Dec
11
Getting Away With Murder
Filed Under Lebanon, Syria, U.S Foreign Policy, justice
The title of the article differs from the one in my post in that it ends with a question mark; I figured I’d go ahead and imply what’s already well assumed. Here’s a blockquote from towards the end of the article when Joshua Hammer sits down with Walid Jumblatt, but be sure to read the entire piece. It’s a captivating narrative of the Hariri Tribunal, and a sobering take on the clash between justice and interest, one that may see the events of February 14th, 2005 figuratively thrown under the bus of the ‘new Middle East’:
“I do believe the U.S. is using the tribunal as a bargaining chip with the Syrian regime,” Jumblatt told me as he gazed out the window toward Syria. Jumblatt had been one of the last people to see Hariri alive; “he believed he was going to be killed,” the chieftain said. Leaning back in a leather chair, hands folded in his lap, Jumblatt looked at once pensive and resigned. The democratic, pro-Western Lebanon he had campaigned for had proved to be a chimera; and the campaign to avenge his closest colleague seemed to be collapsing as well. He said he expected the tribunal to end with some sort of a deal along the lines of that in the Lockerbie case: the regime of the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, was accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 270 people. After intense negotiations with Western powers, Qaddafi finally handed over two low-level intelligence agents to face charges in a Scottish court set up in the Netherlands at Camp Zeist, just a few miles from the court in which Hariri’s murder case will be tried. The same kind of arrangement “would be a face-saving solution for Assad,” Jumblatt told me.
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