The Hariri case's narrow Lebanon angle

Earlier this month, Daniel Bellemare, the prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, met with the families of victims who lost their lives in the bomb attacks between 2005 and 2009. After saying that he was aware of concerns about the length of his investigation, Bellemare explained, “I can assure you that we are making progress and that I am very optimistic. I sincerely wish I could tell you more about the reasons for my optimism but unfortunately I cannot because I do not want to give away any information, or even a hint, that could tip off those we are after.”

If Bellemare is optimistic, that’s good news, and his statement, though it told us relatively little, was perhaps the strongest sign yet that he believes his efforts will not end in a dead end. The prosecutor is responsible only for what he says, and he has said virtually nothing until now; however a more disturbing assessment is emerging from various sources, including foreign diplomatic sources, that the focus of Bellemare and his team may be on domestic Lebanese involvement in the assassination of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and that only through this route might he follow the chain of decision-making in the crime outside the country.

What does this mean? Some will hear echoes of the Der Spiegel article: Hizbullah is blamed for Hariri’s killing, the investigation is contained inside Lebanon’s borders, Syria is effectively exonerated, and the international community averts a confrontation with the Assad regime. In fact, if the assessment is correct, things may be much more complicated.

To this day the role that Hizbullah played in Hariri’s killing is a matter of conjecture. Some senior March 14 leaders have long harbored suspicions that the party lulled the former prime minister into a sense of false security by engaging in a dialogue with him over parliamentary elections prior to February 14, 2005, in order to facilitate his elimination. There is also a pervasive sense among many observers that the truck bomb used in the assassination was prepared in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Subsequent killings have also been blamed on Hizbullah, particularly that of Gebran Tueni, on the assumption that he was spotted at the airport upon his return from Paris and the information passed on to the party.

This may all be true, but the fact is that from the available evidence that Bellemare and his predecessors, Serge Brammertz and Detlev Mehlis, published, we cannot affirm it is true. Basing ourselves solely on the reports of the United Nations investigation of the Hariri murder and subsequent crimes, we get a distinct sense that the attention of investigators was primarily directed at Syria, and that any Lebanese party or individual who might have participated in the Hariri assassination in particular, did so at the request of Damascus. In other words, a crime of that magnitude could not conceivably have taken place without Syrian authorization, given the tight control Syria exerted over Lebanon.

If it is true, therefore, that Bellemare will be unraveling the case through what we can call its domestic window, then what does that tell us about the UN investigation in general? Mehlis and Brammertz were well aware of the Syrian connection, as was, obviously, Bellemare when he took over his post. But there are also converging indications that Brammertz did not aggressively pursue his inquiry in Syria in the same way that Mehlis did, and the evidence for this is that no Syrian official, particularly no intelligence official, was ever arrested, even though Mehlis was on the verge of doing so when he left Beirut in December 2005.

If that reading is correct, then it might explain why UN investigators came to rely more on the alternative, domestic Lebanese, angle to the assassination. And here we have evidence that on the Lebanese side there was progress by the Internal Security Forces, albeit in collaboration with the UN. The evidence is, quite simply, the failed assassination attempt against the ISF officer Samir Shehadeh, and the successful killing of his deputy Wissam Eid. Both men were working on telephone intercepts, and a newspaper story prior to the Der Spiegel article, written by Georges Malbrunot of Le Figaro, reported that there had been a breakthrough there pointing toward Hizbullah’s involvement.

Bellemare met with Eid the day before he was killed in a car-bomb attack, and while some sources believe that the killing was linked to important new information Eid had on the intercepts, Bellemare disagreed with this evaluation. We may never know, but if the UN prosecutor is pursuing a Lebanese path toward the truth, then, significantly, it may have been the Lebanese investigators, not those from the UN, who did the heavier lifting to make this possible.

Accusing Hizbullah alone, or individuals in the party, because that is where the available evidence lies, could bend out of shape our true understanding of the Hariri assassination. It would also raise doubts about Brammertz, who failed to take the wide road that Mehlis and the UN Security Council opened for him in 2005 to facilitate his probes in Syria. That does not mean that Bellemare would not find an alternative path to Syrian participation, perhaps through indictments he would bring against Lebanese intelligence officials (and his release of the four generals was not, legally, a declaration of their innocence). But an accusation against Hizbullah, even if justified, would only be partial if it did not include indictments against senior Syrian officials. They alone could have signed off on Hariri’s murder, a view painfully evident to any Lebanese who knows how Syria ran Lebanon, but also resulting from the relationship of hierarchy existing between Syria’s intelligence services and the Lebanese that the UN time and again described in its reports.

Bellemare’s work is ongoing, so we should be careful before reaching any hard conclusions on the basis of incomplete leaks. But we are entitled to wonder whether the Lebanon tribunal will identify those who gave the final order that Hariri be gotten rid of, or whether will we have to satisfy ourselves merely with identification of those who followed orders.