The blast tore balconies along the Mediterranean Sea, smashed window blocks and echoed across Beirut, shaking a city through the immense loss.
It happened 15 years, five months and three weeks ago, when Rafik Hariri, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, was killed along with 21 others by a suicide bomber in an order bus with explosives that hit the waterfront of the Lebanese capital devastated and the Middle East ravaged.
Now that 6.8 million people in Lebanon are struggling with the trauma of the enormous explosions on Tuesday that killed more than 150 people and equaled broad areas of Beirut, they also support the statements in the murder of Mr Hariri of a special UN-backed court in the Netherlands.
But just as few people in Lebanon trust their government to hold officials accountable for this week’s explosions, almost no one expects the full truth about the massacre of Mr. Hariri and his entourage on Valentine’s Day in 2005.
Already in the wake of the latest explosions, political factions are squabbling over whether to call for an international inquiry in the wake of the one after the assassination of Mr Hariri.
The Hariri trial cost nearly $ 700 million, took many years and became a virtual industry unto itself, with a staff of nearly 400 and 11 full judges – all for a trial never even attended by the four suspects. They are all low-level operatives of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite political organization. Their whereabouts are unknown and they were visited in absentia.
Even more fundamentally, prosecutors have not addressed the basic underlying question of who – or which government, if any – ordered the attack and why.
The case, like the explosions that devastated Beirut this week, is a painful example of the hurtful lack of accountability, government dysfunction and fleeting political divisions that have long plagued Lebanon.
Even before the explosions on Tuesday, the country was shaken by enormous debts, a severe economic crisis, corruption, the coronavirus pandemic and the burden of taking in more than a million war refugees from Syria.
Then came the great shock wave that hovered over the city. Officials have attributed its appalling power to a gigantic supply of highly explosive material that the government had ignored for years, allowing it to sit in a densely populated urban area despite the obvious risks.
President Michel Aoun said authorities would investigate “whether the explosion was the result of negligence or an accident” and “the possibility that there was external interference,” including a bomb as another deliberate act.
But, just as with the assassination of Hariri, the tragedy this week has inflated the deep political divides of Lebanon. On Friday, Hezbollah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah angrily denied speculation that the explosions may have been caused by a gun case belonging to the group.
“Several anti-Hezbollah factions have begun to spread allegations that the hangar is a weapons, missile or ammunition depot,” Mr Nasrallah said, referring to the Lebanese people’s terrorism and painting Hezbollah. as responsible for the disaster that befell them. ”
The same kind of divisions have collapsed since the beginning over the Hariri case. Hezbollah has dismissed the court as a tool of its enemies, Israel and the United States. The leader, Mr Nasrallah, warned against cooperating with the tribunal and threatened to go to all the followers who did.
The court had planned to announce Friday rulings, but it delayed them until August 18 because of the explosions. But whatever the outcome, it will not solve one of the most important cases in the recent history of the nation.
At the time of his assassination, Mr Hariri, a billionaire businessman and former prime minister with high-ranking friends in France and Saudi Arabia, clashed with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose country had his military Lebanon for nearly three years. beset decades.
Mr Hariri had sought to end Syria’s rule. He also does not like Hezbollah’s close ties with Syria and Iran.
Parliamentary elections were difficult and Mr Hariri, the country’s dominant Sunni Muslim politician, was likely to return as prime minister.
Immediately after the assassination, the suspicion fell on Syria. An early United Nations inquiry pointed to the involvement of Syrian senior officials and their Lebanese counterparts.
Under enormous international pressure, Syria withdrew from Lebanon two months later. But the possible roles of Syria and Iran in the assassination were enormously difficult to prove and were not investigated at trial, a patch that was widely criticized.
“The most shocking thing about the case is how little has been invested in finding out who ordered and planned the murder and who was interested in killing Hariri,” said Guénaël Mettraux, a lawyer appointed by the court as defense attorney. “There is a murder, but no one with a motive.” ‘
Instead, the verdict focused on the activities of the four low-level suspects: Salim Jamil Ayyash, Hassan Habib Merhi, Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Assad Hassan Sabra. All were linked to Hezbollah by investigators. Records of their mobile phone details placed the suspects close to the bombing. Their phones went silent immediately.
A fifth suspect, the highest ranking, was dropped from the charge after he was killed in Syria. The suspect, Mustafa Badreddine, was the head of Hezbollah’s military wing and a close confidant of Mr Nasrallah.
Fear among Lebanese officials that a trial could not be held safe in Beirut led to the establishment of the court, known as the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was formed in 2009 under a UN Security Council resolution.
With a mandate to investigate terrorist crimes based on Lebanese law, the court was assigned a mixed Lebanese and international staff. With no UN body, half of its budget was paid for by Lebanon and half by most Western governments, including France and the United States, which supported the establishment of the court.
The difficulties were evident from the beginning. Investigators sent by the United Nations had to work under heavy security in a country where bombing was routine. Witnesses afraid to testify; some revived or disappeared. Detlev Mehlis, a German prosecutor sent by the United Nations shortly after the assassination, reported that his work was frustrated by the Syrian authorities, who denied any involvement.
Mr Mehlis identified close to 20 suspects, including four senior Lebanese security officers and top Syrian officials. But then Mr Mehlis left the investigation, after being warned that UN officials could no longer guarantee his safety. Some suspect that his investigation, instead of resolving the case, risked the flaring conflict among the Shiite and Sunni factions of Lebanon.
Mr. Mehlis’ successors were increasingly focused on the forensics of crime scene.
When the tribunal opened 11 years ago, lawyers close to the prosecution said evidence about the role of senior Lebanese as Syrian officials, although widely reported, had not been raised to the level required at trial. A pre-trial judge was shocked by the release of the four senior Lebanese security officers implicated by Mr Mehlis, citing a lack of evidence.
“I believe there was a desire for political reasons not to get to the bottom of the murder,” said Michael Young, a senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, who wrote about the murder. “Important information was available in the early years.”
Norman Farrell, the current prosecutor, a Canadian, has said he hopes to bring about some form of justice, perhaps “incomplete justice”, even without suspicion.
Asked why the prosecution did not determine who was behind the murder, Wajed Ramadan, a spokesman for the tribunal, replied in an email: “A judicial institution can only prosecute people on the basis of evidence that in the court can stand. “
The trial focused overwhelmingly on technical evidence. Prosecutors produced extensive maps of when and where calls were made from the suspects’ mobile phones, with a systematic tracking of Mr Hariri’s movements. The ruling even led to a re-enactment of the explosion at a military base in southern France.
Mr Mettraux, who now teaches law at the Irish Center for Human Rights in Galway, said the underlying purpose of a trial in the Hariri case was unrealistic.
“We defense attorneys are helping to make it look like a real trial,” he said. “We had to argue, but we had no real evidence that the accused himself lived.”
Early supporters of the tribunal had said the aim had been to seize judicial power and usher in a new era of accountability in a country, and a region, with a history of settling political disputes through murder. But opinions quickly diverged when opponents of Mr Hariri cited it as a tool to attack Syria and Iran.
Dr. Sari Hanafi, a sociologist at the American University of Beirut who studied Lebanese perceptions of the tribunal, said the polarization around the trial partly reflected that Lebanon did not address the failure of the 1975-1990 civil war trauma. .
Massacres and disappearances were never fully investigated; warlords were never prosecuted. This caused many Lebanese to doubt the international pressure to achieve justice for Mr Hariri – a rich and privileged pro-West politician – instead of solving crimes committed during the war.
“The problem was, ‘Why Hariri, and no one for Hariri?'” He said.
Holding the trial far in the Netherlands, with many protected witnesses testifying behind closed doors, may have further tarnished his reputation among the Lebanese.
For some critics of the expanding field of international justice, the Lebanon Tribunal has cast fresh doubts about the effectiveness of creating costly special institutions to deal with heinous and complex crimes.
In this case, an unintended outcome was produced and the suspicions were absent.
“This was a disproportionate use of resources, seeing the small group of people murdered, compared to vermin elsewhere in the world,” said William Schabas, a law professor at the University of Middlesex in London. ‘It will ultimately be symbolic, because no one who is found guilty can be punished. And if they are found, they will have to be revisited. “
