Lebanon Tumbles Towards Civil War

Veteran Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt recently gave his prediction as
the country approaches a political crisis that has been festering for almost
six years. 

"We're going to hell," he said. 

There are many who agree that Lebanon, once a beacon of multiculturalism in
the Middle East, is heading for another civil war. 

On Thursday, foreign ministers from Qatar and Turkey abandoned efforts to
resolve the impasse between caretaker Prime Minister Saad Hariri and his
former coalition partners, but now intractable enemies, the Hezbollah
movement led by Hassan Nasrullah. 

Other senior regional power brokers Syria and Saudi Arabia have already
given up on efforts to resolve the conflict that stems from the
assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, father of Saad Hariri,
and 22 other people in a bomb attack in Beirut in 2005. 

Disputes over who planned and executed the murders have roiled Lebanese
politics since then and are now bringing the country to the brink of civil
war. 

What many see as the trip wire to conflict is recommended indictments
against Rafik Hariri's alleged killers filed earlier this week by the chief
prosecutor of the United Nations-appointed Special Tribunal for Lebanon,
Canadian lawyer Daniel Bellemare. 

The contents of Bellemare's dossier, compiled from investigations conducted
since the tribunal started work in 2009, have not been made public. They
will be reviewed by the tribunal's pre-trial judge, Daniel Fransen of
Belgium, who will decide if there is enough evidence to issue arrest
warrants. 

The problem is that since mid-2009 there have been many apparently
well-founded stories in circulation that the evidence points to Hezbollah
being the culprit. 

The first accounts appeared in the usually reliable German magazine Spiegel
in May 2009. The magazine's source appears to have been people close to a
special unit of the Lebanese security forces headed by Capt. Wissam Eid,
later killed in a terrorist attack. 

Eid's team traced mobile phones in use around the scene of the car bombing
of Rafik Hariri and his entourage. They found an inner network of eight
phones, all of which had been bought on the same day in Tripoli and which,
with one exception which led Eid and his men to the killers, were not used
after the attack. 

>From the records Eid's men also found an outer circle of 20 cellphones in
use that day, all of them belonging to the military wing of Hezbollah, a
Shiite Muslim group which controls much of southern Lebanon, whose
anti-Israel activities are financed by Iran, and which many western nations
have designated a "terrorist organization." 

>From these cellphone fingerprints Eid's team decided that the mastermind of
Rafik Hariri's murder was Hajj Salim, commander of the military wing of
Hezbollah who reports directly to the organization's leader, Nasrullah. 

Whether Bellemare has come to the same conclusion in his dossier is yet to
be seen. But Nasrullah and Hezbollah are engaging in a massive preemptive
defence that includes the threat of civil war. 

Hezbollah moved to undermine Saad Hariri's administration last week when its
10 cabinet ministers resigned from the 14-month-old and always feeble unity
government. 

Hezbollah's determination not to be held accountable for Rafik Hariri's
murder stems from its apprehension this would set back its aim to take over
the government of Lebanon and would revive the "terrorist organization"
label it has been at pains to try to erase with profuse legitimate political
activity. 

In the first months after the assassination a half-hearted investigation by
a United Nations-mandated German prosecutor concluded the killing was done
by Syrian security forces -then an occupying power in Lebanon -together with
high-ranking Lebanese military supporters. 

As a result, four senior Lebanese generals were arrested and spent the next
four years in jail without charge. The first act of the special tribunal was
to order their release for lack of evidence. 

Since then Nasrullah and Hezbollah have been pushing the accusation that the
tribunal is following an agenda planned by the U.S. and Israel. 

This and the threat of war have prompted even Saudi Arabia and Egypt to urge
Saad Hariri to disavow the tribunal and not to accept its indictments. So
far, Saad Hariri has refused to bend.