The Ghosts of Martyrs Square by Michael Young

Author:Michael Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Crack-Up

Oh God, Oh God, this is the end, this is the end,

We were always frightened of the end, we

waited for it, and the end has come .

Elias Khoury, The White Faces (1981)

DAMASCUS, A PRIL 24, 2007. The secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, is sitting down with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the presidential palace in Damascus. For memory, the palace was built by Rafiq al-Hariri in the 1980s, when he was still a Saudi middleman in Lebanon’s civil war and gifts to Syria’s leadership were part of that embarrassment of riches a Saudi mediation effort entailed. Notes of the Ban-Assad conversation are being taken down by a U.N. official accompanying the secretary-general, and one month later they will find their way to the French daily Le Monde.

According to the leaked account of the meeting, Lebanon is the main topic of conversation. Of the country he was forced to withdraw from only two years earlier, Assad says: “In Lebanon, divisions and confessionalism have been deeply anchored for more than 300 years. Lebanese society is very fragile. [The country’s] most peaceful years were when Syrian forces were present. From 1976 to 2005 Lebanon was stable, whereas now there is great instability.” This instability, Assad continues, will only get worse if the special tribunal for Lebanon, the one being set up to identify and sentence those responsible for the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri and others, is approved under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. Such approval is increasingly necessary because the political deadlock in Beirut, which Syria has helped aggravate, makes unlikely the institution’s formal endorsement by Lebanon’s parliament. (On May 30, the tribunal was established under Chapter VII, through Resolution 1757. )

Then, oddly, Assad warns that the tribunal “might easily cause a conflict that would degenerate into civil war, provoking divisions between Sunnis and Shiites from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea.” Why the sudden mention of Shiites? Is this the Syrian president’s underhanded way of suggesting that Hezbollah played a role in Hariri’s assassination? The article offers no answer. Yet two years later that very idea would make its way back into public discussion of the assassination. *

More words are exchanged, until Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Muallim, cuts in to say that the American ambassador to Lebanon, Jeffrey Feltman, should leave the country, and that he is prepared to offer him a vacation in Hawaii. Muallim, a rotund man with cascading terraces of fat, only permits himself that aside because his boss has just explained that the United States and France are playing a “destructive” role in Lebanon. In response to a suggestion from Ban that Syria and Lebanon establish diplomatic relations, Assad replies that this cannot be done with the Siniora government, which he considers illegal. However, if a government of national unity were formed as demanded by the Lebanese opposition, then it might be possible. Until now, Syria has always refused to recognize Lebanon diplomatically, for a variety of reasons related to Syrian interests, but mainly

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