UN turns screw on Syria over assassination riddle

Marie Colvin and Hugh Macleod
October 30, 2005
Times Online (UK)
Original Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1849213,00.html
SYRIA could face far tougher demands than expected tomorrow to compel its regime to co-operate with a United Nations investigation into the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who had opposed the presence of Syrian troops in his country. 
Under the terms of a resolution being hammered out this weekend at UN headquarters, Syria would be required to turn over suspects to international justice or face the possible use of force. 
Tape recordings of Syrian and Lebanese officials discussing the car bomb attack that killed Hariri were being cited by diplomats this weekend to put teeth into the draft resolution. 
Last week Russia and China, two of the five permanent members of the 15-member security council, said they would vote against sanctions. As the permanent members hold the power of veto, that could have put paid to a punitive resolution, but their opposition appeared to be crumbling yesterday. 
Discussions were under way about whether any people identified in the inquiry by Detlev Mehlis, the UN prosecutor investigating the affair, should be subject to a travel ban and should have their assets seized. 
“The blood of Rafiq Hariri is not up for sale,” said Saad Hariri, his son, also a Lebanese politician, from Saudi Arabia yesterday. 
“It is too early to talk about sanctions while the United Nations is acting to bring individuals to justice for my father’s murder. (But) if there is no other way to ensure co-operation with the investigation, we will not oppose sanctions.” 
The tough stance will put Bashar al-Assad, the young Syrian president who inherited a closed, paranoid regime from his father, further on the defensive. He is already under pressure from Washington to stop Islamic fighters crossing from Syria into Iraq. 
Assad will now have to weigh the UN demands against the pressures on him in a country that his father ruled with an iron fist but whose inner circle of power he does not seem to have managed to dominate. 
Two of the president’s immediate family, Assef Shawkat, his brother-in-law and head of military intelligence, and Mahar Assad, his younger brother and head of the powerful Republican Guards, were named in a leaked version of the report by Mehlis as having planned Hariri’s assassination. 
Both names were deleted from Mehlis’s final report to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, but they are expected to be pursued in any prosecution. Also identified in the inquiry was Rustom Ghazali, the head of Syria’s security services in Lebanon at the time of Hariri’s killing. 
The report said that Ghazali planned the political downfall of Hariri with an unnamed “prominent Lebanese official”. Another senior Syrian official who was expected to be named allegedly shot himself in the head rather than face UN censure. 
Assad has promised the UN security council that any Syrian proved “by concrete evidence” to have played a role in the assassination will be brought to trial. Yesterday his officials announced that a judicial committee was being set up to investigate the Syrians who had been implicated. 
Damascus tried to fight back last week by organising a series of protests, but they fell rather flat. Billed in the state-controlled media as a spontaneous outpouring of national pride by hundreds of thousands, television could not hide the fact that fewer than 10,000 people, mostly state employees or members of the Ba’ath party students’ union, took to the streets. 
The protest was anything but spontaneous. “I am here to stand for my country against US pressure,” said Lara Ali, a young sociology student and Ba’ath party member. Like other users of Syriatel, the mobile network owned by Rami Makhlouf, the president’s first cousin, she admitted that she had received a text message urging her to participate in “a demonstration supporting the national attitude”. 
Other demonstrators had an even more ambivalent attitude. “We hate America! We hate America!” shouted a fellow student, before he realised that the television footage might be shown in the West. “I love America! I love America!” he then shouted, to laughs from friends. With that kind of support from supposed regime stalwarts, Assad has a tough week ahead.