The special tribunal, mirror and answer for Lebanese society’s ills
Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare, who under the rules of Common Law rules took over the investigation as head of the commission of inquiry, raised the issue in public when investigation files were transferred in The Hague. In a statement he said he hoped that the new stage will convince people to speak and tell the tribunal what they know, reassured that they will be protected as witnesses during in-camera hearings.
The crimes that were committed involved an actual network of people. The series of faceless attacks, beginning with the attempt on Marwan Hamadé’s life in October 2004 and ending with the assassination of Internal Security Forces Captain Wissam Eid in January 2008, point the finger to men who accepted, whether from conviction, for personal gain or out of fear, to collaborate with those who would subjugate their people through terror and elite decapitation, and thus crush a peaceful revolution.
That a network existed is beyond dispute because there was a before and after the series of attacks, because there was a given period of time in which they were perpetrated, because they took two clearly different forms—targeted attacks against (14) prominent people (3 missed)—and (33) nightly attacks against economic objectives that tried to avoid civilian casualties but still killed 96 people, injuring another 678.
Notwithstanding obvious differences, this trial resembles a bit the Nuremberg trials against Nazi leaders. In the German city many defendants did not understand what crimes they had committed. They simply obeyed orders and never thought they would be tried for doing so. Some were even convinced that they were serving their country. undoubtedly they did not feel any guilt to the extent that they accepted a system everyone else accepted. Objectively though, they were guilty, even if they could not see it, even if it was “the victors’ justice”. After all is said and done, the issue revolves around one’s kind of politics. Are politics meant to seek the common good or are they a process to satisfy a lust for power?
Given the number of attacks carried out in Lebanon it is unthinkable that only those in the dock know the secrets behind them. STL officials are convinced that many in the know are not speaking. Their challenge now is to get them to speak. The challenge for the attacks’ instigators is to intimidate them so that they do not speak..
Thus for Lebanon the STL represents not only the start of the search for truth but also a source of courage, something that is not always the outcome of a reasoned journey but one that reflects a desire among the Lebanese to put behind them a reckless regime that has not yet stopped regenerating itself.
In her letters Simone Weil shows incontrovertibly that in some “historical cases a criminal policy based on brutal force often ends up erasing a respectable culture in a conquered or colonised people;” equally it shows that “in foreign policy at least the demonic aspect of the means used [in carrying it out] does not prevent them from being successful. The weak and the oppressed are not protected by their innocence (See Georges Hourdin’s biography of Simone Weil).
Lebanon’s national liberation is perhaps the most important goal on the STL’s agenda. A verdict will be its starting point even if the tribunal should be late in reaching one, or prove incapable of unmasking what would be the perfect crime or if the verdict should prove disappointing. Whatever the case may be, the struggle will go on for as someone once said, the “causes that die are those for which no one is ready to die.”
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17/08/2011
