BEIRUT - The Lebanese opposition pressed for 11th-hour changes to an electoral law it regards as unfavourable Tuesday just two days before the president is to call parliamentary elections.

Opposition parties want revisions to the constituency boundaries established for the last elections in 2000 and, after a five-day parliamentary recess for public holidays, Wednesday will be their last opportunity to change the law.

But so far parliament speaker Nabih Berri, a pro-Syrian Shiite, has rebuffed calls for a debate.

"It is all in Berri's hands," Christian opposition MP Nayla Moawad told AFP.

"The 2000 electoral law is the worst. It was passed under Syrian tutelage in order to guarantee the control of the Syrian-Lebanese intelligence services over the Lebanese parliament," she charged.

Another opposition MP, who asked not to be identified, said he feared Berri would prevent any debate as the existing law favoured his Amal faction.

An earlier attempt by the opposition to put forward amendments in a parliamentary committee Thursday proved abortive after they failed to reach a quorum.

Most opposition MPs said they would prefer to see the elections go ahead on schedule later this month, as required by the constitution, rather than delaying them for the sake of changing the boundaries.

The opposition is "determined to safeguard the elections and agrees they must be held on time," said Druze MP Ghazi Aridi.

"We will go into the elections united, whichever law is adopted," said Moawad.

The patriarch of the Maronite church, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, also entered the fray, insisting that the most important thing was for the elections to go ahead on time.

"The eyes of the world are upon us," he told reporters Monday on his return from a trip abroad.

But some Christian politicians have insisted they would rather delay the elections than see them held under the current constituency boundaries.

Michel Aoun, a former interim prime minister driven into exile by Syrian troops in 1990, accused opposition leaders ready to work with the 2000 law of "treason".

Supporters of Aoun, who is planning a triumphant homecoming from France Saturday following the departure of Syrian forces last month, have also split with other opposition parties on other issues.

On Monday night, Sunnis, Druze and one Christian faction dismantled tents in Beirut's central Martyrs' Square where they had been staging a round-the-clock protest for the past two and a half months.

The "freedom camp" had become the symbol of the wave of opposition protests that swept the country after the murder of five-time prime minister Rafiq Hariri in a February bomb blast widely blamed on Syria and its supporters here.

But Aoun's supporters rejected the other factions' argument that the aims of the camp had been achieved and announced they would maintain their presence.

Meanwhile, a preliminary investigation has shown that Syrian troops deployed in a border area are on Syrian soil, not Lebanese land, officials said.

"The concerned security services informed Prime Minister Nagib Miqati this evening of the preliminary results of the verification process of Syrian troops deployed in the eastern border region of Deir el-Aashayer and Kfarquq," the prime minister's office said.

"The verification showed that these positions are inside Syrian territory," the statement added, a day before Miqati was due to visit Damascus.

On Monday, Miqati said in the French newspaper Le Monde that Syrian troops were still deployed in Deir el-Aashayer and that the location was inside Lebanese territory.

The official Syrian news agency SANA said Tuesday that Lebanon and Syria had decided to set up a joint military commission to probe the claims.A UN team is already at work verifying the pullout.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier had issued a joint demand for an end to any "residual" Syrian presence after Miqati's comments to a Paris daily.

The two governments co-sponsored a UN Security Council resolution passed last September demanding the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon.

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