President Bush and Secretary of State Rice called Friday for urgent Security Council action in response to the report. Bush stated that
the report strongly suggests that the politically motivated assassination could not have taken place without Syrian involvement.
UN Ambassador Bolton accused Syria of failing to cooperate with the investigators, which, he said, was “diplospeak for obstruction of justice.”
The report concludes there is probable cause to believe that high-level Syrian officials were involved in the Hariri assassination, that there’s clear evidence of obstruction of justice on the part of the Syrians, failure to cooperate. That is what the Security Council needs to take up in a serious way.
The publication of the report . . . unleashed a reaction seldom seen in the Middle East. The document was read in its entirety on al-Jazeera . . . ; other stations broadcast hours of coverage Friday on the report and its fallout. To many people here, its publication marked a turning point in Middle East politics, signaling a looming confrontation with an uncertain outcome.
In Damascus, some Syrian government supporters were unusually open in expressing fear about the repercussions of the inquiry, which President Bush cited Friday in calling on the U.N. Security Council to take action. Georges Jabbour, a Syrian legislator and former presidential adviser said
The government is rather cornered. Essentially, what the government can do is very limited. I am not quite optimistic.
The most immediate fallout was growing pressure in Lebanon for the resignation of the country’s pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud. In a signal Lahoud has no intention of resigning, the statement by his office said the charge was part of a months-long campaign against him “and the national responsibilities he shoulders and will continue to do so at this delicate stage in Lebanon’s history.”
UPDATES
From an editorial in the Washington Post:
The United States has plenty of reasons of its own to bring pressure on Mr. Assad, including his support for foreign terrorists and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. But the detailed report compiled by the U.N. commission clearly justifies—indeed, makes urgent—Security Council action.
[ . . . ] By insisting on full Syrian cooperation with the ongoing investigation, the Security Council has a rare opportunity to enforce consequences for a state-sponsored act of political murder. The Middle East has been poisoned by such acts for decades, yet almost never have the killers and their sponsors been identified and brought to justice.
[ . . . ] The Security Council has a good precedent to follow here. When Western investigators linked the Libyan government to the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Scotland, the United Nations applied sanctions to the regime of Moammar Gaddafi and kept them in place until his government accepted responsibility for the crime and surrendered two of its authors for trial. The United Nations should demand no less in this case. The Syrian sponsors of Mr. Hariri’s murder must be identified and brought to justice; if that includes Mr. Assad and his relatives, so be it.
The BBC has reactions from the Arab press here.
From the AP:
The son and political heir of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Saturday called for an international tribunal to try his father’s killers.
From an editorial in The Times:
What Syria must do is clear. It must turn over for trial the men named. It must allow the UN access to witnesses. And it must stop the attempts to keep its control of Lebanon through violence, intimidation and destabilisation carried out by undercover agents. Already Damascus stands accused of supporting Hezbollah, backing Palestinian opponents of the peace process and giving covert but active support to the terrorist insurgency in Iraq. Promises to close the border and stop the flow of weapons and fighters into Iraq are as empty as they are hypocritical: of the ten insurgents recently killed or captured, all had come through Damascus and at least one had arrived there on a one-way ticket. The chances, however, of Syrian compliance are slim. The arrest of so many top figures would spell the end of the Assad regime. In any case, it is unclear where the suspects should be tried: Syria itself is out of the question; Lebanon, fearful of Syrian retaliation and with a President refusing to resign, is equally ill-suited; and the International Criminal Court does not command the support of the US. The worst thing, however, would be for the UN now to walk away from the case. Lebanese politicians are already terrified that a desperate regime in Damascus would wreak revenge in their country with bombings and assassinations. The UN stood firm against Libya over Lockerbie; it must now be ready to impose sanctions on Syria. The US has made clear that if Mr Assad, like Colonel Gaddafi, shows belated courage in ending support for terrorism and turning over the guilty, he might escape retribution. This is a lifeline to a regime which will collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions.
From the Financial Times:
The immediate question facing Mr Assad is whether he can afford to co-operate. Political analysts have long assumed that he would be willing to give up mid-ranking security officials but the Mehlis probe has reached uncomfortably close to family members. Moreover, Mr Mehlis complained that demands to interview the president himself were denied. His report repeated Lebanese witness accounts that Mr Assad had threatened to “break Lebanon” over Hariri’s head.
More to come . . .
