The
Mehlis Report and Lebanon’s Trouble Next Door
Marlin
Dick
November 18,
2005
(Marlin Dick
is a freelance journalist based in Lebanon.)
Further
Info
For
background on the Lebanese elections, see Sateh Noureddine and
Laurie King-Irani, “Elections
Pose Lebanon’s Old Questions Anew,” Middle East Report
Online, May 31, 2005.
The fall 2005 issue of Middle East Report focuses
entirely on developments in Syria and Lebanon since the Syrian
withdrawal. To order the issue or to subscribe to Middle East
Report, visit MERIP’s home
page. |
The
UN-authorized investigation into the assassination of former
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, now well into a second
phase of heightened brinkmanship between Damascus and Washington,
also has Lebanon holding its collective breath.
As expected,
the first report of German investigator Detlev Mehlis, released on
October 21, 2005, did not produce a “smoking gun” proving the
involvement of Syrian officials or Lebanese proxies in the February
14 killing of Hariri and 22 others with a one-ton truck bomb in
downtown Beirut. Rather, Mehlis wrote that “on the basis of the
material and documentary evidence collected, and the leads pursued
until now, there is converging evidence pointing at both Lebanese
and Syrian involvement in this terrorist act” and that “it would be
difficult to envisage a scenario whereby such a complex
assassination plot could have been carried out without their
knowledge.” The public version of the report lays out a
circumstantial case for these allegations, and cites the claim of a
witness who worked for Syrian intelligence that “senior Lebanese and
Syrian officials decided to assassinate” Hariri in September 2004. A
leaked, unedited version of the report names two of these officials
as Mahir al-Asad, head of Syria’s Republican Guard and brother of
President Bashar al-Asad, and Asef Shawkat, head of Syrian military
intelligence and the president’s brother-in-law.
ELECTION
RESHUFFLE
The
assassination and subsequent Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon
happened to precede Lebanese parliamentary elections that had
already been scheduled for May and June. The elections were held
under roughly the same election law as 2000, when Hariri and his
allies scored important victories but failed to win control of
Parliament because of a cohort of Syrian-backed deputies. In the
2005 round, the “March 14 opposition,” so named for the date of a
million-person demonstration demanding “the truth” about Hariri’s
death and an end to Syrian influence in Lebanon, won a slight
majority of seats. This alliance was led by Saad al-Hariri, son of
the slain premier and heir to his heavily Sunni Future Movement, and
Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, along with Christian MPs from the
Qornet Shehwan Gathering, the Lebanese Forces, several mainly
Christian groups and the Democratic Left Movement. However,
victorious Christian MPs from this camp had what, in the sectarian
logic of Lebanon’s confessional system, is seen as a political
liability. All of Lebanon’s electoral districts are multi-member; an
MP who wins election does so thanks to the votes of the entire
district, not just her own sect. The sectarian logic also means that
when an MP wins a race without securing at least a plurality of
votes from his own sect, he is subject to charges that he lacks
legitimacy as a spokesperson for the sect. In opposition, many
hailed the March 14 coalition as multi-confessional. In electoral
victory, the coalition was widely seen as dominated by Sunni and
Druze politicians who had to court the Shiite parties to get
business done. Anything dramatic like the fate of the president
would require full consensus, namely support from the leading
Christian politician whose credentials were not “tainted” by having
won his seat on the strength of non-Christian votes.
That person was
former general Michel Aoun, who returned to Lebanon in May from 14
years of exile in Paris. Aoun heads the Free Patriotic Movement,
which had been one of the main players in the anti-Syrian opposition
prior to the withdrawal. He is widely rumored to have cut a deal
with Lahoud, and by extension the Syrians, by which he would not
demand Lahoud’s resignation when he landed in Beirut. (Aoun denies
the charge.) Upon his arrival, Aoun said, “Lebanon has been under a
black cloud that enslaved it for 15 years. Today, there is a sun of
freedom. I am coming to look to the future and to build Lebanon
together.” He did not call upon the president to step down; instead,
he castigated Jumblatt and Hariri’s Future Movement for having been
willing allies of Syria during most of the period following the
1975-1990 civil war and blamed them for the country’s dire economic
situation and problems with corruption. In the election campaign,
the ex-general allied with backers of Lahoud. Supported by Christian
voters who were angrier at 15 years of Syrian “tutelage” than at
Lahoud in particular, Aoun scored strong victories in three
districts, claiming a substantial 21-seat bloc and a defeat of rival
Christians, including some who had called for a Syrian withdrawal
for several years.
The third major
electoral force was the Shia alliance of Hizballah and Amal, which
retained most of its deputies (around 28 in all), mainly in southern
Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. While tacitly or openly running with
the Hariri-Jumblatt camp, the Shia alliance also had cordial
relations with the Aounists. The very few MPs left were either
difficult-to-classify independents or allies of the Syrians. Before
the elections, an informal Hariri-Jumblatt-Hizballah-Amal grouping
agreed to keep the 2000 electoral law. Afterward, the same alliance
of heavily Sunni, Druze and Shiite parties agreed upon major policy
parameters, allowing Aoun and Lahoud to cry “imbalance” and claim
that Christian politicians had no role in the big decisions. The
exit of the pro-Syrian deputies did little to dispel that criticism.
Ironically, the
Syrian-managed ruling “troika” system of president, speaker and
prime minister was roundly criticized after the war, but when
Damascus departed and elections were held, Lebanon ended up with a
new troika, consisting of the March 14 coalition, the Hizballah-Amal
alliance and the Aoun-Lahoud partnership, with no group able to
implement major policy alone.
SUMMER OF
PARALYSIS
BILATERAL ISSUES
In the absence
of serious policymaking while awaiting Mehlis’ report and its
consequences, key bilateral matters were put on hold. The Asad
regime and the Siniora government have frosty relations and neither
has taken the initiative to spell out a post-withdrawal
relationship, constrained by the investigation hanging over their
heads.
The lowlight of
the summer was the spectacle of dozens of trucks held up for weeks,
in the sun and heat, on the Lebanese-Syrian border, wrecking
business for Lebanese exporters and others. Syria’s justification
was that security checks were needed to clamp down on the smuggling
of weapons from Lebanon, which took it as a sign of Damascus’
displeasure with its former satellite. Siniora’s official visit to
Damascus produced an agreement allowing the trucks through, but this
was followed by Syrian customs officials’ seizing goods carried by
people traveling to Syria. The Syrians have increased the exit fee
paid by its nationals to enter Lebanon from 200 lira to a hefty 800
(the equivalent of $16), demanded that Lebanese residents of Syria
have proper residency and work permits (a practice long ignored for
Syrian workers in Lebanon), and stopped allowing Lebanese to pay for
hotels in Syria in local currency, demanding hard currency as they
do from all foreigners. The two countries’ borders are porous and
both sides complain about weapons being smuggled across them in both
directions. A complete demarcation is another thorny issue, and not
just in the Shebaa Farms, the strip of land along the Lebanese
border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Syria and Lebanon
reject the UN-Israeli position that the farms are in Syrian
territory, and Hizballah mounts episodic attacks on Israeli outposts
in the farms on the grounds that this is Lebanese territory yet to
be liberated.
The bilateral
conundrum is highlighted by the past and future of the Higher
Syrian-Lebanese Council and the 1991 treaty of “brotherhood,
coordination and cooperation” governing the countries’ economic and
military relations. While Lebanese opponents of the Syrian presence
have long called for revising the document, its various components
grant Lebanon a number of economic advantages that could be lost in
renegotiation.
THE TROUBLE
NEXT DOOR
Along with a thousand other
rumors, expectations of either a blockbuster report by Mehlis or a
big dud swirled in Lebanon for months, with the result falling
somewhere in the middle: accusations that require more investigation
before formal charges are issued and a court convened. Although the
report “settled” the issue that Israel or a lone fundamentalist
bomber was almost certainly not responsible for the killing of Rafiq
al-Hariri, it signaled that resolving the assassination would
probably take considerably longer than the time needed to produce
the report. The investigation is generating various bones of
contention, such as the site of interrogations of Syrian officials,
the composition and location of a court if indictments are issued,
and the appeals process. In calling for “justice, not revenge,” Saad
al-Hariri loudly rejected any compromise in the matter, probably a
response to popular speculation that a deal might be struck over the
investigation between Washington and Syria, in return for the
Syrians’ helping the US in Iraq.
In addition to
the issues of Lahoud and UNSC 1559, there is the worrisome question
of whether the US ultimately wants to see regime change in Syria or
merely, as it publicly states, a “change of behavior.” Some Lebanese
quietly voice concerns that their country will never have secure
relations with Syria as long as that country is ruled by a
dictatorship, implying approval of some type of regime change. But
there is no appealing alternative to Asad, and the example of Iraq
is another deterrent to this sort of talk.
Syria’s
paradigm for the coming months, according to Asad’s November 10
speech, is the post-1982 Israeli invasion phase, when Damascus
managed to scuttle the May 17, 1983 peace agreement between Lebanon
and Israel, thanks to its Lebanese allies. It remains to be seen
whether, after the withdrawal of its army, Damascus can still forge
a cohesive coalition of Lebanese actors to affect the Lebanese
state’s decisions or even, as some Lebanese newspapers allege,
change the government’s composition.
In the
meantime, the atmosphere is tense. The killings of writer Samir
Kassir and ex-Communist Party head George Hawi and the attempt on
the life of TV announcer May Chidiac are viewed by many Lebanese as
of a piece with Hariri’s assassination and the earlier attempt to
kill Hariri’s supporter Marwan Hamadeh. All were vocal critics of
Syrian interference in Lebanon. For much of the summer, political
figures associated with the “independence uprising” of the spring,
including Hariri’s son Saad, shuttled between various European and
Arab countries or practically confined themselves to their
residences in Lebanon. Cracks in the government are showing up. In
his speech, Asad accused Lebanon of being a “corridor and a factory
and a funder” of plots against Syria, and referred to Siniora as a
“slave of a slave,” a reference to Hariri and his foreign backing.
Hizballah and Amal ministers walked out of a cabinet meeting
convened to condemn Asad’s remarks, with Hizballah’s Naim Qasim
saying: “We guarantee President Asad that we will not allow Lebanon
to become a bridgehead for imperialism.”
With both the
fate and the behavior of the Syrian regime uncertain, the strategic
issues of Lebanon’s politics are on hold as the country waits for a
winner to emerge in the confrontation between Washington and
Damascus, as well as the findings of the German
detective.
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