Why the revival of the Der Spiegel theory?

There has been a story circulating around Beirut lately that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon will soon be issuing indictments in the February 14, 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri and those accompanying him, and that these will closely replicate the conclusions published by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel last May.

As you might recall, the article, written by one Erich Follath, made the claim that “it was not the Syrians, but instead special forces of [Hezbollah] that planned and executed the diabolical attack.” Follath also affirmed that Syria “is not being declared free of the suspicion of involvement,” but that “President Bashar Assad is no longer in the line of fire.”

That the Hariri tribunal will be issuing indictments soon is good news, but nothing yet indicates this is in any way true. Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare, by the tribunal’s own admission, will be spending several weeks in Canada, during which time he will undergo medical treatment. His health problems may be minor, we hope so, but somehow it seems unlikely that a prosecutor on the verge of issuing high-profile accusations will do so right after spending that long a period away from his office.

There are several more serious problems with the hypothesis about the indictments approximating the Der Spiegel article – a hypothesis repeated again this week by the respected An-Nahar commentator Sarkis Naoum. The first is that Der Spiegel itself was vague about the nature of Hezbollah’s involvement. In a complex conspiracy like the Hariri assassination, there are several circles of perpetrators, something United Nations investigators recognized in their reports. Follath claimed that analyses of telephone intercepts by Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces had proven that Hezbollah members were in on the Hariri operation. Yet nowhere did he elucidate precisely the role they allegedly played. For example, they may have been observing Hariri’s motorcade but were not in on the actual killing, which was apparently carried out by a suicide bomber. Only by being specific on so essential a detail can Follath legitimately assert that Hezbollah planned and executed the attack.

A second problem is that nowhere did Follath substantiate that Syria was not involved in Hariri’s murder, which meant he could not make a compelling case that Bashar Assad was “not in the line of fire.” The reality is that if Syrian involvement is proven, then no decision along such lines would have been taken without Assad’s approval. And if Follath was unable to demonstrate Syrian innocence, why should we expect the Special Tribunal to do so, when all the information indicates that UN investigators never abandoned their belief that Syria was involved?

In fact, just before leaving office, the first commissioner of the UN investigative commission, Detlev Mehlis, was preparing to arrest Syrian officials, a decision he left to his successor, Serge Brammertz, because of time constraints. If Brammertz disagreed with Mehlis, he never expressed it in any of his reports. All of them tended to validate what Mehlis had written, even if Brammertz’s methods were tamer. In fact they were so tame that not a few people, including several officials who dealt with the Belgian, believe he advanced relatively little during his years in office.

A third problem is that the Special Tribunal is not only investigating Hariri’s assassination, but also the dozens of bomb attacks and assassinations that followed between 2005 and 2008. The Der Spiegel article never addressed these crimes, therefore any thorough indictment must necessarily move well beyond what Follath wrote. When UN investigators from the outset have been mainly working on a Syrian angle to the crime, and this can be confirmed from numerous sources, it seems risky in the extreme to maintain that everything has been telescoped into a narrow focus on Hezbollah. Nor do recent UN reports imply this.

This allows us to ask, then, why the sudden return to the Der Spiegel conclusions? It’s difficult to say. However, the leak to the German magazine was not a coincidence, and it was, plainly, done to undermine the UN investigation. The most frightful message in the article was that the truth about who killed Rafik Hariri might lead to a Sunni-Shia civil war. That was the gist of what Bashar Assad told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in a meeting they held in Damascus in April 2007. Are those leaking to the media that the Special Tribunal’s indictments will inculpate Hezbollah trying to issue the same warning? If so, then someone is again placing the Hariri trial in the crosshairs.

In the absence of something official from the Special Tribunal, it’s best to remain skeptical when it comes to whatever is said about the Hariri case. However, the tribunal’s continued delay in issuing indictments only provides more room to those seeking to close the institution down once and for all. Not surprisingly, the scent of blood is in the air.