BEIRUT, 5 April 2007 — Lebanese Parliament’s anti-Syrian majority has called on the UN to impose an international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former Premier Rafik Hariri after the government failed to win opposition support for its creation.
The anti-Syrian legislators’ call late Tuesday on the world body to take “alternative measures” to approve the tribunal amounted to an invitation to the UN Security Council to independently establish it.
It appears aimed at bypassing the legislature after its speaker, key opposition leader Nabih Berri, has refused to call it into session to ratify the tribunal. It also could be an attempt by the majority to put pressure on the opposition to change course.
The move prompted a warning from Hezbollah that such international intervention threatens Lebanon’s security and stability. “This is not a game. This is an international foreign intervention in the internal affairs which threatens the security and stability of Lebanon,” Hezbollah lawmaker Hussein Haj Hassan said in a telephone interview with LBC television.
Hassan’s comments came a day after the deputy leader of the Iranian— and Syrian-backed Hezbollah, Sheikh Naim Kassem, warned that a UN-imposed tribunal will be “a court against Lebanon and not to try the killers of Premier Hariri.”
Saad Hariri, leader of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority and son of the slain leader, presented a memorandum to Geir Pederson, the UN representative in Lebanon, during a meeting late Tuesday, demanding UN action to establish the tribunal.
Signed by 70 of parliament’s 128 members, the memorandum seeks UN action in line with a draft agreement signed in 2006 between the government and the United Nations.
Hariri and his supporters have demanded that the opposition endorse the creation of a “tribunal with an international character” that includes Lebanese and foreign judges. Hezbollah and its allies have declined. They want limits to the court’s mandate.
The memorandum, addressed to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, calls on the UN chief “to take all alternative measures under the UN Charter which ensure the establishment of the international tribunal which has been approved by the Security Council in order to achieve justice, strengthen national peace and protect world justice and peace,” according to a statement issued by Hariri’s office.
