotionally, many are having children before their bodies are fully developed.

In one house, we meet Ayman (ph). She has such a sweet young face. And yet the baby she is awkwardly cradling is hers. Ayman (ph) is 14. She speaks softly.

"I wouldn't have gotten married," she tells us, "but it's because of the situation now."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: A tragedy indeed. And be sure to watch Arwa's special investigation, "Syria Uncovered: Risks of Refuge." That airs all weekend here on CNN, wherever you are, check your local listings for the time.

And that is it for tonight's program. Meantime, you can always contact us at our website, amanpour.com. Thanks for watching and goodbye from New York.

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