Hobeika's slaying - a mystery takes shape

Elie Hobeika is dead. A chilling yet re-assuring fact to many and a nightmare to others. I received news of Hobeika's brutal assassination with mixed emotions. I had lived in Lebanon and knew only too well of Hobeika's murderous career.

Unlike other Lebanese leaders whom I knew, however, I had never met Elie Hobeika. One year ago, a friend who knew him quit well offered to hook me up with the Lebanese warlord. "Sheikh Ellie – now there's a great leader you should meet!"

Few in Lebanon, however, share in my friend's admiration for the man. Earlier in January 2002, I consulted a Lebanese expert on the advisability of such an interview.

License in war

I was told, "Hobeika is an intelligence man (moukhabarat). He no longer grants interviews the way he used to when serving as minister. He will talk only when he wants to talk, and this means, when he wants to reveal something to the world, either directly or indirectly."

I will probably never know if Hobeika would have granted me an audience and whether he would have had "something to say" before me.

Twenty years ago, Syrian Foreign Minister Abdul Halim Khaddam met with Hobeika and inquired on the level of his education. The 25-year old Maronite stalwart responded promptly, "a license in war." He was not joking.

Hobeika began his career in the 1970s under the patronage of the Maronite leader Bashir Jumayyel. He served on the Lebanese Forces (LF), a military apparatus of Jumayyel's political machine, the Lebanese Phalange.

He hated the Palestinians for all that they stood for, and in 1975, suffered from the rape and murder of his fiancé at the hands of Palestinian militants in West Beirut. He then drifted into the Israeli orbit, underwent military training in Tel Aviv, and returned to Lebanon in 1983 to escort Ariel Sharon's forces into Beirut.

Under Israeli auspices, Hobeika invaded the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian camps and ordered the killing of an estimated thousand women, children and unarmed men. Sharon presided over the massacre; Hobeika gave the orders for it. When the Israelis left Beirut, however, Hobeika shifted allegiance to Syria. In 1985 he co-signed the Tripartite Agreement with Shiite and Druze leaders, in a feeble attempt at ending the war.

Hobeika then shut down the LF liaison office in Jerusalem and closed the Israeli office in Dbayieh. This paved the road for future success and saved him from the tragic fate that awaited his comrades: Bashir Jumayyel and Samir Gagegea.

Hobeika then became a frequent guest in Damascus, and served as minister in various posts. He also served as a parliamentarian for Beirut and Baabda respectively.

His career began to falter, however, when in 1999, his former bodyguard, Robert Maroun Hatem (Cobra), another protégé of Israel, published a book entitled From Israel to Damascus, further implicating Hobeika in the Sabra and Shatila affair.

He was also accused of having plotted the murder of education minister Salim Al Hoss in 1984. In February 2000, while Hoss was serving as prime minister, the matter was brought before court.

Hobeika died, however, before a verdict was reached. Overnight, other accusations unfolded against him including the 1978 assassination of Zhgorta MP Tony Franjiyyieh, and a 1985 car bomb that severely injured Sidon MP Moustapha Saad and killed his daughter Natasha.

Roles in assassinations

During an interview on Doha-based al-Jazeera television, Hatem said that Hobeika had tried killing Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and "might have been responsible" for the assassination of Bashir Jumayyel in 1982.

Other accusations included the executions of four Iranian diplomats abducted by the LF in 1982, and the kidnapping of businessmen Roger Tamraz. All of these claims have been dropped by those who wrote about Hobeika over the past week, and people only remembered Sabra and Shatila.

In November 2000, Hobeika suffered yet another blow when he lost his parliamentary seat at the polls and was declined any cabinet post in the third Hariri cabinet that came to power in November 2000.

This is when Hobeika decided to give his career a face-lift. First, he warded off accusations of being a Palestinian hater by appointing a Palestinian from Haifa as his aid-de-camp and public relations director.

Syrian authorities began toying with the idea of re-creating the disbanded LF, with a more pro-Syrian leadership, and placing it under his chairmanship. Hobeika called on President Lahoud and received further backing for such a move. He then declared that he would be willing to stand as an eye-witness to the case brought against Ariel Sharon in Belgium, accusing him of genocide against the Palestinians.

"I am very interested that the (Belgian) trial starts because my innocence is a core issue," were his words earlier in 2001. During the Sabra and Shatila affair, he claimed to have been in Sweden and "couldn't have possibly ordered the killing."

On January 22, 2002 two days before his death, Hobeika met with two Belgian senators, for the purpose. He claimed, however, to have received death threats. His dramatic death on January 24 prompted immediate accusations against Ariel Sharon, with Lahoud claiming that he wanted to muddle up the evidence that Hobeika knew.

It was hard to find one person in Lebanon who was not convinced that Sharon had done him in. The Arab media hurried to express that, "the last eye-witness to Sharon's massacres is dead." The truth, however, is not so-clear-cut.

Who killed Elie Hobeika? Was it Sharon who wanted to spare himself the embarrassment of his confessions in Belgium? Or members of his own disbanded LF who did not want to re-assemble under a Syrian umbrella and were upset at his on-going alliance with Damascus?

The Israelis, it is widely believed, have a lot to benefit from Hobeika's disappearance. However, is Sharon crazy enough to assassinate Hobeika only two days after his meeting with the Belgian senators? Wouldn't he know that this would surely incriminate Israel and tarnish its already humiliating reputation for "target assassination?" If it were true, wouldn't he have calculated that someone with Hobeika's experience would have, at least, made copies of the information he possesses and placed it in safe-keeping of the Belgian lawmakers?

Hobeika had, after all, declared earlier this summer that he had made back-up cassette recordings of his confessions. Yet even if he possessed "secret documents" – why wait until today to reveal them? He could have, had he wished, saved himself much humiliation, if he were truly innocent, and revealed his papers in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Israeli leaders denied accusations, with Sharon claiming that they were "rubbish" and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres claiming: "We have left the Lebanese territory not to return to Lebanese politics. We don't want to play any role there."

The accusation that Christian radicals killed him proves more likely. Supporting this claim was a declaration issued on Tuesday hours after Hobeika's death, made by an unknown "Lebanese for a Free Lebanon" which claimed responsibility for what it labelled, "H