Interventions (37 page)

For several years, Rafiq al-Hariri, the billionaire Lebanese businessman, by sheer force of personality and immense personal wealth, came to dominate Lebanese politics. Here was a Sunni leader who, to the extent that anyone could, transcended the sectarian divide. As prime minister on several occasions, “Mr. Lebanon” helped to bring the country and its remarkable capital, Beirut, back from the destruction of the war. Indeed, Beirut's revival was inspirational. When I first visited the city as secretary-general in 1998 and inaugurated the UN House in Beirut, I said: “All men and women of hope, wherever they may live, are citizens of Beirut. Therefore, as a hopeful man, I take pride in the words
‘Ana Beiruti'
(I am a Beiruti).”

Al-Hariri had ties with Saudi Arabia, where he had built his fortune, and with the West. But he also kept close with Syria, which maintained some forty thousand troops in Lebanon and whose intelligence chief was probably the most powerful man in the country. The 1989 Taif Agreement had legitimized Syria's military presence as a guarantor of Lebanon's security. But the agreement had also envisaged its drawdown. Through the recovery of the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, this drawdown never came. Syria justified its hegemony as a counterbalance to Israel's presence.

But once Israel left in 2000, Syria's role in Lebanon seemed increasingly driven by ignoble motives, including the maintenance of corrupt Syrian economic and intelligence interests. Syria maintained close ties to Hizbollah, which grew stronger after the Israeli withdrawal, and justified maintaining its “resistance” weapons by claiming that the Shab'a farms remained unliberated Lebanese land. The Lebanese government was not able or willing to establish itself in the south of the country, leaving UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) to keep an uneasy peace between Israeli positions south of the Blue Line and Hizbollah positions north of it.

In September 2004, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad orchestrated a three-year extension of the term of pro-Syrian Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, forcing the Lebanese government to amend a law that set term limits. I always found a step like this a sign of trouble—usually in Africa, where I had taken to excoriating strongmen for overturning constitutional limitations on presidential terms. This move, and the manner of its execution, produced a terrible falling out between Assad and Prime Minister Hariri, who resigned shortly afterward.

Assad's move confirmed my impressions from my earlier dealings with him over the Blue Line. When I first met him in 2000, I described Bashar as “the son of his father and a modern man.” By this I meant someone who had the potential to reform his country. More than a decade later, his response to the awakening of the Syrian people in 2011 in protests aimed not at revolution, but reform, confirmed the more troubling suspicion that he was a man beholden to a small group of Alawite security officers and willing to employ any means to retain power. This included a renewed attack on the city of Hama, which had suffered a brutal assault in his father's time and left an estimated ten thousand people dead. As of this writing, Syria is in the midst of the most violent of government responses to the Arab Awakening, with thousands estimated killed by security forces and no end in sight.

Just as Bashar misjudged the Syrian people in 2011, he misjudged the Lebanese in 2004. His intervention against Hariri united Christian, Sunni, and Druze elements in opposition to him—only the Shiites remained overwhelmingly pro-Syrian, including Hizbollah. Assad also misread the international scene. His actions in Lebanon, in fact, succeeded where everyone else had failed in bringing President Bush and President Chirac together after their bitter divisions over the Iraq War. They agreed to pressure Syria over Lebanon.

Chirac had no desire to threaten Assad's regime and had made a point of reaching out to the new president. But he viewed Lahoud's extension as a coup d'état against a fledgling Arab democracy, and against his close personal friend Rafiq al-Hariri. The United States was more motivated by the calamitous aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and its desire to confront any forces contributing to instability there. For his part, Assad seemed determined to insist on his prerogatives in Lebanon, and with no prospect of a peace path with Israel, he tacked toward a deeper alliance with Iran and Hizbollah. All the ingredients were brewing for a showdown.

As Assad prepared to force Lahoud's extension, France and the United States cosponsored Security Council resolution 1559. Russia and China abstained, and the resolution attracted only nine votes, but the resolution was duly passed, and called for the full reassertion of Lebanon's sovereignty and political independence. The Council backed free Lebanese elections, demanded the withdrawal of all remaining foreign (that is, Syrian) forces from Lebanon, and called for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese (that is, Hizbollah) and non-Lebanese (that is, Palestinian) militias.

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I
n time, 1559 would become one of the most controversial UN interventions in the Middle East. Its supporters would say that it embodied the unfulfilled provisions of the Taif Agreement and struck a blow for an embattled Lebanon—certainly, there were progressive forces inside the country who hailed the Council's intervention. On the other hand, the Council's aggressive stance against the Syrian presence in Lebanon stood in stark contrast to its passivity regarding Israel's occupation of Arab land. I would often state publicly that the perception of double standards in the Middle East undermined the United Nations. But more important than this, Lebanon was, as one analyst put it at the time, “a thin reed on which to build a strategy of confrontation” toward Syria.

My initial report to the Security Council on Security Council resolution 1559 stated that no concrete steps had been taken on the resolution, but both the Lebanese and Syrian governments, despite objecting to it, had stated that out of respect for the Security Council, they “would not contest” 1559. Instead, the contestation came on the streets. Lebanon would soon be gripped by a wave of bombings that terrorized the anti-Syrian members of the political elite. The very same day I issued my report, a political ally of Hariri's, Marwan Hamade, narrowly escaped death after a bomb exploded next to his car.

The real earthquake came on February 14, 2005, when Rafiq al-Hariri himself was assassinated in a massive explosion in Beirut. I remember hearing the news after I awoke at the residence in New York and being shocked by its sheer brazenness. The immediate background was chilling. My envoy had returned to New York two days before from a mission to the region, where he had unsuccessfully tried to calm tensions between Assad and Hariri.

At the request of the Security Council, I asked the Irish police chief Peter Fitzgerald—a distinguished officer with past experience in UN peacekeeping operations—to lead a fact-finding mission into the killing. In a dramatic paragraph, Fitzgerald's report recounted that Assad had personally threatened Hariri in Damascus before Lahoud's extension, in a meeting that lasted less than ten minutes. Assad had said he would rather “break Lebanon over the heads of Hariri and [Druze leader Walid] Jumblatt than see his word in Lebanon broken.” When I saw Assad in Algiers two days before formally conveying the report, I warned him that the account of this threat might be included in the report. He denied the threat but made no effort to try to have the report changed. Once I submitted the report to the Council, the Syrians asked me to redact this paragraph, which I did not.

Fitzgerald's report recommended that an international independent investigation would be needed to uncover the truth, and the Council established a commission in response. This commission provided an interim conclusion in October 2005 that the crime was “carried out by a group with an extensive organization and considerable resources and capabilities,” and that it was almost inconceivable that the assassination plot could have been carried out without the knowledge of the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services that worked in tandem.

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A
s I finalize these memoirs today, six years later, responsibility for the killing of Hariri and more than a dozen other assassinations in this period is still undetermined. I felt the failure to close the file acutely when, after my retirement, I attended a memorial for Hariri in Paris, and I have had periodic contact with his wife. During the time of the UN's work, certain persons have been arrested and subsequently released for lack of evidence, which has also harmed the process—and a key witness has been murdered. The slowness of international justice can be a problem when the pace of politics is intense.

The United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC) was eventually superseded by a UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which issued a full report on August 17, 2011, including indictments—against four members of Hizbollah. While the indictments are an important step, their implementation is inevitably complicated by the maelstrom of Lebanese politics, and by the fact that Hizbollah today holds a blocking majority in the Lebanese government. Lebanon's stability is hard to maintain in the best of circumstances. It remains to be seen how this issue continues to affect Lebanon's politics in the years to come.

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The international outrage that followed Hariri's murder combined with the massive outpouring on the streets of Beirut in the Cedar Revolution made clear that the people would insist on free parliamentary elections, and that Syria would not be able to sustain its military presence. The blocs spoken of in Lebanon today—the pro-Syrian March 8 and the anti-Syrian March 14—take their names from massive public demonstrations at these times.

We achieved a diplomatic breakthrough when Assad informed Roed-Larsen in Aleppo on March 12, 2005, of his plan for a full Syrian withdrawal with a clear timetable. In a meeting in Algiers in late March, I then pressed Assad to deliver his timetable soon and to have Syrian troops and intelligence apparatus out before the Lebanese elections. We received strong support from Washington and Paris—I received many calls from Chirac, Bush, and Rice, personally complimenting our efforts—but I tried not to allow this overbearing interest to sway my work. I found the constant U.S. boosterism ironic given that President Bush had just nominated John Bolton, a Washington figure deeply hostile to the UN, to be the U.S. permanent representative to the UN. This was hardly a sign of support for me or the institution.

There were four bomb attacks in Beirut in nine days at the end of March. The Council's 1559 and 1595 demands were the opposition's manifesto and their conditions for joining a national unity government—free and fair elections, an international investigation into Hariri's killing, and Syrian withdrawal, as well as the resignation of the heads of the Lebanese security services. Eventually, elections were set for May 29, and the UN provided technical assistance to help the fragile state conduct them.

My envoy returned to Damascus in early April to receive the Syrian timetable for a full withdrawal of all troops, assets, and intelligence apparatus by April 30. Assad called me to ask me to delay my next 1559 report until April 26, when his withdrawal would be complete: “It is definite, you can be sure about that,” he promised. Rice and Chirac were both upset when I agreed to this request and lobbied me to reverse my decision, but I had the substance I needed from Assad and saw no reason to insist on his face, too. I would keep control over my own reporting—not Assad, but not the United States or France, either.

On April 26, I was able to report that, the same day, Syria had confirmed its withdrawal in writing. I sent a technical team to confirm the withdrawal. They concluded that no visible intelligence presence remained but were unable to certify that all intelligence apparatus had been withdrawn. They had to go back subsequently due to reports that Syrian intelligence elements were still operative—hard to doubt given that many countries would have had intelligence operatives in Lebanon at the time—but they did not appear to interfere heavily in the election.

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T
he momentum on 1559 slowed as 2005 dragged into 2006, primarily because many of the remaining issues were harder to address and required internal political consensus. The Lebanese launched a national dialogue to discuss issues like the presidency and the weapons of Hizbollah and the Palestinians. Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah claimed publicly in 2005 that the movement had more than twelve thousand missiles. But the Lebanese army refused to confiscate weapons caches belonging to those who were still viewed as the legitimate resistance to Israel. Interestingly, however, the national dialogue generated a Lebanese consensus that if the Shab'a farms were returned, territorial disputes with Israel would be over. By implication, this would render obsolete Hizbollah's claim that it needed weapons to liberate Lebanese land.

This opened a potentially interesting way forward. When Ariel Sharon came to the opening of the UN General Assembly for the first time as prime minister of Israel, to bask in the glory of his withdrawal from Gaza, I urged him to consider a further courageous move by withdrawing from the Shab'a farms—even handing them to the UN if necessary. They clearly were not Israeli territory, and leaving them might have weakened Hizbollah's position in the internal debate in Lebanon and strengthened the hand of Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora, who headed the pro-Hariri government formed after the May elections. There was strong Israeli opposition to reopening what had been finalized in 2000 when I drew the Blue Line. Yet Sharon seemed to be considering a move when we met in September 2005. If he was, he had not done anything about it when felled by a massive stroke a few months later. Soon after, he was replaced by Ehud Olmert.