Syria?

Award winning British journalist, Robert Fisk, thinks Israel did it.

Civil war in Lebanon

By Robert Fisk in Beirut - The Independent 22 November 2006

Civil war - the words on all our lips yesterday. Pierre Gemayel's murder - in broad daylight, in a Christian suburb of Beirut, his car blocked mafia-style by another vehicle while his killer fired through the driver's window into the head of Lebanon's minister of industry - was a message for all of us who live in this tragic land.
For days, we had been debating whether it was time for another political murder to ratchet up the sectarian tensions now that the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora was about to fall. For days now, the political language of Lebanon had been incendiary, the threats and bullying of the political leaders ever more fearsome. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia Hizbollah leader, had been calling Siniora's cabinet illegitimate. "The government of Feltman," he was calling it - Jeffrey Feltman is the US ambassador to Lebanon - while the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was claiming Iran was trying to take over.
Yesterday's assassination of Pierre Gemayel was a warning. It might have been Jumblatt, who has told me many times that he constantly awaits his own death, or it might have been Siniora himself, the little economist and friend of the also murdered former prime minister Rafik Hariri.
But no. Gemayel, son of ex-president Amin Gemayel and nephew of the murdered president-elect, Bashir Gemayel - murder tends to run in the family in Lebanon - was no charismatic figure, just a hard-working unmarried Christian Maronite minister whose unrewarding task had been to call émigré Lebanese home to rebuild their country after Israel's bloody bombardment.
The fires burnt in the streets of Christian east Beirut last night and there were hundreds of young and occasionally armed young men in the neighbourhood of Jdeideh, where Gemayel was killed. "I want no revenge," his father Amin pleaded in front of the hospital where his body lay. But violence crackles through the air in a city where four anti-Syrian politicians and journalists have been assassinated in 21 months.
Gemayel, too, was a harsh critic of Syria, which was one reason why Hariri's son Saad - leader of the March 14th movement which controls parliament - blamed Damascus for his death.
Yet nothing happens by accident in Lebanon and political detectives - as opposed to the police kind who most assuredly will not find Gemayel's killers - have to look beyond this country's frontiers to understand why ghosts may soon climb out of the mass graves of the civil war.
Why did Gemayel die just hours after Syria announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Iraq after a quarter of a century? Why has Nasrallah threatened street demonstrations in Beirut to bring down the government when Siniora's cabinet had just accepted the UN's tribunal to try Hariri's assassins?
And why did America's UN ambassador, John Bolton, weep crocodile tears for Lebanon's democracy - which he cared so little about when Israel smashed into Lebanon this summer - without mentioning Syria?
All this, of course, takes place as thousands of Western troops pour into Lebanon to shore up the UN force in the south of the country: UN troops who are supposed to protect Israel (which they cannot do) and disarm Hizbollah (which they will not do) and who are already being threatened by al-Qa'ida.
No wonder the Europeans, whose armoured Nato forces now lie trapped in the south of the country, are so fearful. No wonder the Foreign Office has been telling Britons to stay away. No wonder Tony Blair - as discredited in the Middle East as he is in Britain - has been demanding an inquiry into Gemayel's assassination, something he will not get.
Hypocrisy isn't the word for it, though recent history provides all the clues. When Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three on 12 July, Israel bombed Lebanon for 34 days, slaughtered more than a thousand civilians and caused billions of dollars of damage. It blamed Siniora's government and Mr Bolton and his fellow American diplomats did nothing to help the hapless prime minister. President George Bush wanted Israel to destroy Hizbollah - which they totally failed to do - as a warning to his latest Middle East target, which just happens to be Hizbollah's principal supporter, Iran. So much for Lebanese democracy. Even Mr Blair, so anxious about Lebanon yesterday, saw no reason for an immediate ceasefire.
In the aftermath of the war and the failure of all Israel's war aims, Sayed Nasrallah began to boast that he had won a "divine victory" and that Siniora's government had failed. Hizbollah, of course, is also Syria's friend and no one was surprised that the anti-Syrian government came under the lash of the Shia prelate whose giant billboard posters across Lebanon suggest he is suffering the cult of personality.
Twelve days ago, all six Shia ministers left the cabinet, leaving the largest religious sect in Lebanon unrepresented in government. Last Monday, Siniora's government - Gemayel included - approved the UN's plans for a tribunal to try Hariri's killers, whom most Lebanese suspect were working for the Syrians. But without the presence of the Shia, their decision may have no legal status. Nasrallah began to call for street demonstrations.
If he is the creature of Syria and Iran - and the Lebanese are still debating this while Nasrallah denies it - there could have been no better way of striking at Lebanon's anti-Syrian government. "We can have no confidence in this government because it obeys the orders of the US administration," Nasrallah announced. "... the cabinet has received an order from the US embassy assuring them that American policy in the region has not changed. The Americans told them: 'We are with you - don't give up!'"
Nasrallah chided those who claimed he was trying to create a crisis between Shia and Sunni Muslims, although many fear that their own religious divisions reflect, in faint and phantom form, the blood-drenched sectarianism of Iraq.
And does America really support Siniora, whose cabinet may now be in its death throes? At the UN, Mr Bolton loudly supported it yesterday while desperately avoiding the use of the word Syria. That almost certainly means Washington does at last realise that it will need the help of Damascus - as well as Tehran - to pull its tanks and troops out of the slough of Iraq.
Beside America's catastrophe in Mesopotamia, the democracy of Lebanon and Siniora's government doesn't amount to the proverbial hill of beans - as Syria and Iran are well aware. And Syria, yesterday, resumed diplomatic relations with the American-supported government of Iraq.
Today, Lebanon celebrates - it would be difficult to find a more lugubrious word on such an occasion - its 63rd year of independence from France, whose troops again patrol southern Lebanon. And Siniora's government still - just - exists. With Gemayel gone, however, it would only need the loss of two more cabinet ministers to destroy the legitimacy of his Shia-less cabinet and close down Lebanese democracy.
The Lebanese may be too mature for another civil war. But ministers might be well advised to avoid driving their ministerial cars along the highways of Beirut for the next few days lest someone blocks their way and fires through the driver's window.

Gemayel's mourners know that in Lebanon nothing is what it seems

In the house of mourning, an old Lebanese home of cut stone, they did not show Pierre Gemayel's body. They had sealed the lid - so terribly damaged was his face by the bullets which killed him - as if the nightmares of Lebanon might thus be kept away in the darkness of the grave.
But the Maronites and Greek Orthodox, the Druze and - yes - the Muslims who came to pay their condolences to Gemayel's wife, Patricia, and his broken father, Amin, wept copiously beside the flag-draped casket. They understood the horrors that could unfold in the coming days and their dignity was a refusal to accept that possibility.
Down in Beirut, I had been watching the Lebanese detectives - they who had never solved a single one of Lebanon's multitude of political murders - photographing the bullet holes in the pale blue Kia car which Gemayel had been driving, 13 rounds through the driver's window, six of which had broken out through the passenger door after tearing through the Lebanese Minister of Industry's head and that of his bodyguard. But in the family home town of Bikfaya, mountain cold with fir trees and off-season roses and new Phalangist banners of triangular cedars, the black huddle of mourners spoke of legal punishment rather than revenge for Gemayel's murder.
It was a heartening moment. And who would have imagined the day - back in the civil war that now haunts us all again - that the Druze could enter this holiest of holies in safety and in friendship to express their sorrow at the death of a man whose Uncle Bashir was the fiercest and most brutal enemy of the Druze?
Bashir's best friend Massoud Ashkar, a militia officer in those dark and terrible days, spoke movingly of the need for Lebanese unity and for justice. "We know the Syrians killed people during the war," he said to me. "We are waiting to find out who killed Sheikh Pierre. These people wanted to restart a civil war. We must know who these people are."
Ah, but there is perdition in such hopes. With the sadness of those who still expect recovery when all such possibility has been taken away, some of the local Christians gathered in the Beirut suburb of Jdeideh where the three killers had blasted away their MP on Tuesday afternoon. His car, Lebanese registration number 201881, the hood smashed upwards where it had been rammed by the gunmen's Honda CRV at 3.35pm and its rear still embedded in the van of a waterproofing company into which it rolled when Gemayel died at the wheel, was photographed a hundred times by the cops. They were watched silently by the men and women who, less than 24 hours before, had not heard the silenced pistol which killed him, and thought at first that the minister was the victim of a road accident. No one would give their name, of course. You don't do that in Lebanon now.
"I was asleep when I heard some very mild sounds, like gunshots but not loud enough," a white-haired man told me on the balcony of the old family home where he was born. "Then I heard a crash and several real gunshots. I got up, put on my clothes but didn't see any gunmen. A neighbour went over and came back and told me it was Sheikh Pierre and then I saw him carried from his car covered in blood and put in the back of a van."
Scarcely an hour earlier, Pierre Gemayel had been up in Bikfaya, only 200 metres from where his body lay yesterday, honouring the ominous statue of his grandfather - also Pierre - who had founded the Phalangist party which his grandson represented in parliament.
No one mentioned, of course, that this same old granddad Gemayel, a humble football coach, had created the Phalangists as a paramilitary organisation after being inspired - so he told me himself before he died in 1984 - by his visit to the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Hitler's Germany. As usual, such uneasy details had long ago been wiped from the narrative of Lebanese history - and from our journalistic accounts of the grandson's death this week.
Pierre Gemayel Jnr, however, had been an earnest MP as the witness to his death made clear. "You see that house over there with the awnings?" he asked me. "Well an old lady had died there and Sheikh Pierre was coming here to express his condolences to the family." The dead woman's home was scarcely 30 metres from where Gemayel's car had come to rest. He must have been slowing down to turn into the side road. Everyone here knew he was coming to the house on Tuesday morning, so the neighbours said, which meant - although they did not say this, of course - that he had been betrayed. The murderers were waiting for the good MP to pay his condolences, knowing that the man's own family would be receiving condolences themselves a day later. They didn't even wear face masks and coldly shot a shopkeeper who saw them.
The Lebanese have been responding to the international outcry over Gemayel's murder with somewhat less rhetoric than President George Bush, whose promise "to support the Siniora government and its democracy" was greeted with the scorn it deserved. This, after all, was the same George Bush who had watched in silence this summer as the Israelis abused Siniora's democratic government and bombed Lebanon for 34 days, killing more than a thousand of its civilians. And the Lebanese knew what to make of Tony Blair's remark - he who also delayed a ceasefire that would have saved countless lives here - when he said that "we need to do everything we can to protect democracy in Lebanon". It was a long-retired Christian militiaman, a rival of the Gemayel clan, who put it succinctly. "They don't care a damn about us," he said.
That little matter of the narrative - and who writes it - remained a problem yesterday, as the Western powers pointed their fingers at Syria. Yes, all five leading Lebanese men murdered in the past 20 months were anti-Syrian. And it's a bit like saying "the butler did it". Wouldn't a vengeful Syria strike at the independence of Lebanon by killing a minister? Yes. But then, what would be the best way of undermining the new and boastful power of the pro-Syrian Hizbollah, the Shia guerrilla army which has demanded the resignation of Siniora's cabinet? By killing a government minister, knowing that many Lebanese would blame the murder on Syria's Hizbollah allies?
Living in Lebanon, you learn these semantic tricks through a kind of looking glass. Nothing here ever happens by accident. But whatever does happen is never quite like what you first think it to be. So the Lebanese at Bikfaya understood yesterday as they gathered and talked of unity. For if only the Lebanese stopped putting their faith in foreigners - the Americans, the Israelis, the British, the Iranians, the French, the United Nations - and trusted each other instead, they would banish the nightmares of civil war sealed inside Pierre Gemayel's coffin.

Assassination timeline

12 July-14 August
Hizbollah captures two Israeli soldiers. At least 1,200 Lebanese and 157 Israelis are killed in conflict.

31 October
Hizbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, vows peaceful protests demanding elections unless there is a national unity government.

11 November
Five pro-Syrian Shia ministers resign after collapse of talks on giving their camp more say in government.

21 November
Gemayel is shot as his convoy drives through Beirut, raising fears of civil war.

22 November 2006
PM Fouad Siniora asks UN to help investigate Pierre Gemayel's death.

2.13pm GMT Lebanese Christian leader Pierre Gemayel, the Industry Minister, shot dead in his car.
2.50pm Saad Hariri, son of murdered former Lebanese prime minister Rafik, accuses Syria of the assassination. British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni condemn killing. Ms Livni says: "The negative role of Syria in Lebanon is not something new or unexpected."
3.07 pm US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns says US considers assassination "an act of terrorism" against government of Fouad Siniora.
3.20pm Syria issues a condemnation, calling assassination "a despicable crime".
4.10pm Tony Blair says everything must be done to "protect democracy in Lebanon and the premiership of Prime Minister Siniora".
5.23pm Mr Siniora vows that his government will not be deflected from setting up a tribunal to try Hariri's murderers.
5.45pm President George Bush calls for full investigation to find killers and accuses Syria, Iran and their allies of fomenting "instability and violence" in Lebanon.

Israel?! Oh no, you are mistaken..... not the blue eyed boy of the world!

Syria is already accusing Israel of assassinating the Lebanese MP.

I think Syria just wants to drive their tanks back in
Lebanon and control everything like they had been doing for decades.

They miss Lebanon so much.

More from Robert Fisk:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2010016.ece

Also from our Professor at Warwick:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2009994.ece