The BBC reported yeterday that the UN’s special tribunal investigating the assassination of Rafiq Hariri has released four Lebanese generals it had been holding as suspects in the assassination.
The UN court was set up to investigate the bomb attack which killed Mr Hariri and 22 others in February 2005.
The decision to free the generals comes less than two months before a finely-balanced legislative election that pits the pro-Syrian bloc against their pro-Western rivals, including Mr Hariri’s own political movement now led by his son.
While the BBC observes that this will likely help Hezbollah in the upcoming Lebanese elections, it claims that according to its sources the tribunal is making progress on other fronts.
The New York Times gives some more background.
The first prosecutor in the case, Detlev Mehlis, released a report in 2005 that said that the assassination had been planned by high-level Syrian and Lebanese officials, including some in the inner circle of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. At the time, the tribunal was seen by many as a vehicle for the widespread anger here and in the West over Syria’s role in Lebanon. A string of other political assassinations took place in the following years, and they could still be included as part of the tribunal’s work if they are proved to be related to the attack on Rafik Hariri, in which 22 others also died.
The tribunal has always been controversial in Lebanon. Many supporters have seen it as a way to punish Syria and its proxies here, which they tend to blame for all the assassinations since 2005. By contrast, those in the political opposition, including Hezbollah, see it more as a political weapon aimed at their Syrian ally. They also ask why such a tribunal is warranted for the death of a billionaire politician, Mr. Hariri, and not for the deaths in the many massacres and other assassinations that have taken place here in recent decades.
One question is whether the new judge, Daniel Fransen is as scrupulous and incorruptible as Mehlis had been. The key event leading to the release of the suspects was the recanting of the witness who had accused them. Still it was reported that Mehlis had developed a pretty strong case.
Hariri’s son, Saad seemed untroubled (according to the news reports) by the turn of events, however not everyone was.
But many Lebanese seemed to view the officers’ release as a sign that the tribunal might never bring Mr. Hariri’s killers to justice.
“It is a shock,” said Samir Frangieh, one of Saad Hariri’s parliamentary allies. “Everyone knows who these men were and what they did.”
Is Saad scared to be too vocal about how he really feels? I can’t say that I’d blame him.
In a book review about Syria, Fouad Ajami writes:
The very dynasticism of the succession was a rebuke to all that the Baathists had once thought about themselves. The succession would stick, but the son, a pampered child of privilege, lacked his father’s touch. His coming-out, the defining act by which the outside world came to know him and his style, was the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, in February 2005. In the days leading up to Hariri’s brazen murder, which happened in broad daylight, outside Beirut’s seafront hotels, Bashar and his principal lieutenants had openly bullied and threatened Hariri.
Bashar himself had warned that he would “break Lebanon” over Hariri’s head if Hariri ran afoul of his wishes. The Syrians did not even bother with a convincing cover-up; an early United Nations investigation, led by a meticulous German prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, made official and public the involvement of both the Syrian regime and its closest Lebanese satraps. (An unedited version of the report named Bashar’s younger brother Maher, his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, and high functionaries of the Syrian intelligence services.) Hafez, it was understood, would have gotten his way without outright murder. The father had secured hegemony over Lebanon in a meticulous, deliberate drive that took well over a quarter century. The son lost that dominion in the blink of an eye. He had misjudged the world around him. Pax Americana was right next door, in Iraq, determined to punish the Syrian regime for its subversion of the Iraqi-Syrian border, and Hariri was a friend of powers beyond — France and Saudi Arabia.
Five years earlier, there had been hopes that the young man, who had had some exposure to the West, would open up his country: U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had turned up for the father’s funeral, returned from Damascus with praise for Bashar — he was a “modernizing reformer,” part of the Internet generation, she and her advisers said. The inquiries into Hariri’s murder shone a floodlight on the workings of the Syrian regime. This was less an organized government than a huge criminal and financial enterprise held together by a security apparatus built around the children and in-laws of Hafez al-Assad and the intelligence barons. In Damascus, it is the rule of the Sopranos.
The Daily Star has many more details and an editorial supportive of the tribunal’s decision. I’m curious what Michael Young and Michael Totten will write. Assad apologist, Helena Cobban is absolutely delighted.
I can’t help thinking that this is a revolting development.
UPDATE: A few months ago there was a report that members of Hezbollah were photographing the site at the Hague where the tribunal would be meeting. Though that report was subsequently denied there was this incident too.
UN chief prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) Daniel Bellemare met Hezbollah officials in Beirut before heading to the Hague for launching the tribunal, local As-Safier daily reported Tuesday.
The STL was launched Sunday in Hague to try suspects in the murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was killed in a car bomb along with 22 others on Feb. 14, 2005 in Beirut.
Sources from the UN investigation committee were quoted describing the meeting between Bellemare and the Shiite armed group Hezbollah, as “fruitful and very positive,” the daily said.
Something about the release doesn’t smell right.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.