Murder of millionaire destabilises Syria

THE morning of Monday, February 14 — Valentine’s Day — last year was sunny and crisp in the throbbing heart of Beirut. Restaurants and nightclubs were preparing for a night of celebration. Downtown, as Beirutis called it, was renowned once more throughout the Middle East for its glitter after its resurrection from the ashes of civil war.

If there was one man who could claim to be the cause of this miracle it was Rafik Hariri, a construction millionaire-turned-politician, who had brokered the deal that ended 15 years of fighting and, as prime minister, organised the rebuilding of the downtown district.

That Valentine’s Day morning, Hariri attended a pre-election meeting in Lebanon’s parliament. Having resigned as prime minister after a confrontation with Syria — Lebanon’s neighbour, military occupier and power-broker — he was hoping to return to office with a large popular mandate.

After the meeting, he strolled to a pavement cafe for a chat with local journalists. He was in a cheerful mood but had to be at his Kuraytem Palace residence by 1pm for a gala lunch with 20 guests.

Hariri’s six-vehicle motorcade had three possible routes home. Minutes before departure, his head of security told the lead car to take the maritime route overlooking Beirut’s beaches — not difficult for people outside his inner circle to figure out for a man with an appointment to keep.

Hariri drove an armoured Mercedes. In front and on his flanks were cars manned by security officers and equipped with jamming devices. A Chevrolet ambulance manned by his personal paramedics brought up the rear.

The precautions were useless. At 12.56pm, as the motorcade passed the St George hotel on Minae Al-Hosn Street — another Hariri construction project — there was a huge explosion in a parked Mitsubishi van. Hariri was killed instantly; 21 others died. More than 220 people were injured and buildings collapsed.

Using 1,000lb of military explosives, the assassins had wiped out one of the few Arab leaders respected by the world’s most powerful men, including George W Bush and Jacques Chirac.

His death triggered not just mass anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut but also an anti-Syrian resolution at the United Nations, the victory of anti- Syrian parties in Lebanon’s general election, the forced withdrawal of Syrian troops and a UN investigation that implicated powerful Syrian security officials in the murder.

Yet a year on, this investigation has run into the sand. A key witness has recanted and another has been exposed as a conman. The chief investigator, Detlev Mehlis, has been replaced after presenting two reports that exposed evidence of Syrian collusion but fell short of providing real proof.

Far from being toppled, as some observers had predicted, Syria’s President Bashar al- Assad has organised a counterattack, undermining Mehlis and turning resistance to outside pressure into a national crusade. His regime remains a powerful player in Lebanon — as the burning of the Danish embassies in Beirut as well as Damascus in the cartoons protests demonstrated last week.

Four Lebanese generals are under arrest in the Hariri case but no Syrians, and the UN’s interrogation of Syrian officials has been inconclusive.

So who killed Hariri? Will the answer ever be known? Has the world moved on to new Middle East crises: Ariel Sharon’s stroke, Hamas’s election victory, Iran’s nuclear programme?

Mehlis says it could take years to solve the mystery; but outside the investigation, politicians and diplomats see that his death could have positive consequences, particularly in Syria.

Although Assad has strengthened his internal grip in the short term he remains under political and diplomatic siege by Washington, Paris and London.

His long-term future is by no means certain. A military presence in Lebanon has been a pillar of the Syrian Ba’athist regime’s security policy ever since his father, President Hafez al-Assad, sent in troops to kill exiled Palestinian fighters in Lebanon in 1976.

The purpose then was to stop Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims from dominating Lebanese Christians — an upheaval that would have had repercussions in Syria, where the Sunni majority is ruthlessly dominated by a minority Alawite dictatorship.

This still holds true today. Hariri was Lebanon’s leading Sunni politician and Damascus feared Sunni revanchism on his coat-tails. There was also a financial interest. Syrian security officials had been plundering Lebanon for decades and did not want the tap turned off.

Yet by heavy-handed intervention to extend President Emile Lahoud’s term of office two years ago, Assad foolishly humiliated Hariri and increased the likelihood of an anti-Syrian backlash in last year’s Lebanese general election.

If Syria had a hand in Hariri’s death, the alleged motive was to get him out of the way before polling day. Yet his murder caused an even more devastating anti-Syrian backlash. Hence the question, whispered by Syrian diplomats, of whether Assad and the men around him could really have been that stupid. Or, as the conspiracy theorists have it, was somebody trying to frame Syria?

For Hariri was not short of other enemies. Although he was seen by the majority of Lebanese as the pivotal figure in their country’s political and economic resurgence, others claimed his business dealings led to corruption, a staggering national debt and even forcible evictions from some homes.

In his report on Hariri’s death, Mehlis concluded that there was “converging evidence pointing at both Lebanese and Syrian involvement in this terrorist act . . . Given the infiltration of Lebanese institutions and society by the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services working in tandem, it would be difficult to envisage a scenario whereby such a complex assassination plot could have been carried out without their knowledge”.

In a “restricted” version of the report, Mehlis named some of Syria’s most powerful men, including Assef Shawkat, head of Syrian military intelligence and Assad’s brother-in-law, and Maher Assad, the president’s younger brother.

Transcripts of phone taps showed that Syrian officials in Lebanon had been desperate to engineer Hariri’s downfall. And the report documented how his movements and phone calls were monitored by Syrian and Lebanese intelligence in the months before his death.

But there was no silver bullet pinning down the Syrians. It was Mustafa Hamdan, a former head of Lebanon’s presidential guard, who was taped saying: “We are going to send him on a trip. Bye, bye, Hariri.”

Doubts about even Mehlis’s limited evidence arose when Zuheir Muhammad Saddik, a witness who had provided details about the planning of the assassination, was accused in the German media of being a conman in the pay of Rifaat al-Assad, the Syrian president’s exiled uncle, who is suspected of manoeuvring to take power.

Saddik is in custody fighting extradition to Lebanon from France, where intelligence contacts have revealed he was once branded a liar after a debriefing by the CIA. Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader and former friend of Hariri, has suggested that Syria itself may have planted him as a witness lacking credibility to taint Mehlis’s investigation.

Syria’s masterstroke, however, has been to produce a man called Hussam Taher Hussam in Damascus, where he identified himself as a key anonymous witness to the Mehlis inquiry. Hussam said he was recanting his testimony. Mehlis later confirmed Hussam had been a witness, but dismissed his recantation.

Mehlis has been replaced by Serge Brammertz, a Belgian prosecutor, who wants to question the Syrian president about a claim by Abdul Halim Khaddam, an exiled former vice-president, that he had heard Assad threaten to “destroy” Hariri.

Whatever the truth, Syrian dissidents see a positive outcome from the assassination. “Things will change soon . . . something is really going to change,” said Riad Seif, who emerged as a popular politician in the brief “Damascus spring” that followed Assad’s succession to the presidency in 2000.

“This regime has lost the ability to survive and it is not able to be reformed. We believe the future of Syria is to have a democratic system very soon.”