[LCM Articles] by Robert Fisk

[Loai Naamani]

A batch of Fisk's latest articles: one on Sayed's press conference, another about the Ali Hajj connection and the disappearing car
(circulated before), and the last recollecting war memories from what he now considers his home city, Beirut.

Enjoy,
L.

 

 


 

 <http://www.independent.co.uk> The Independent on Sunday, Independent.co.uk

Security chief 'sues himself' to clear name over Hariri

By Robert Fisk in Beirut

18 March 2005 

In Lebanon, tragedy and farce often go hand in hand. But tragedy turned to vaudeville yesterday when Syria's top Lebanese
intelligence officer called a press conference to announce that he and his colleagues would "sue themselves" to clear their names of
negligence over the murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February.

Even more incredibly, Jamil Sayed, the head of the Lebanese General Security Directorate, announced that he had decided to bring
these legal proceedings "without consulting" his colleagues. "All the heads of security institutions are ready for trial and
accountability," he said. "We have no secrets to be embarrassed about."

It appeared that Mr Sayed, an intelligent man who does not speak without much forethought, was warning the political opposition to
stop their attacks on him, on the prosecutor general, on the Internal Security Forces head, and other senior officers. Those who
were calling for their resignations, he said, should "not mix politics with crime ... Let justice decide."

The honour of the Lebanese security forces was at stake, Mr Sayed said - the anti-Syrian opposition would certainly agree with that
- and claimed he was starting his own legal proceedings against himself since no members of the opposition had filed a lawsuit. This
begs a few questions. How can Mr Sayed be interrogated? Will he question himself? And how can he carry out such an interrogation
when all the Lebanese evidence about Mr Hariri's murder is in the hands of - well, Mr Sayed.

"They should stop under- estimating people's intelligence," was the only comment to come from Walid Eido, a former judge and a
member of Hariri's parliamentary party.

He might be wise to treat Mr Sayed less dismissively. The security head is possibly the most powerful man in Lebanon and controls
passports, all border crossings and censorship.

But what did the announcement mean? Is Mr Sayed preparing for his resignation if the UN investigation into Hariri's murder condemns
the Lebanese security services? Or is he telling Lebanese MPs that they will have to sue him before he resigns?

His statement followed only a few hours after Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hizbollah guerrilla movement, rejected
President Bush's latest demand for the organisation's disarmament. "We are ready to remain until the end of time a 'terrorist
organisation' in Bush's view, but we are not ready to give up protection of our country, our people, their blood and their honour,"
he said.

Mr Nasrallah regards the Hizbollah as an anti-Israeli resistance group and thus hopes to avoid UN Security Council Resolution 1559's
stipulation that all Lebanese "militias" must be disarmed.

In fact, Hizbollah's best defence was offered by Bahiya Hariri, the murdered prime minister's sister, when she told the
million-strong crowd of Lebanese in Beirut on Monday that they must "protect" Hizbollah. It was an attempt to bring Nasrallah over
to the opposition cause - although this would mean at least the partial abandoning of its military alliance with Syria. The
Hizbollah have not responded to this offer.

At least 4,000 of Syria's troops in the country have crossed the international frontier; the remaining 10,000 are now in the eastern
Bekaa Valley.

Syria's one million workers in Lebanon, however, continue to pay the price for the revived hatred of their country. Up to 30 have
been murdered in the past four weeks - with scarcely a headline in the Lebanese press about this outrage. 

 

 

 

 


 


The mystery of Mr Lebanon's murder


After the assassination of Rafik Hariri, his vehicles were taken from the scene on the orders of a former aide. And now, reports
Robert Fisk, many believe the missing cars may hold the key to the killing


By Robert Fisk in Beirut

17 March 2005 

Now here's a strange story from Beirut. Strange, because it is one of fear and suspicion about Rafik Hariri's murder on 14 February;
stranger still because - although almost everyone in Beirut knows the story -much of it has not been published in Lebanon.

It involves a man called Ali Salah Haj and Hariri himself - and the mysterious decision to move the most vital evidence of his
murder from the scene of the crime. Some say it is all a mistake, the result of inexperience or ignorance. Others believe it holds
the key to how the former billionaire prime minister was murdered in a bombing that cost the lives of 18 other innocents.

It all begins in the late 1990s when Hariri was prime minister. He lived in a palace of pre-stressed concrete in the Beirut suburb
of Qoreitem and travelled everywhere with a government-supplied team of escorts from Lebanon's Internal Security Force.

Of the 40 men regularly on his team, Hariri regularly drove with one of its senior officers, a man he liked, the heavily mustachioed
Ali Haj. "Things were quite normal," one of Hariri's closest associates now says, "until Sheikh Rafik found that the Syrians seemed
to know everything he was saying in his car. People thought he must be bugged or that there was a tap on his phone. And after a
while, he decided that Ali Haj might be telling the Syrians what he was saying."

In a land such as Lebanon - where everyone listens to everyone else (Hariri had his own security informants) - that had to be
investigated.

"So he told Ali Haj something very specific that the Syrians wouldn't like," the family associate says. "And, within minutes of
meeting a Syrian official that day, the very same matter was raised with him. That day, Sheikh Rafik asked another security man to
ride with him. Ali Haj was relegated to another car."

Within a short time, Ali Haj was reassigned - to a Lebanese intelligence post in the Bekaa valley where he dealt regularly with
Brigadier General Rustum Ghazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon.

Now we flash forward to 14 February 2005. Hariri's armoured motorcade, struck by a bomb of around 600kg, lies blazing in the narrow
road beside the St George Hotel on the Beirut Corniche. The vehicles, pitted with shrapnel holes, perhaps bearing traces of the
explosives, formed a pattern which showed how the bomb scattered the cars - as well as the order in which the convoy was travelling.

But within hours - although every other burning car was left intact beside the highway - Hariri's vehicles had disappeared. The
decision was taken by the man who is now head of the Syrian-controlled Lebanese Internal Security Force, a certain Brigadier General
Ali Salah Haj.

He ordered that the wreckage should be removed from the scene of the crime - and this, remember, was the location of the murder of
the most important figure in the history of independent Lebanon - and taken away on trucks to the Lebanese Charles Helou army
barracks. Where they remain to this day.

Ali Haj was among the many thousands of mourners who later came to pay their respects to the Hariri family. Witnesses later recorded
he was given a frosty reception. Ghenna Hariri, the young daughter of Hariri's sister Bahiya, a Lebanese MP in the southern city of
Sidon, greeted him with the words: "Your place is not here." When he offered his hand to Hariri's widow Nazek - who now wears her
late husband's wedding ring on a chain round her neck - she touched her chest modestly rather than take Ali Haj's hand.

In a country where everyone believes in the "moamara" - the Plot - it is essential not to point the finger. No one has yet
discovered who set off the bomb that killed Hariri. But there are a number of remarkable elements about the Lebanese investigation.

The first is that, a month after Hariri's murder, it has still given no information about it. Furthermore, the bombing took place in
a part of Beirut - site of a recent Francophone conference, close to the Phoenicia Hotel where many foreign dignitaries stay and
within half a mile of parliament - the most heavily guarded area of Lebanon.

For the killers to have avoided the attention of the ISF, the army, the traffic cops and a host of other security organisations as
they prepared their bomb was a truly extraordinary achievement. And for anyone to have ordered the removal of the principle evidence
from the scene of the crime was an even more unlikely denouement.

One of those working on the Lebanese security investigation has admitted there have been "many mistakes made", suggesting Ali Haj's
decision to move the Hariri convoy cars came about because of his conflicting loyalties - he had been one of Hariri's own bodyguards
but was now a senior security officer - rather than any desire to cover up the evidence.

He also said the police are convinced the killer was a suicide bomber, possibly an al-Qa'ida operative who targeted Hariri because
of his links with the Saudi royal family. Hariri held Saudi citizenship. Hariri's supporters are increasingly convinced the bomb was
hidden under the roadway, down a drain or a telephone cable duct.

It's easy to see how each theory suits their respective creators. An al-Qa'ida murder clears the Lebanese and Syrian security
authorities of blame.

The bomb-under-the-road story suggests the Lebanese military security institutions must have been breathtakingly careless in failing
to notice the planning and planting of the bomb.

The Lebanese and the Syrians believe in the al-Qa'ida plot - even they are blaming the Israelis as a poor second - but the political
opposition is increasingly fingering Syria for, at the least, incompetence, carelessness, even criminal negligence.

Hence Hariri's supporters - even many thousands of those demanding the truth about Hariri's death - are demanding the resignation of
seven principal figures, all deeply in the pro-Syrian Lebanese justice or intelligence services. They include General Ali Haj. The
remainder are: Adnan Adoum, the minister of justice and prosecutor general; Jamil Sayed, the head of Lebanese General Security;
Mustapha Hamdan, head of the Lebanese Republican Guard; Raymond Azar, the head of the"mukhabarat" intelligence service; Edgar
Mansour, the head of "national security", and Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of the security service's "listening department", the "Amn
el-Tanassot".

The authorities have refused to accept the list, claiming all are honourable men performing their duties with patriotism and
devotion.

Needless to say, there's an old Arab argument which runs in parallel with any ordinary policeman's first question: in whose interest
was it to commit the crime? Ask the Syrians, and they say they would never commit such an act, not least because the calumny which
the accusations have since brought upon Damascus have caused such political disadvantage to Syria's young president, Bachar al-Assad
- who has himself condemned the killing as a "heinous crime."

Syria's political friends in Lebanon - some of them Bachar's acquaintances - have been pointing out, accurately, that the American
neo-conservative project for the Middle East originally drawn up by Messers Perle, Feith, Wurmser and others, called not only for
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein but for diverting of Syria's attention "by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilise Syrian
control of Lebanon."

How better to destabilise Syria in Lebanon than by killing Hariri?

Those million Lebanese who demanded Syria's withdrawal, the resignation of the Lebanese president and the truth about Hariri's
murder on Monday do not recognise themselves in this scenario. They also demanded to know who killed ex-President Rene Mouawad, the
Grand Mufti Khaled and the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt.

It is worth pointing out that the Christians among the demonstrators did not call for the truth about the murder of prime minister
Rashid Karami and National Liberal leader Danny Chamoun - because wartime Christian militiamen rather than the Syrians are widely
regarded as their murderers.

The imminent return from self-imposed French exile of the messianic ex-General Michel Aoun - who led a hopeless "war of
independence" against the Syrians in 1989 which cost thousand of innocent lives - is a clear sign that the opposition here could
find themselves gravely embarrassed.

Most, in fairness, do not personally blame President Bachar al-Assad of Syria for Hariri's murder. They were insulted by his speech
in the Syrian parliament last Saturday but are well aware that far more ruthless men exist in Syria - and outside Syria's borders -
to whom Hariri's fate could be assigned, or even self-assigned.

Many opposition leaders, including Walid Jumblatt - it was his father Kamal who was murdered - hope desperately Bachar was not
involved. But it remains the case the Lebanese security officers who were appointed to guard Lebanon on Syria's behalf have
established a wretched reputation.

Why, for example, were three more bodies discovered at the site of the Hariri mass murder in the two weeks that followed the
bombing?

Ali Haj could immediately take the vital evidence from the scene of the crime - something which no police force in the world would
do - on the grounds that he needed to "protect" it. But how come his investigation failed to spot three corpses at the scene?

When the Zahle MP and former Syrian ally, Mohsen Dalloul, announced this week that the Lebanese authorities "knew" who had
assassinated Hariri - who was the unofficial leader of the Lebanese opposition to Syria until his death - those same authorities
were as silent as the proverbial grave.

Maybe they are listening to the million Lebanese who demanded the truth. Or maybe they are just following the usual trade of all
security services, silently listening to their telephone lines. I say this because just three days ago, Ghassan Tfayleh, the head of
the Lebanese eavesdropping department, put a tap on my home telephone in Beirut. Well, there's only one response to that: call any
time.  

 

 

 

 


 


Memories of war, fear and friendship in my home city, where time has stood still


Reality, normality, was back in Beirut, with its burning garbage tips and its matchstick crackle of gunfire


Robert Fisk


19 March 2005 

My home in Beirut has been a timebox for almost 30 years, a place where time has stood still. I have sat on my balcony over the
Mediterranean in the sticky, sweating summer heat and in the tornadoes of winter, watching the midnight horizon lit by a hellfire of
forked lightning, the waves suddenly glistening gold as they slide menacingly below my apartment. I have woken in my bed to hear the
blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain smashing against the shutters until a tide of water
moves beneath the French windows and into my room.

I came to Lebanon in 1976 when I was just 29 years old, and because I have lived here ever since - because I have been doing the
same job ever since, chronicling the betrayals and treachery and deceit of Middle East history for all those years - I felt I was
always 29.

Abed, my driver, has grown older. I notice his stoop in the mornings when he brings the newspapers, the morning papers in Beirut and
The Independent, a day late, from London. My landlord Mustafa, who lives downstairs, is now in his 70s, lithe as an athlete and
shrewder, but sometimes a little more tired than he used to be.

The journalists I knew back in 1976 have moved on to become associate editors or executive editors or managing editors. One founded
a brewery and became a millionaire. They have married, had children. Some of them have died. Sometimes, reading the newspaper
obituaries - for there is nothing so satisfying as the narrative of a life that has an end as well as a beginning - I notice how the
years of birth are beginning to creep nearer to my own.

When I came to Beirut, the obituary columns were still recording the lives and deaths of Great War veterans like my Dad. Then the
years would encompass the 1920s, the 1930s, at least a comfortable 10 years from my own first decade. And now the hitherto friendly
"1946" is appearing at the bottom of the page. Sometimes I know these newly dead men and women - spies and soldiers and statesmen
and thugs and murderers whom I have met over the past three decades in the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Sometimes I
write these obituaries myself.

And still I was 29. I could look back over the years with nightmare memories but without dreams or pain. Lebanon had a brutal
history but it had been a place of great kindness to me. It taught me to stay alive. And amid all the memories of war, of
friendships, of fear, of books read past midnight - long into the early hours, when dawn shows the crack between the curtains -
there had always been the idea that Beirut was the place one came home to.

How many times have I sat on the flight deck of Middle East Airlines' old 707s - from the Gulf, from Egypt, from the Balkans or
other parts of Europe - and watched the promontory of Beirut lunging out into the Mediterranean "like the head of an old sailor" and
heard a metallic voice asking for permission to make a final approach on runway 1-18 and known that, in half an hour, I would be
ordering a gin and tonic and smoked salmon at the Spaghetteria restaurant in Ein el-Mreisse, so close to my home that I can send
Abed to his family and walk back to my apartment along the seafront to the smell of cardamom and coffee and corn on the cob.

Of course, I know the truth. Sometimes when I get out of bed in the morning, I hear the bones cracking in my feet. I notice that the
hair on my pillow is almost all silver. And when I go to shave, I look into the mirror and, now more than ever, the face of old Bill
Fisk stares back at me. Yet I am surrounded by so much history that an individual age seems to have no meaning.

The knights of the First Crusade, after massacring the entire population of Beirut, had moved along the very edge of the
Mediterranean towards Jerusalem to avoid the arrows of Arab archers; and I often reflect that they must have travelled over the very
Lebanese rocks around which the sea froths and gurgles opposite my balcony. I have photographs on my apartment walls of the French
fleet off Beirut in 1918 and the arrival of General Henri Gouraud, the first French mandate governor, who travelled to Damascus and
stood at the most green-draped of tombs in the Omayyad mosque and, in what must be one of the most inflammatory statements in modern
Middle East history, told the tomb: "Saladin, we have returned."

A friend gave me an antique pair of French naval binoculars of the mandate period - they may well have hung around the neck of a
French officer serving in Lebanon - and in the evenings I would use them to watch the Israeli gunboats silhouetted on the horizon or
the Nato warships sliding into Beirut bay. When the doomed multinational force had arrived here in 1982 to escort Yasser Arafat's
Palestinian fighters from Lebanon - and then returned to protect the Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Chatila camps massacre -
I counted 28 Nato vessels off my apartment. From one of them, the Americans fired their first shells into Lebanon. And one night, I
saw a strange luminosity moving above the neighbouring apartment blocks and only a minute afterwards realised that they were the
lights of an American battleship towering over the city.

War gave a kind of symmetry to Beirut. The smell of burning garbage became a symbol of summer evenings. The wartime electrical cuts
would have me racing on foot up and down floors without elevators - war keeps you fit, I once churlishly remarked to a friend. I
remember once, flying off to Geneva to see a beautiful girl (by chance, sitting next to me, was a certain Ahmed Chalabi, but that's
yet another story), feeling that Switzerland, where I couldn't throw a cigarette packet out of a car window, was unreal, false, a
bubble of luxury in a cruel world. Reality, normality, would be back in Beirut with its burning garbage tips and its matchstick
crackle of gunfire.

I was here on the very last day of the civil war, following the Syrian tanks under shellfire up to Baabda. In conflict, you never
believe a war will end. Yet it finished, amid corpses and one last massacre - but it ended, and I was free of fear for the first
time in 14 years.

And then I watched it all reborn. The muck along the Corniche below my balcony was cleared and flower beds and new palm trees
planted. The Dresden-like ruins were slowly torn down or restored and I could dine out in safety along the old front line in fine
Italian restaurants, take coffee by the Roman ruins, buy Belgian chocolates, French shirts, English books. Slowly, my own life, I
now realise, was being rebuilt. Not only did I love life - I could expect to enjoy it for years to come.

Until, of course, that Valentine's Day morning on the Corniche just down from my home when the crack of a fearful explosion sent
fingers of dark brown smoke sprouting into the sky only a few hundred metres from me. And that was the moment, I think, when the
beautiful dream ended, as it did for tens of thousands of Lebanese. And I no longer feel 29.

 

 

 

 

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