Beirut: When defence attorneys representing the five Hezbollah members accused of killing Rafik Hariri on February 14, 2005 sought to nudge the former Prime Minister’s childhood friend and confidante Ghaleb Al Shama’a at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) on Thursday, many recalled how painful the entire process has been, believing that justice delayed is justice denied.
In the event, the wheels of justice move slowly, often hanging around esoteric technical matters as prosecutors and defence teams haggle over tainted evidence, contradictory interpretations, and doubtful motives. What does not change, however, is the eagle-eyed focus of the tribunal to do what the Lebanese cannot not accomplish by themselves: write their country’s contemporary history.
The tribunal opened on March 1, 2009 under an agreement between the United Nations and the Lebanese government pursuant to Security Council resolution 1664 (2006) and, far more important, granted it primacy over the national courts of Lebanon. In 2007, the Security Council created the STL under Chapter VII of its Charter, and while botched investigations hampered some of its work, it finally managed to convene at its Netherlands seat in Leidschendam.
It is worth recalling that the UN dispatched an investigation team after the murders of 22 people that perished on that day, and initially implicated high-level Lebanese and Syrian security officers in the killings. Damascus denied involvement and while the four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals who were detained four years without charge were released after the STL ruled that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention, multiple judicial appointments at the highest levels of the court complicated investigations, politicised annual reports that catered to the country’s special circumstances, and introduced tangential debates over funding that raised troubling questions.
When the first sealed indictments were submitted in mid-January 2011, the Lebanese Government collapsed, after 11 cabinet ministers aligned with the Hezbollah-led March 8 alliance resigned because Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri refused to disown the STL. At the time, media outlets speculated senior Hezbollah operatives were involved in the plot, though the STL refused to identify the four individuals against whom it issued arrest warrants on June 30, 2011, asking Beirut to apprehend them within 30 days. Pro-Hezbollah newspapers revealed that Mustafa Badr Al Deen, Salim Al Ayesh, Assad Sabra and Hassan Unaisi were the accused. [Hassan Merhi, the fifth indictee, was added to this list in July 2013].
‘Foreign plot’
On July 3, 2011, the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, warned he would “cut off the hand” of anyone who tried to arrest the five suspects, saying the tribunal will never get its hands on them, “not in 30 days, not in 30 years, not even in 300 years.” Furthermore, he denounced the tribunal as a foreign plot against his party, and asserted that Israel committed the assassinations. Pro-Syrian Lebanese politicians rallied around Hezbollah too, with Wiam Wahhab, a Druze politician with close ties to Damascus, affirming that the STL had done “nothing that gave it credibility,” adding in a recent television interview that the tribunal “will not be able to even touch the nail of any members of the resistance.”
Beyond such platitudes, and as discussed in a recent New York Times expose, it would have been nearly almost impossible for the STL to reach the truth were it not for the brilliant analytical and technical skills of a Lebanese Internal Security Forces Captain, Wissam Eid, who single-handedly deciphered the extensive telephone networks that were used to carry out the assassination. Eid, who was killed in a car bomb attack on January 25, 2008, had submitted a preliminary report of his work to UN investigators. In fact, a few days before his murder, Eid had several meetings with STL officials, and though he knew that his life was in danger for what he discovered — a clear link to the five indictees and, perhaps, others — he persisted.
Notwithstanding current Lebanese socio-political tensions, various testimonies delivered under oath during the past year discussed taboo subjects that, ironically, raised sensitive topics related to the 1975-1990 civil war and, equally important, to both the Syrian and Israeli occupations of the country. For the first time in contemporary times, the Lebanese heard what motivated most and, though confusing and contradictory, gained rare insights on the calamities that befell them. Even in death, it was fair to say, Hariri continued to enlighten his fellow countrymen, asking them to assume their fair share of the nation-building burden.
The STL was also unique in another way among all international criminal tribunals in that it was the first to deal with terrorism as a distinct crime, and while it applies Lebanese criminal law (Article 2 of the Statute of the Special Tribunal) and not international law, legal observers expected the UN to eventually expand its writ and, perhaps, transform it into a permanent court to try terrorists. That too was a befitting legacy for Rafik Hariri.
