Hezbollah’s indictment

Indictment gives Lebanese people the chance to remove the shackles Hezbollah has placed on their country.

By JPOST EDITORIAL
Hezbollah rocket launcher 311 (R) (photo credit: Reuters)
Hezbollah rocket launcher 311 (R)
(photo credit: Reuters)
In an indictment filed on June 10, 2011, but unsealed to the public earlier this month, the UN’s Special Tribunal for Lebanon has accused four Hezbollah members of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others six years ago. The long overdue indictment is an important milestone on several levels.
First and foremost, it serves as a message to the Lebanese people that men and private armies in their country are not above the law.
Second, it points a strong finger at Hezbollah, giving proof once again before the international community that the organization is a pariah that must never be allowed the legitimacy that it has attempted to gain through participation in elections.
Lastly, it brings some measure of closure to Hariri’s family, particularly his son Saad, who has long had to live among his father’s killers, watching them live freely.
Rafik Hariri was killed in an explosion on February 14, 2005, soon after leaving a café in central Beirut. Slightly over a year later, the UN in collaboration with Lebanon established a special court to “prosecute persons responsible for the attack.”
The tribunal was modeled on those established in Cambodia and Sierra Leone and tasked with applying Lebanese law to the acts it investigated. For years the prosecution dawdled.
The tribunal’s first leader, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, accused Syria of complicity but provided little evidence. His successor, Belgian prosecutor Serge Brammertz, did little between 2006 and 2008. It was left to Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare to keep the case alive.
There has a been a great deal of intimidation against the tribunal, including death threats against Mehlis. Perhaps because of this it is not based in Lebanon the way similar courts were based in the countries where their investigations took place.
Instead, the court sits in Leidschendam in the Netherlands.
Over the years the media and Lebanese have speculated that any indictments of Hezbollah might lead to a second civil war in that country. Yet to Bellemare’s credit, he went forward with his indictments.
The main case against the four men the tribunal has indicted is a result of complicated police work carried out by a mild mannered, patriotic Lebanese cop, Capt. Wissam Eid. Eid discovered a series of telephone patterns that linked certain phones with each other during the period before and during the assassination. He handed his report to the UN, which promptly ignored it.
In 2008, when the UN investigators finally discovered the brilliance of Eid’s work, they began meeting with him. This led to his assassination in January 2008.
The UN’s final indictment relies heavily on the work that Eid put together. Because it relies primarily on evidence of phone communications between four men and their handlers, some analysts have concluded that it offers no direct evidence linking the four Hezbollah suspects to the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri.
However, considering the near impossibility of an investigative team being able to interrogate the suspects and interview people connected with them in Lebanon, it seems the tribunal’s final report is as robust as it can be.
It traces the movements and actions of the assassination team and concludes that “the conspiracy had come into existence by sometime between at least 11 November 2004 and 16 January 2005.”
The tribunal also found that “all four accused are supporters of Hezbollah, which is a political and military organization in Lebanon.”
What is most interesting is that two of the subjects are related through marriage to Hezbollah arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyah who was blown up in Syria in February 2008.
Saad Hariri, the son of the slain prime minister and a former premier himself, has encouraged Hezbollah to “cooperate with the tribunal, and hand over the suspects in order to ensure the establishment of a fair trial.”
This is a brave move in a country where politicians who have confronted the terrorist organization have met with bad ends. The younger Hariri’s decision to stand behind the rule of law is important for Lebanon, but it means little if the government of the country, which is currently in the hands of a Hezbollah ally, does not cooperate.
Nevertheless, the indictment gives the Lebanese people the chance to revive the spirit of unity they found in 2005 that allowed them to throw off the Syrian occupation and to finally rise up against the shackles that Hezbollah has tried to place on their country.