Will the inquest into Rafik Hariri’s murder dissolve into a diplomatic tussle between Syria and the United Nations and the power struggle in Lebanon?
As the UN’s legal team completes its latest mission in Beirut and Damascus, the answer appears to be yes.
The government in Damascus has shown no sign of toning down its opposition to an international trial of those accused of involvement in the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister in 2005. The core of President Bashar Assad’s opposition to the trial consists of a claim that an international trial would undermine Syria’s sovereignty.
Whether genuine or not, Bashar’s concern about Syrian sovereignty cannot be dismissed out of hand. After all, as head of state he is sworn to uphold the Syrian state’s sovereign rights.
The problem, however, is that the Security Council Resolution 1644, setting up the international inquest into Hariri’s murder, was issued under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Resolutions passed under Chapter 7 bypass the national sovereignty issue in the name of international law. Thus, if Syria continues its campaign to prevent the international inquest, it could find itself in direct defiance of the UN, a position that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was in until April 2003.
In other words, it would be bizarre if Syria transformed itself into an international rebel in the name of its national sovereignty. Resolution 1644 includes adequate provisions for respecting and safeguarding Syrian sovereignty. All that is needed is for Damascus to cooperate with the UN in setting the precise modalities under which the inquest and the subsequent international trials would be conducted.
Syria’s other argument is that, since it is prepared to try those of its nationals charged with involvement in Hariri’s murder, there is no need for UN intervention. That argument, too, holds little water.
If Syria is certain that its nationals have been charged on spurious grounds, would it not be better to have them tried and exonerated by an international court? On the other hand, if the Syrian nationals involved did act as rogue elements in defiance of their superiors in the government, an international tribunal is the best stage from which to demonstrate that fact. In opposing the international tribunal, Syria is treading the path taken by Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi and the late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
For over a decade Qaddafi refused to cooperate with the international investigation into the destruction of the Pan-Am jet over Lockerbie in Scotland.
The result was years of diplomatic and political isolation for his regime, translated into economic misery and social shame for his people. Having paid that high price, Qaddafi ended up accepting what he had rejected for years, and that at a time he was obliged to take the worst deal on offer.
Milosevic and his immediate successors played a similar strategy in the name of nationalism. They kept their people in a state of denial about the atrocities that the Serbian military had committed in Bosnia and Kosovo. Their argument was that if crimes were committed, it was up to the Serbian justice to take action. In reality, however, Serbian justice took no action until this month when it sentenced four officers to imprisonment on charges of murdering a number of Muslim youths in Bosnia in 1995.
The Serbian defiance of the international community led it into a war it could not win. Milosevic was toppled and eventually taken to The Hague where he stood trial on a charge of crimes against humanity before he died of a heart attack.
Serbia’s defiance has done great damage to the nation’s economy, led to the secession of Montenegro from the rump Yugoslav Federation, and is setting the stage for secession by Kosovo. Serbia is not allowed even to apply for membership of the European Union until it has abandoned its defiance on the issue of war criminals.
By seeding a similar field, Syria is already reaping a similar harvest. A vital agreement with the European Union, negotiated over years and designed to save the Syrian economy from slow death, has been put on hold. Diplomatic contacts with Syria have been curtailed to a minimum, leaving it increasingly dependent on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Lebanese opposition, for its part, is trying to use the issue of the international tribunal as a means of furthering its own aims in the power struggle against Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s coalition government. The Lebanese branch of Hezbollah is determined not to let the UN set a precedent for intervening in the affairs of the region, a precedent that could later be used against the Islamic republic with regard to its controversial nuclear program. Hezbollah’s position has nothing to do with Lebanon or the party’s own genuine interest. Hezbollah was not involved in Hariri’s murder and did not benefit from it. It has embarked on a high-risk strategy just to please Syria and Iran, to the chagrin of a majority of Lebanese who are not necessarily anti-Hezbollah.
For his part, ex-Gen. Michel Aoun, the Maronite maverick who has joined Hezbollah in its fight against Lebanon’s democratically elected government, opposes the UN role for even less laudable reasons.
All that Aoun is interested in is to become president of Lebanon, regardless of how he gets there. His current calculation is that the pro-Syrian camp in Beirut is still strong enough to choose Lebanon’s next president. At the same time, however, he retains the option of betraying his Hezbollah and Syrian allies if they appear unable to get him into the presidential palace.
A resolution passed under Chapter 7 of he UN Charter cannot be put on the backburner. The international trials will take place, regardless of Tehran-Damascus axis and the Aoun-Hezbollah alliance.
The UN effort to find and punish Hariri’s killers is part of a broader pattern of international justice that has already dealt with crimes in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and is beginning to tackle crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan. It cannot be wished away simply because Tehran and Damascus oppose it.
Wisdom dictates that those who were not involved in Hariri’s murder help the international tribunal establish the truth about that most heinous crime.
