BEIRUT — The Washington-Damascus show is nearing its climactic dramatic moment. In the coming months, the protagonists must either conclude there can be no coexistence and accordingly fight it out to the death; or, they can clear up the ambiguities and falsehoods they hurled at one another, reconcile, embrace, and live happily ever after. A flurry of events in the past week has once again focused on the U.N.-led international investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which has pointed possible blame in the direction of Syria.
The immediate issue of the two Syrian witnesses in the UN probe who seem to have contradicted or recanted their testimony is intriguing and entertaining, but it remains unclear how significant this is. The two Syrians, Husam Husam and Mohammed Siddiq, provided information to the investigation headed by UN-appointed investigating judge Detlev Mehlis that seemed to corroborate common Lebanese suspicions that Syria was somehow involved in the Hariri killing. Subsequently, these two witnesses were discredited as untrustworthy crooks, unstable liars, or planted witnesses designed to confound the Mehlis investigation. Husam in particular created a ruckus last week when he appeared in a televised press conference in Syria to claim that he had been pressured and bribed by Lebanese parties to point the finger at Syrians in his sworn testimony.
The UN investigators quickly responded by making it known via the press that these two witnesses were not central or primary sources of testimony that built up the case that implicated Syria in the killing. When I and a few other journalists spent a few hours talking with Mehlis and other members of his staff in his heavily guarded offices outside Beirut on Wednesday, the atmosphere was distinctly low-key and confident. Husam and Siddiq clearly had not sown any panic there. Mehlis dismissed the Syrian-orchestrated press conference as something that reminded him of Soviet-style propaganda 40 years ago — something he knows about because he experienced it first hand as a young man in Berlin. Clearly he was not impressed, or bothered, by the Husam show.
The use of the Soviet-style analogy to describe Syrian behavior was significant, in my view, because it links nicely with the wider analytical framework we need to use to really understand what is going on here. This gets us back to the main dynamics that have defined the American-Lebanese-Syrian relationship in the past 18 months or so: this is the last battle of the Cold War that ended in most other parts of the world in 1989-1990. Syria is one of the few countries of the world still run along former Soviet lines of centralized power anchored in a single or dominant party, and, more importantly here, one of the few countries in the world that still defies, challenges and resists the U.S. in various ways, often for valid reasons, at other times for the sake of obfuscating drama.
The Syrian-American confrontation is about the past and the future together. It is both a remnant of the Cold War and a new battle in the American-led “global war on terror” that was launched after the September 11, 2001 attack against the United States. The UN-led investigation of the Hariri murder is a central mechanism in the American confrontation with Syria, but it is also much more than that, which is why it is so wrong and simplistic for some Syrians, Lebanese and others to try and discredit the Mehlis probe as a tool of U.S. neo-colonialism.
It is important to remember that serious Lebanese-Syrian and American-Syrian tensions emerged on the scene at least six months before the Hariri assassination. The turning point was the summer of 2004, when noises were heard from Damascus about extending the mandate of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. Some courageous Lebanese responded to this likelihood with a public rejection of the extension, and demands that the security-dominated governance system in Lebanon be dismantled. The U.S. itself six months before that, in late 2003, had passed a congressional bill pressuring and sanctioning Syria for its conduct in Lebanon. The European Union, meanwhile, was quietly negotiating an association agreement with Syria, in which it was broaching touchy issues like development of weapons of mass destruction.
The global response to the gravity of the Hariri murder simply funneled all these bilateral dynamics into a single, collective process, anchored in the UN Security Council. This sought to respond to murder with the force of the rule of law and the accountability of any person or state proven guilty in a fair court of law. The historic importance of the Mehlis investigation, and the assorted UN Security Council resolutions that frame the Lebanon-Syria situation, is very simple but very powerful: a legal process of accountability, based on patient and meticulous fact-finding, is being implemented in two Arab states (Syria and Lebanon), including questioning members of the security services and the national leaderships.
While most attention has focused on Mehlis’ team’s possible questioning of top Syrian security officials related to President Bashar Assad, I found it equally significant that the investigators recently spent hours questioning incumbent Lebanese President Lahoud. What a nice way to start the new millennium: credible, independent, legitimate international investigators questioning an Arab leader on issues related to a capital crime that occurred under his watch.
The historic significance of the Mehlis probe is the message it sends: Arab security organizations, governments and individuals can no longer act with impunity. This is why it is so important for the UN probe to keep working diligently and fairly, guided minutely by the dictates of law and fair play, giving every accused or suspected person the full protection of the law and the presumption of innocence until and if proven guilty.
For the same reason, the Syrians must stop resorting to televised drama with limited credibility and instead also anchor their response in the rule of law. If, as they say, their government was not involved in the Hariri murder, and any Syrian proven to have been involved would be turned over to the appropriate tribunal for trial, then Syria should see the Mehlis probe as a golden opportunity to affirm its commitment to the principles of law and justice that occupy such a central place in the lexicon and iconography of modern Syrian statehood.
If state or rogue elements in Lebanon, Syria or other lands killed Hariri, they will be held accountable by the law, and the incumbent governments should be able to carry on — but only if they adhere to the global consensus on the rule of law, rather than security systems, as the preferred way to govern.
If the world is now serious about implementing the rule of law in Arab lands, this might be a good opportunity to ask again about whether other, equally valid UN Security Council resolutions related to Israel may soon get the same sort of attention. Specifically, those of us who respect UN resolutions, embrace the rule of law, and want all regimes in the Middle East held accountable to a single moral and legal standard of justice should push hard to complete the Mehlis investigation and let it lead where it may to any guilty party. At the same time we should quietly and repeatedly ask when UN resolutions that demand actions by Israel might elicit the same sort of enthusiastic investigative and implementation mechanisms that we have seen mustered for the Lebanon-Syria realm.
The two are separate but parallel processes that should not be conditional. The Mehlis probe must be completed so that we start putting an end to the impunity of killers in the Arab world. That should pave the way for putting an end to the official and private crimes of others in the region, including Israel, and Western armies, who kill Arabs on a routine basis.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
—————-
Released: 03 December 2005
Word Count: 1,303
——————-
For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606