This week, a UN-backed tribunal at The Hague rendered a verdict on the 2005 assassination of the Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The massive bomb that killed him also took the life of twenty bystanders. Although only one suspect was convicted, the real perpetrator, writes Oz Katerji, is Hizballah, which wanted to prevent Hariri from freeing his country from Syrian domination:
[J]ustice has come under absurd circumstances. The tribunal, which spent more than $1 billion and took eleven years to return one guilty verdict (out of four suspects on trial in absentia), never had the remit to investigate Hizballah as an organization, and its final verdict was undermined before it had even been read out by the demonstrably ridiculous statement that the court had seen “no evidence that the Hizballah leadership had any involvement” in the assassination, before returning a guilty verdict for a senior Hizballah operative, Salim Ayyash. Ayyash was found guilty of co-conspiring to murder Hariri with Mustafa Badreddine, Hizballah’s second-in-command, the case against whom was dropped following his death in Syria in 2016.
In Lebanon, prominent critics of Hizballah and of its allies in Syria’s Assad regime get killed in car bombs, Hizballah denies responsibility, and the nation is expected to move on as if nothing happened and mysterious car bombs are just one of those unexplained quirks of life rather than a clear message, etched in blood, for all to understand.
Yet there can be no misreading of this judgment, despite the surreal statement. Hizballah’s most senior operatives do not act independently from the organization’s leadership. This tribunal and verdict, as flawed and toothless and disappointing as they have been for many Lebanese, has at the very least hammered the nail into the coffin of Hizballah’s charade of plausible deniability.
Read more on Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/19/hezbollah-lebanon-hariri-murder-verdict-power/