Inconclusive verdict on Hariri assassination frustrates hopes for political change in Lebanon

The UN sponsored International Tribunal at The Hague returned a guilty verdict on only one of the four members of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement indicted for the murder of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri on February 14th 2005. He was killed by a huge truck bomb as he drove down Beirut’s corniche. Altogether 22 people died and more than 200 were injured.

It was yet another theatrical assassination of a Lebanese leader, one of more than a dozen since the country gained independence in 1946. Four men linked to Hezbollah were tried in their absence. One, Salim Ayyash, 56, a senior operative in the militia, was convicted on the basis of phone record largely. The case against the others was not proven; charges against a fifth, Mustafa Badreddine, in charge of Hezbollah special operations, were dropped following his death in Syria in 2016.

The murder of the several times prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a prominent leader of the Sunni Muslim community, was a turning point. A protest movement led by his son, Saad, who also became prime minister, led to the Syrian military regime finally withdrawing its forces from Lebanon two years later. An initial UN enquiry led by Detlev Mehlis provisionally concluded that Syrian military and Hezbollah did have a hand in the assassination. By 2009 Mehlis, after a barrage of threats, gave up the job.

Today a panel of three judges led by David Re said that it found no evidence linking the crime to the leadership of Hezbollah or Syria. “A judicial tribunal can only try people based on evidence that can stand up in court,” Wajed Ramadan, spokesman for the Tribunal. “We don’t try political parties or governments,” another official said.

The three judges, from Australia, Lebanon and Jamaica red from 2,600 pages of judgment. The whole process has cost nearly $1 billion. Saad Hariri, the dead man’s son and also former pm, said that he accepted the verdict, but added: “the matter doesn’t rest there.”

The outcome of the International Tribunal on Lebanon, ITL, is less than satisfactory. While playing to its own judicial rules, it has nonetheless resolved nothing politically and socially in Lebanon’s worsening crisis. The reading of the verdict had to be postponed because of the huge blast in Beirut’s port that killed over 200, wounded 6,000 and made 300,000 homeless.

The way the Tribunal has operated and delivered has caused frustration and dismay. This was a supremely political murder – yet the court failed to address seriously political motivation, scheming, and execution. It has satisfied almost no one. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said he will protect all the accused, including Salim Ayyash, who will not be surrendered. He has made further public threats against “the enemies of our movement.”

Lebanon and the Lebanese are at an impasse – broken, battered, and very angry. Caught in a spider’s web of violent factions and militias across the Middle East, the Lebanese are in what German chess masters call zugzwang – make any move and you are in trouble.

The main ingredients of the immediate crisis are the terrible aftermath of the explosion in the Port of Beirut, the resurgence of Covid-19, and the growing pressure of Syria – mainly in the form of the refugees now making up well over a third of the national population of about 6.85 million.

The explosion of the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, left untended and unmanaged at the port, led to the resignation of the coalition government of Hassan Diab. He has promised to carry on as caretaker until new elections can be arranged – not that they are likely to resolve anything much.

The strong partner in the coalition is Hezbollah, which behaves as a party, a militia with forces stronger than the Lebanese state, and a parallel power structure in its own right. It paints itself as the defender of the Shiite peoples of Lebanon, and with its own welfare and medical services operates like a state with a state. As such it works with its principal ally, Damascus, and its sponsor and paymaster, Tehran.

Its power base was in the southern parts of Beirut and leading to the border with Israel, and in the Bekaa valley. Following invasion by Israel in 1978 and 1982, it took on the mantle of “Islamic Resistance” – displacing the older Shiite Amal party. It took on not only Israel but the Multinational Force that came into Lebanon after the killing – again another assassination bombing, of the Maronite Christian president-elect, Bashir Gemayal, in September 1982. The following year, Hezbollah, directed by its new field commander Ima Mugniyeh bombed the UD Embassy and on October 23 blew up 60 French paratroopers at their embassy, and 241 US Marines at their base in south Beirut.

By this time the Shiites were the relative plurality, in other words the largest of Lebanon’s 12 main sects, faiths and communities. But this wasn’t reflected in the distribution of power and office – under the National pact of 1943, agreed before independence in 1946, the Maronite Christians took the top job of president, the Sunni Arabs the prime minister’s office, and the Shias the speakership of the assembly. The Druze got military command, and the Orthodox Christians the deputy speakership of the assembly. This deal,  which stemmed from the balance of populations in late Ottoman times, was reinforced by the accords drawn up at Taif, the agreement which brought 15 years of civil war to an end in 1990.

Since then, Hezbollah has been dragged into the war in Syria, funded and trained by Iran. It is now a formed force of 15,000 all told, an effective fighting army adept in the use of drones, GPS-guided rockets and missiles, coastal warfare and cyber-attack.

For Hezbollah, as much as any political force in Lebanon, the explosion in the port on August 4th spells trouble – as, in a way, does the inconclusive result from The Hague tribunal. No one seriously accuses Hezbollah of direct involvement in the detonation of the pile of ammonium nitrate – the canard from Israel that Hezbollah effectively ran the port is empty. Like other militias it ran several operations through the port.

The explosion at the port is symptomatic of the corruption, incompetence and sheer crapulousness of government and public institutions in Lebanon. Hezbollah is very much part of that – it holds the whip hand in the coalition, getting in the way of major reform, including cleaning up the port. Nothing was done about the deteriorating cargo of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, forcefully removed in 2014 from a rotting freighter, whose hulk still graces the post-apocalypse setting of the harbour.

Hezbollah is in trouble as never before with supporters at home and sponsors abroad. Iran, squeezed by sanctions, can no longer be generous with funds, salaries and pensions – paid to top operatives in dollars. Operations with allies like the Shia militias of Iraq are not working as they once did. The targeted assassination of the popular, and pro-western, adviser Hisham al-Hashemi on a school run in Baghdad, backfired spectacularly.

On the home turf of the rolling hills of southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah hoisted its banner of resistance to Israel, things aren’t going too well, either. Especially revealing are the accounts reported by Liz Sly and Suzan Haidamous last week in the Washington Post from Nabatiyeh, the local Hezbollah capital. “Brainwashing us with talk about resistance to Israel is not going to feed us or secure our children,” one woman told the reporters. “I am a mother in pain because of them.” Rabih Thais, a Shiite journalist and activist from Bekaa told them there is now “a class rift” in Hezbollah, with huge resentment of senior figures still paid in dollars. Meanwhile the Lebanese pound is in freefall.

My wise Italian diplomatic interlocutor believes that almost any international intervention to restore the port, the economy and constitution in Lebanon would make matters worse. “Yet the Lebanese cannot do it by themselves.” It is little use running yet another general election under the old terms.  The National Pact of 1943, and the Taif dispensation of 1978 – both reruns of Ottoman policies, should be abandoned. The aim should not be a divvying of spoils and interests according to faction, party and sect – rather in the way “influence” and “interest” were divvied between the families and clans in 18th century British politics. There needs to be a sense of a Lebanese national polity.

At the international level, too, my friend Federico concluded, division, faction and partition should be avoided. Partition doesn’t offer much resolution to Syria, Iraq, Libya – let alone Lebanon. “The competition and standoff between France and Turkey trying to outbid each other to rebuild the port in Beirut doesn’t help much either.”

This is where an institution like the World Bank should step up. Doing so is very much its purpose and remit, but it will need robust and firm international backing and supervision.

Most worrying, we both concluded, is the growing division and confrontation across the eastern Mediterranean – it leads to friction, fission and combustion. As the anonymous bars of the Odyssey might say of Lebanon and the Levant: the story continues. It is a human epic likely to touch most of us.