Mick Hartley

Amir Taheri on the latest Syrian duplicity:

Talk to anyone familiar with the United Nations’ investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri, and you’ll hear the same message: It’s an open-and-shut case.

Serge Brammertz, the European judge who heads the investigation, says he has more than enough evidence to initiate prosecution against those he has identified as suspects. Endorsing that position is the democratically elected Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora – backed, if opinion polls are right, by more than 65 percent of the nation’s people.

Yet the U.N. Security Council, which ordered the investigation soon after Hariri’s murder in February 2005, still can’t decide whether or not to bring the perpetrators to justice. […]

Having failed to kill the Hariri investigation through war, street action and targeted killings, those who do not want the truth to be fully established have now switched to diplomacy…

The carrot that Syria is dangling is the prospect of revived peace talks with Israel. Syrian leaders laid out this prospect for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she visited Damascus last spring. It is supposed to be so attractive as to trump all other considerations, including the Hariri murder investigation.

Syria believes that the Ha riri investigation was a pet project of the Bush administration and French ex-President Jacques Chirac. With Chirac retired and Bush’s time in the White House winding down, all that Syria needs is to buy time – which it’s trying to do by courting Pelosi and wooing beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Allowing such dilatory tactics to succeed, however, would have a deadly effect on the politics of the Middle East far beyond the Hariri case. It would endorse state-sanctioned murder as a legitimate tool of politics, and deal a further blow to the United Nations’ already shaky authority.