Lebanon

U.S. Institute of Peace expert Mona Yacoubian tells Bernard Gwertzman the international pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime seem to be easing—at least from Damascus’ perspective.

Scott Lasensky, a Middle East specialist for the United States Institute of Peace, says pressure is mounting on President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria overthe assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February and the recent killing of a prominent Lebanese editor, Gibran Tueni. "If you listen to [UN investigator Detlev] Mehlis, if you read the press and hear how the Syrians are reacting, there is no other conclusion than the Assad regime is behaving as if it has something to hide."He says the United States should be careful to continue to work within the UN Security Council on the Syria issue. He also says he is worried about the political situation in Lebanon, which is volatile in the aftermath of the Syrian troop withdrawal earlier in the year. "We see now Lebanese politics becoming very, very tense and there is a lot of concern among Lebanese, not to mention outsiders, that Lebanon could possibly descend again into sectarian violence."Lasensky, a former fellow at CFR, was interviewed on December 14, 2005 by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org.There have been two developments regarding Syria in the last couple of days. One was the submission by UN Investigator Detlev Mehlis to the Security Council of his updated report on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, to which he has linked Syrian officials. And on the same day, a very prominent Lebanese journalist named Gibran Tueni was blown to bits in Beirut. There are big rallies in Lebanon today accusing Syria of being behind the latest assassination, too. What do you think about the future of the leadership in Syria?The politics are very opaque there. One can certainly speculate that this latest killing in Lebanon came about because Syrian leaders were feeling very bullish and felt that they’re on the offensive. Or you could speculate that it was done by a rogue element or even a third party looking to embarrass the Syrians. Rather than speculate, I think that, as a result of fear from the Mehlis investigation and from the changing political environment, it is clear Syria is not off the hook. But, at the same time, I don’t think the United Nations has turned up a smoking gun just yet. It’s not a slam-dunk case, but if you listen to Mehlis, if you read the press and hear how the Syrians are reacting, there is no other conclusion than the Assad regime is behaving as if it has something to hide. You mean the reluctance to really allow the investigation to proceed unhampered?Yes. They clearly have something to hide, not only on the Hariri case, but on a whole lot of other incidents that we know about. Some of this is cleaning up a mess that had been ignored for some time. The international community, including the United States, made a deal with the devil after the first Gulf War and we winked a bit when the Syrians consolidated their hold on Lebanon. This was happening just before the first Gulf War, and now the second Gulf War has proved to be a second bookend. Now you see the international community trying to set things straight and, I think, trying to make good now after leaving Lebanon in the clutches of Syria for well over a decade. Of course at the time, the Syrians went into Lebanon, as you just indicated, and the world community was pleased with anything that would end that civil war. That’s true. The one thing I think we haven’t figured out this time around is that after forcing the Syrian troops out of Lebanon—and it happened very quickly—earlier this year, the international community didn’t have a plan for the day after. We see now Lebanese politics becoming very, very tense, and there is a lot of concern among Lebanese, not to mention outsiders, that Lebanon could possibly descend again into sectarian violence. There is a great deal of tension in Lebanon. That’s not to argue that the Syrians should have stayed, but the rapidity with which they were chased out earlier this year leaves a lot of things unanswered. Lebanese politics, which has always been something of a powder keg, was very much contained for quite some time by the Syrian occupation. The Lebanese there are quite relieved, I think, to have the Syrians gone, at least formally. But there is a lot of concern about their own politics. This is what the second UN investigation is looking into. Remember, Security Council Resolution 1559 called for stabilizing the situation in Lebanon. This is the so-called Terje Roed-Larsen mission [Roed-Larsen is the appointed special envoy for the implementation of Resolution 1559]. The Lebanese are worried about any kind of residual, informal Syrian presence in the country. The Larsen mission deals not only with the Syrian withdrawal, but also with the Lebanese militias, such as Hezbollah, having to give up their arms, right?Yes. The disarmament of militias, including Hezbollah, is one of the thorniest of all the problems Lebanon is facing right now. So, the Mehlis report has taken the headlines, but we should remember there is a second process going on, and the UN envoy Larsen, who has dealt with Arab-Israeli and Palestinian issues for a long time, is working quietly behind the scenes to try to untie that knot.Your organization, the US Institute of Peace, has issued a briefing paper on Syria and political change that was written by you and Mona Yacoubian, a visiting scholar. Would you like to summarize that document?Sure. Again, politics in Syria are very much a riddle and things are very opaque. But from talking to diplomats, from gathering the evidence, it is clear that there are new rifts appearing among the Allawite ruling elite. It’s not as if the regime’s power is necessarily falling apart, but there are new rifts and these reflect that the longtime options for the regime under President Bashar al-Assad are narrowing. No. 2, the opposition is more active than ever before both inside and outside the country, and at the tip of the spear is the [fundamentalist group] Muslim Brotherhood, al-Ikhwan. From what we see, at least the initial signs are that the Muslim Brotherhood is quite different from the one that appeared twenty, twenty-five years ago in Syria. They’re evolving, they’re talking about nonviolent change, and they’re reaching out to other opposition groups, including secular opposition groups. There are a lot of interesting trends to look at there. But at the same time, I would say if you look around the Syrian political scene and you see where the disaffected parties and blocs are coming from, some are the oppositionists on the left and some are from an Islamist opposition that includes some of the Sunni urban elite and longtime leading Syrian families, who have been increasingly marginalized. It also includes some of the disaffected members of the ruling clique of the former president, Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad. You see there is growing dissatisfaction among these different blocs, but you see there is very little indication that they will unite and form a grand alliance and remake Syrian politics. So the regime’s grip on power remains pretty solid, but there is a lot to look at in terms of what I call the thawing of Syrian politics. Syrian political development has been essentially frozen for thirty-five years and things are thawing a bit now. But it reminds me a lot of the height of the Cold War, when the Sovietologists looked at Moscow to see who shows up at a parade and who doesn’t, that kind of gossip. To a large extent, that’s what watching Syria is all about these days as well.I guess the ruling Baath party is not in the mood for really open elections.No. There was a lot of talk when Bashar al-Assad came into power four, five years ago that the regime possibly could reform from within. But at this point, it’s clear that prospect is virtually nil. Bashar has relied increasingly on a circle of family members and reforms, particularly economic reforms, that turn out to be quite cosmetic. The idea that he will be a reformist president has long disappeared.And relations with the United States are absolutely frozen, as far as I can tell.Yes, the United States is trying to isolate Syria. We’ve had very little diplomatic activity and I don’t think we’ve even had a resident ambassador since the Hariri assassination. We’re talking to the Syrians, but only through the United Nations or third parties. I think there are two difficult patterns that we have to wrestle with now in terms of Syria. One is its past behavior in the region. They do have a history of buckling under pressure. I think this is part of the U.S. calculation. But at the same time, there is another trend in Syrian behavior, which is they have a history of what I call designing around external pressure. The best example is how they’ve manipulated Lebanon and used Hezbollah to pressure Israel, despite the fact that Israel maintains an overwhelming monopoly on power vis-a-vis Syria. Yes, there is some evidence in the past to suggest that you can gain something by pressuring this regime, this minority regime with a military backing. But at the same time, they do find ways to get around external pressure and to wreak havoc. What is critical now for the United States is to burrow ourselves into the United Nations and its multilateral mechanisms. If it becomes a U.S.-Syrian confrontation, then obviously it’d be bad for us and it’d be bad for the prospect of change in Syria. That would feed into a larger problem now between the U.S. and the Arab world. You can list ten reasons why you don’t want it to become a U.S.-Syrian confrontation. It’s very important to have the French on board, it’s very important to lean on the Arab governments in the region to try to talk some sense to the Syrians. We have to be working through an international framework. The United States at the moment seems happy enough to let the Security Council handle it. Absolutely. Here you find a reassuring willingness to press Syria on behalf of the Security Council. There are a lot of reasons for this consensus in the Security Council, including France’s long ties to Syria and Lebanon. It looks pretty likely that the mandate for the Hariri investigation may get expanded to cover some of these other killings. That would be important. Some Lebanese are calling for an international tribunal. It’s hard to say whether that’s necessarily the right way to go, or if it’s even feasible at this point. I think there is a good chance the UN mandate will be extended, and that’s only going to further increase the pressure on the Syrians who, as I said, are behaving as if they have something to hide. And that’s sort of what was behind Mehlis’ first report that said it’s impossible to think that this took place without Syrian involvement. You know, he didn’t have the smoking gun, he didn’t have a lot of hard evidence, but from the way they behave and from other little bits and pieces of evidence here and there, it’s clear they’ve got something to hide.The United States and France haven’t agreed on much recently.No, not in the Middle East. They agree on goals. I think where we disagree now is on tactics and how to achieve our objectives. This is all about strategy, not about objectives, I think. But the French, like the Americans, are also standing back right now in terms of the internal reform agenda. The demands on Syria very much relate to their behavior in the region and to Lebanon.And Iraq, of course.The quandary for the United States and France and other outside parties is whether this essentially is going to be treated like the Libya case, where it’s really about curtailing and stopping external behavior, or will the outside parties go a little bit further? Will we go beyond the Libya case and actually make our policy demands about internal issues as well? One of the Bush administration’s top priorities is affecting change, affecting a transformed political environment in the Middle East. So whether they’re going to give them a pass on internal issues remains to be seen. I mean you have some signs, very small signs. Over the weekend, the White House released a statement asking that a number of political prisoners in Syria be released unconditionally. Oh, I missed that.Including an opposition activist named Kamal Labwani. Now Labwani left Syria, he went to Europe a few weeks ago and met with government officials, met with other Syrian opposition speakers, exiles, and he came to Washington and met people from the State Department. And in fact, he went to the White House and met senior representatives at the National Security Council. When he landed back in Damascus, he got arrested. Now, are we going to go as far as some Syrian oppositionists would like and make very clear and wide-ranging demands for political reform in the country? I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do now. There is so much momentum working against Syria and there is so much consensus in the international community to follow up on the Lebanon investigation and to maybe expand it. The United States hopes that this will have a boomerang effect and help us on our Iraq agenda, which is to get that [Syrian-Iraqi] border more secure. I wouldn’t look for the United States going all out on the path of demanding widespread political reform, but I think it’s something down the road. It’s interesting, you still have Syrian oppositionists who talk to Americans and other outsiders and they plead, they say "you need to press for internal reform as well." They very much want assistance from the outside. It’s quite remarkable considering how poor our reputation is in Syria and among the Syrian public. The local oppositionists—and there is some debate about this—but there are quite a few local oppositionists and some exiles and figures who do want a greater international campaign for internal reform.Lastly, are Israel-Syrian peace negotiations dead?I would say they’re on long-term hold. The Israelis are sitting quite comfortably now, watching as the international community bears down on Syria. They’re more worried about Iran right now. The Israelis, particularly now, while they’re reformulating their own political scene, are completely obsessed when it comes to foreign policy with the Palestinian issue. They are in no mood to start these negotiations with the Syrians and the Syrians aren’t either. Every time you hear from the Syrians that they want to revive the talks with Israel to finally end the 1973 war, it’s transparent that it’s just a way out of their current fix. It’s not a sincere offering. The Israelis are sitting pretty right now watching this. There is a little bit of anxiety, obviously, on the Hezbollah issue. The Israelis have an uneasy relationship across the Lebanese border, a sort of balance of terror almost. Israelis, you know, don’t treat Hezbollah as they treat Palestinian groups. Hezbollah does have an impressive lethal military capability. The Israelis are watching the situation unfold and they want to be sure that it doesn’t lead to Hezbollah lashing out across the border, as happened a couple of weeks ago as a way to maybe distract pressure against Syria.

Martin S. Indyk, who served as assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs in the Clinton administration, says the unanimous Security Council resolution ordering Syria to cooperate with the ongoing Mehlis investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, puts Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on “the horns of what I think is an irresolvable dilemma.” Indyk, who met with Assad in September 2004, says: “If he gives any hint of moving against his brother and brother-in-law, they might preempt him. If he’s unable to avoid sanctions, then his people are going to face increasing isolation and considerable economic discomfort.” “The Security Council resolution has put the ball firmly in his court.”Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution, says that the French-U.S. cooperation at the Security Council has been pivotal and stems from a private meeting that Presidents Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush had at the last Group of Eight (G8) meeting. Indyk was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on October 31, 2005.It’s been eleven days since the Mehlis Report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was presented to the Security Council. And the Security Council itself under the leadership of the United States, France, and Britain has just passed a new resolution demanding that Syria cooperate fully in the investigation with a threat of further action down the road if nothing happens. What’s your overall appraisal of the situation?Well, first of all, I think that the Security Council has sent a strong message backing Mehlis’ investigation and demanding full Syrian cooperation, and that’s an important next step in this process. However, the Syrian president, [Bashar] Assad is on the horns of what I think is an irresolvable dilemma. Since it’s clear that Mehlis is going after his brother [Maher Assad] and brother-in-law [Asef Shawkat], who are the strongmen of his family and therefore his regime, he is going to have to choose between acceding to the demands of full cooperation from the Security Council and thereby giving up his brother and brother-in-law, or refusing to cooperate fully and thereby exposing his nation and his people to sanctions down the road.The Security Council resolution has put the ball firmly in his court.The one thing I regret about this process of getting the Security Council resolution, is that somebody seems to have bragged beforehand about how sanctions, or the threat of sanctions, was going to be in there. That appeared as you know, in the New York Times Monday morning. But to get unanimity, the threat of sanctions was dropped. There is only the threat of further action if Syria does not cooperate.That’s an inevitable result of the negotiating process in the UN Security Council, but what it does, I’m afraid, is send the wrong signal to the Syrians, who are chronically prone to misreading the map. They may conclude that the United States failed in this resolution to get a reference to sanctions and therefore they don’t have to worry about it, which would be a big mistake on their part, but I’m afraid that’s how they’ll read it. To tell you why I’m afraid of this, I happened, by pure coincidence, to be in Damascus the day after UN Resolution 1559 was passed [calling for Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon] and the Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa told me that we, the United States, were very fortunate that Syria allowed the resolution to pass. Otherwise, it would be a great humiliation for us if it had failed. This is the kind of disillusion that the Syrians indulge in. It would be unfortunate if a unanimous Security Council resolution demanding Syrian cooperation would be interpreted in Syria as something that was weak and somehow dodged a bullet because it doesn’t mention sanctions.I noticed over the weekend that President Assad set up some commission to investigate possible crimes in Lebanon. Is this much of a commission?Inevitably, people will be skeptical of the regime investigating itself. This is clearly a case for an independent investigator. And the international community has that in Mehlis and I think that, regardless of what the Syrians do, the litmus test will be whether they cooperate with the Mehlis investigation. He in fact called for the Syrians to do this, to show some responsibility in terms of investigation, and it will be another way of testing their seriousness. If they do just an investigation, which in effect is just a cover-up, I believe that Mehlis will expose that.Do you have any doubts in your mind that the interior minister, Ghazi Kanaan, who officially committed suicide a few weeks ago, did not commit suicide?I think it’s a strange situation. It’s one of those things where, usually, what the Syrians do is opaque and far from transparent. The amazing thing about the Mehlis investigation is that he has lifted the veil here and showed the workings of this “thugocracy.” So that said, it would seem unusual that Ghazi Kanaan would commit suicide; he’s a tough guy. He was not implicated in Mehlis’ investigation, so the notion that he committed suicide because Mehlis was after him, is clearly not going to fly.On the other hand, he did represent an alternative to President Assad and his brother and brother-in-law and so this may well have been a case of taking care of the rival at a time when the regime is going to be under considerable pressure—that’s purely speculative. I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, but there certainly is a “smell” about this, that it was an “assisted suicide,” and that’s not unusual in the history of this particular Baath regime. We’ve had assassinations of other political leaders that were believed to be done by this regime and we’ve never actually known the truth of what happened.Now you’re one of the few Americans who have had any contact with President Assad in recent years. You, in fact, visited him in Damascus last year, didn’t you? Yes, that’s right. It was early September of last year when the resolution was passed.And at that time, you came back thinking there was an opportunity to revive the Israeli-Syrian negotiations. What was your impression of the president then and now? You’ve changed your mind, obviously, it seems.I came away from that meeting, which was unusual because he was there on his own—he didn’t have a translator, note-taker, or foreign minister that is normal for presidential meetings—and we had a long talk that I thought was pretty candid. He talked about the problems he faced within his own regime, the incompetence of the people around him. He was quite disarming about the situation of Iraq, in which he said that Syria had assisted the insurgency because it was not in its interest for the United States to have an easy time in Iraq because the United States would then turn its attention on Syria. But he told me that all that had changed now; that the interests had changed because they were concerned that chaos in Iraq would spread chaos to Syria, and so now he was ready to cooperate with the United States.I came away from the meeting thinking that he had developed what appeared to be a very shrewd strategy; that he would cooperate with us over Iraq, that he would pursue peace with Israel in a serious way, and that he hoped in that way we would leave him alone to have his way with Lebanon.This is after Resolution 1559 had passed already, right?Correct. He was under pressure, but he seemed to have figured out an approach of which making peace with Israel was a critical component. And he said some things about his willingness with Israel that was a departure from his father’s position. But what happened in the aftermath of that, I think, tells you a lot about this guy. He did not cooperate in terms of stopping the support for the insurgency from Syria. And other than repeating statements he made before about a willingness to make peace with Israel, he did nothing to follow through on that to indicate any kind of seriousness or genuineness about his desire for peace.Instead, he wreaked havoc in Lebanon; he apparently allowed for the assassination of Rafik Hariri. There’s a great disconnect between the words and the actions, which leaves me with a big question mark about whether he simply says one thing and does another, or whether he’s not capable of pulling the levers of power in Syria in a way that he can deliver on what he’s talking about. Either way, he has proved himself to be a master at making all the wrong mistakes—all the mistakes possible.I’ve been surprised at why he made such an issue of keeping President Emile Lahoud in office in Lebanon [beyond his constitutional limits]. He probably could have found many other pro-Syrian Christians who could have done it.You’re absolutely right. And I think that that is a perfect example. Essentially, as I understand, what happened is that the regime—again I’m not sure whether it’s Assad who’s making the decisions here—came to understand late in the day that Hariri was working with [Jacques] Chirac and Bush to pressure the Syrians not to extend Lahoud’s term in office. And when they saw the United States and France were playing in this game, I think their calculation was, “We will show them. They don’t want Lahoud, they’re going to get Lahoud. We’ll show them who’s boss in Lebanon.” And in the process, they humiliated and threatened Hariri and forced him to move in the cabinet and in the parliament to extend Lahoud’s term in office.And then he resigned after that.Well, no. He was forced to resign by them. They forced him out and told him he was finished; that he would never be prime minister again. And that, combined with the humiliation that is described in the Mehlis report, I think led Hariri to miscalculate. That is to say, for years he’d been very careful about knowing where the red lines were in terms of what the Syrians would tolerate, and always kind of going up to the line, trying to push it a little bit, but never crossing out. But after he was forced out of office and told he wasn’t going to be prime minister again, he then joined the opposition with [Druze leader] Walid Jumblatt and with his formidable organization, and purchasing power, managed to get the votes necessary to get himself back into the position of prime minister in the upcoming elections. And where I think he crossed the line is he started bragging about it. He started telling everybody that he had the votes and he was going to be prime minister not withstanding Syrian opposition. I think at that point—this is all speculation—but I think at that point the Syrians decided enough is enough.Let’s conclude with a little dissertation on American diplomacy. Under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, diplomacy has obviously become much more multi-faceted. Were you surprised at the degree of cooperation we’ve had with France on this issue, or was it expected because of France’s special involvement inLebanon?No, it’s a complete surprise. Its origins are interesting, but I think its impact on American diplomacy is very important. Its origins come from Hariri going to Chirac and telling Chirac, “I cannot abide by Lahoud anymore. If Lahoud’s term is extended, it’s a disaster for me. I need your help on this.” Chirac, who is beholden to Hariri, went to Bush at the G8 meeting last June and apparently told Bush, “Basically, we’re not going to agree on anything, but here’s a project we can work on together. It’s about democracy in Lebanon.” And Bush bought on to it. This was not staffed; this was a top-down decision, by the president, to work with Chirac on promoting democracy—or in the first days, defending constitutionalism—in Lebanon. They’re an odd couple in this.When was 1559 passed?I believe it was the beginning of September. Resolution 1559 came after the Syrians extended Lahoud’s term—it was the punishment for extending his term.So that’s the origins of it. But the power of France and the United States working together in concerted diplomatic effort has, I think, been a very important lesson for the Bush administration. The way in which they are using the Security Council to deal with Syria, instead of spurning the Security Council, is I think an indication of how far the administration has come as a result of this cooperation between the United States and France.And what they’ve discovered along the way is something they didn’t know, but should have known at the time when they were dealing with Iraq in the Security Council, that the mathematics of the Security Council is very simple: There are five veto-wielding members. You have to have three on your side and you can then pass just about anything you want in the Security Council. In this case, Britain, France, and the United States are able to get the resolution through because Russia and China are a minority. China in those circumstances normally abstains and that would leave Russia isolated and having to wield a veto, which it was reluctant to do. In the Iraq case, had we brought Russia on board, and [Vladimir] Putin was up for sale, we would have three and France would have found itself isolated. I believe we would have been able to get a resolution through that would have given us the international legitimacy necessary for the war in Iraq.I didn’t know you could have gotten Russia then.You don’t remember? Putin basically was looking for a deal in which we would support him on Chechnya, his war on terror, and we promised to repay Iraqi debts to Russia. And we ignored him. We ignored the Security Council. We spurned the Security Council and he went off to Paris and had a summit meeting with Chirac and Schroeder. It was an unnecessary diplomatic disaster.Well that also helps in the ongoing diplomacy with Iran right now, too.Absolutely. It’s the same thing, the same lesson learned: We could use the Europeans to isolate the Iranians rather than allow the Iranians to split us and the Europeans.

Michael Young, an editor of the Beirut Daily Star and a well-known analyst on Lebanese-Syrian relations, says he hopes that the UN Security Council meeting due to take up the Mehlis Report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, will keep up pressure on Syria to get more specific evidence to prove Syria’s involvement in Hariri’s killing.Young says he hopes the Council will approve the extension of the Mehlis investigation beyond its current December 15 cutoff, and allow for such measures as interviewing Syrian officials outside the borders of Syria. As to economic sanctions, he indicates he thinks it would only unite the Syrian people who would suffer the most. “In terms of sanctions, let’s be honest: Economic sanctions in Syria are not going to do anything except consolidate the regime’s power and make the average Syrian feel worse off, as has happened in Iraq….I think the best thing is to continue with the judicial inquiry process, to get more information on what happened, on how Hariri was killed, and to continue to function within the parameters of international law. This gives everyone more legitimacy and I think there is a consensus on that within the Security Council.”Young was interviewed from Beirut by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on October 24, 2005.The Mehlis Report has now been out for several days and, of course, everyone in Lebanon who wants to know about it has had a chance to read it in your newspaper and elsewhere. What is the general sense in the streets of Beirut these days? Is there a general unanimity on this, or are there still many Syrian supporters who find this hogwash?I think, by and large, most Lebanese are not surprised by the results of the investigation. I think many Lebanese always believed the Syrians were responsible. Now, there have been no polls to show how many—early on there were a few, there was one by Zogby International. But the fact of the matter is that by and large, at least from my impression, a majority of Lebanese believed Syria was behind this. That said, Syria does have some old allies it can rely on, particularly [the Lebanese Shiite militant group] Hezbollah and a portion of the Shiite community, and there is indeed, among several people I’ve spoken to, the impression that this is a political report. The effort is to put the onus on Syria and in a way, indirectly, to tighten the screws on Hezbollah in the future through implementation of [UN] Resolution 1559. So, they see this as the first step in an effort by the Americans particularly to go after Hezbollah.There were staged demonstrations today in Damascus and Aleppo, in which—according to the wire services—thousands of people including school children carried banners, etc., linking the report to the United States and Zionism. Do you think the report suffers from lacking specific accusations?Well, I’m not sure that’s correct. I think people have over-interpreted this report as being essentially an open and shut accusation. I mean, what [UN Lead Investigator] Detlev Mehlis made clear in his report was that he was given five months to uncover a massive conspiracy. And he said that was just not enough time to get to the bottom of all the details. I think the second thing we have to understand is that Mehlis is there to help the Lebanese judiciary, at least this is according to the [U.N.] Resolution 1595, which set up the inquiry commission. He’s there to help the Lebanese. In other words, this is not a trial document. This is the backbone of what will eventually become acts of accusations against subjects. I think we should be realistic. What he’s done up to now is that he’s confident enough to say that all the evidence indicates high-level Syrian and Lebanese participation in this crime. He does have a lot of specifics; we know a lot about the Lebanese effort to cover up and to tamper with the crime scene; he does have evidence of phone conversations and phone communications between suspects. We do have quite a few witnesses, saying by and large convergent things—not that there aren’t some contradictions, but that’s to be expected—on those involved and who might have been involved.Now the names of the witnesses have not been made public because of fears for their lives, but presumably at some point, they will be known. I think that for a five-month investigation, he’s got quite a lot, aside from the details of the actual explosion and so forth. I think that those who are saying we don’t have everything here, well, indeed not everything is there. In fact, the Lebanese government and the security forces tampered with a lot of evidence in the months before Mehlis began his inquiry. But, Mehlis is a serious guy. He would not have accused the Syrians and the Lebanese had he not had very compelling evidence that they were involved in Hariri’s assassination, not least of which, because of the threats that have been issued by the Syrians; including by President Assad himself against Hariri, but as well as other Syrian officials. I think it’s quite compelling, but I do also agree that if you’re going to take this to court, there is going to have to be more and he did make that clear.Can you talk a bit about the domestic scene in Lebanon? I think to Americans who are not familiar with the situation, it seems bizarre that you have a president who supports the Syrians on this, where as on the whole, the public seems to hold the Syrians responsible for the assassination.I think we should be careful. [President] Emile Lahoud has not come out officially in support of the Syrians on this. In fact, one of the paradoxes of this situation is that in reading the Mehlis Report, it is very difficult to believe Lahoud could not have known about the Hariri assassination. But the fact is that Lahoud, early on, agreed to the Mehlis investigation. He probably did it to cover himself and to cover his acolytes. But the fact is that he did agree. And he hasn’t officially taken the position that he supports the Syrians. What he’s done is that, officially, he’s supported the Mehlis commission.Now, essentially, Lahoud comes out of this report not looking good. In one passage, one of the suspects apparently called him on his personal cell phone minutes before the explosion. The fact is that many of those allegedly implicated and who are now under arrest in Lebanon were in fact close collaborators with the president. In any system, the president would have long ago resigned, but unfortunately this is Lebanon and two things are essentially preserving Emile Lahoud. First of all, there is the fact that the Mehlis report was not released until last week so that in a sense he managed to stay in power until the report came out because everyone was waiting to see what the report would say. I suspect in the coming weeks we’ll see an escalation in the demands for him to resign.Secondly, the reason Lahoud has managed to stay on is that there is little agreement among the politicians about who should succeed him. The president in Lebanon, while constitutionally lost a lot of power with the Taif Agreement of 1989, the fact is that the constitution is fairly imprecise when it comes to the president’s mandate and getting rid of him. So Lahoud has been able to hide himself behind this constitutional ambiguity to stay in power. He’s at the same time been able to take advantage of the fact that because there is no agreement on his successor, the political class is divided and consequently he’s been able to ride this through. Now, the key question obviously is will the political class unite in the coming weeks over his successor? I’m not convinced that we will soon have an answer.I’d just like to add that I don’t think he’ll serve another two years in office, in other words, until the formal end of his extended mandate.The role of the prime minister of Lebanon right now is what? He’s clean on this, I take it.The prime minister, who is Fouad Siniora, is certainly clean. He was one of Hariri’s closest collaborators. He was his favorite finance minister and he’s squarely in the Hariri camp. He’s prime minister because he has experience, in contrast to Hariri’s son, Saad, who is the leader of the Hariri movement today and also because Saad is not in the country. He fears for his life so he goes between Paris and Saudi Arabia. He doesn’t dare live in Lebanon these days. So yes, the prime minister has actually brought a certain amount of stability to the Hariri movement in the wake of Rafik Hariri’s assassination. As I said, he has experience; he’s a fairly cool guy. He’s not someone who seeks confrontation and he’s diplomatic. And I think, for the moment, he’s probably the best guy who could be prime minister. Having said that, he will soon probably be called upon to enter into political confrontation with Lahoud because I think that’s where the Mehlis report is leading. I can’t imagine that Lahoud will not, in the very near future, be facing escalating demands for his resignation.But there has to be a Christian as president according to the Taif Agreement, right?That’s right, and perhaps that’s where the nub of the problem lies. The most popular Christian politician today is Michel Aoun, the former army commander and head of the interim government. Aoun did very well in parliamentary elections this summer. He is without a doubt the most popular Maronite Christian politician. The only thing is that most of the political class doesn’t want Aoun. He’s a strong figure; he’s someone who has said that he wants to clean the system of corruption. He’s also someone who has a strong personality. And I think that’s something that bothers a lot of people in the political class. It disturbs a lot of Hariri’s supporters and it also disturbs a lot of members of the Christian opposition. So that in a sense, you have a situation where the parliamentary majority led by the Hariris will probably not vote for Michel Aoun because in Lebanon it is the parliament that elects the president; it’s not a direct vote from the people.So the parliamentary majority indeed does not favor Aoun. But the Christian community likes Aoun. So if the majority decides to bring in a man other than Aoun, he’s someone who legitimately might be questioned among Christians. So it would be very important to see which Christian the parliamentary majority brings in. They have to bring in someone whose legitimacy can compete with that of Michel Aoun and who can rather quickly convince his Christian comrades that he, in a way, is worthy of their trust. I think it will be difficult if Aoun has presidential ambitions.Let’s go back to last summer, August 2004, when Hariri had this now-famous meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Why did Assad want to alter the constitution to keep Lahoud in office? Couldn’t he have found another puppet to serve his purposes just as well?Well, that was precisely what many people have been saying; that this was a reflection of his inexperience. My personal view of this is that we have to understand that Assad, leading up to August 2004, had not made up his mind whether he wanted to extend Lahoud’s mandate or not [under the Lebanese constitution at that time, Lahoud’s term could not be extended]. I think that, as pressure began building up in June, July, and August of 2004—as I recall the United States had imposed sanctions under the [2003] Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (PDF)—plus he was coming under increasing pressure from Washington. I think Assad felt that he had to show that he could take a stand and be tough. I believe that’s the reason why he took this position. Also, I think that at the time—I can’t quite remember all the details—but my understanding is that he was expecting the United States to be more flexible with Syria over a variety of things including Iraq and Lebanon.The United States, however, was taking an increasingly strong position on the Lebanese constitution saying there should be a new president. I think Assad felt that he had to show that he could be tough. Remember, this is someone who was trying to send messages domestically, as well as to the international community; domestically, because he had to prove himself inside Syria. So he took this position and indeed, in the months after he imposed Lahoud’s extended mandate, he thought—and the mood in Damscus was—that this was a great success.If you recall, Assad followed that up with a change of government in Syria—it wasn’t a complete change, it was a cabinet reshuffle—and in a sense he felt confident that keeping Lahoud on in Lebanon had consolidated his hold in Lebanon. He felt that it was a good time to consolidate his hold in Syria and indeed his anticipation was that by the first quarter of 2005, he would be in a position to substantially enforce his authority in Syria. This would culminate with the Baath Party congress, as in fact happened, in which he managed to place his own people in the senior positions. So this was all a process. But he completely miscalculated American and French seriousness when it came to Resolution 1559, which effectively called on the Syrians to leave Lebanon, but also to respect the Lebanese constitution and bring in a new president. He miscalculated and he’s paid the price.What would the Lebanese like to see come out of the Security Council, realistically?I’m not sure that there’s really a consensus.What would you like to see?What I would like to see, I think, are a couple of things. First of all, I think a key ingredient in Mehlis’ report was his asking for this investigation process to continue. I think ideally this must continue, and to my mind, it must continue beyond the December 15 deadline, which it now is. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Mehlis should continue to conduct his investigation in exactly the same way, but certainly some kind of mechanism to continue the investigation—like calling on Syrian officials to be interviewed outside Syria—there must be a mechanism to continue this process.My suspicion is that they may actually reach a consensus on this. In terms of sanctions, let’s be honest: Economic sanctions in Syria are not going to do anything except consolidate the regime’s power and make the average Syrian feel worse off, as has happened in Iraq. However, you can impose selective sanctions on members of the Syrian regime. That may be something also worth looking into at the United Nations. Beyond that, as I said, I think the best thing is to continue with the judicial inquiry process, to get more information on what happened, on how Hariri was killed, and to continue to function within the parameters of international law. This gives everyone more legitimacy and I think there is a consensus on that within the Security Council. The worst thing that could happen is that the consensus breaks down in the Security Council.How is the United States viewed in Lebanon these days?Schizophrenically. I think that the political leadership is trying strenuously to say that they’re not doing America’s bidding and that they’re not siding with America against Syria. A few will, a few don’t care, but most want to stay away from that, largely because they are afraid of a confrontation with Hezbollah. But at the same time, at the popular level, I think many people simply understand, at least those who at the start liked the United States—obviously not everybody does—that in effect the United States  has been essential to the entire process. Not only the United States, but France as well. But I think that there is an understanding that, had the United States and France not taken the tack they did at the United Nations, this entire process—the Mehlis investigation, the Syrian departure from Lebanon—all this would not have gone anywhere and I think that understanding is widespread.Why did [French President Jacques] Chirac come on board with the United States, since obviously France and the United States have not agreed on much lately?I think it’s actually the other way around. I think it’s the United States that last June—June 2004—went on board with Chirac. It was actually the French who had been leading this process before the Americans, and I think the Americans saw a good thing. What motivated Chirac, I’m not sure. I think it was a number of things: His relationship with Hariri was an important factor, but more importantly, his understanding that more of Emile Lahoud—an extended term for Emile Lahoud—was not good not only for Hariri, but was not good for Lebanon’s future; all that, duck-tailed with the fact that Chirac by the summer of 2004 had lost all confidence in Bashar al Assad.I think from the French side there was a feeling that this was a time to act in Lebanon and with Syria. From the American side it was Iraq and the fact that people were still coming through the Syrian border. I think they both saw parallel interests and perhaps Chirac saw, as did Bush, that this was a good occasion for the two countries to get over the rift created by the war in Iraq. So they’ve been in collaboration, but the French, I think, took an interest before the Americans.

This publication is now archived. Syria’s slow declineWhat a difference five years makes. At the beginning of the century, Syria was a proud Arab country, ruled with brutal consistency for thirty years by Hafez al-Assad, comfortably assured of its decades-old grip on Lebanon, and admired in the Arab world for standing up to Israel and representing the principles of pan-Arab unity. Then, in June 2000, Hafez al-Assad died. Today, five years into the reign of his son and successor Bashar al-Assad, Syria is an international pariah whose actions have driven even Arab allies to reconsider their support of Damascus. Under Bashar’s leadership, the country has pursued a disastrous set of policies that have rapidly led to near-unanimous international opposition. The latest and most serious of these began in fall 2004, when Bashar forced an extra-constitutional extension of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s term through the Lebanese legislature, a naked display of power that antagonized then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri into quitting the government and joining the political opposition. Hariri spoke of running for president himself amid growing support for ending Syria’s 29-year occupation of Lebanon. Then, on February 14, 2005, Hariri and twenty-one others were killed in a massive car bombing in downtown Beirut. Suspicion immediately fell on Syria, and the extensive security and intelligence infrastructure it used to control Lebanon for decades. Bashar and Syrian officials repeatedly denied involvement in Hariri’s murder, but few believed the denials. UN special investigator Detlev Mehlis’s report into the assassination accuses members of Assad’s most inner circle—including his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat—and the Syrian intelligence apparatus in Lebanon of deliberately plotting the murder over several months. The UN Security Council is currently examining the report and will debate the issue next week. The United States and France are proposing new Security Council resolutions, including one that would expand the mandate of the UN investigation into the Hariri murder—and possibly set up an international tribunal to try those found responsible—and another that would authorize sanctions against Syria for funneling weapons to the terrorist group Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists based in Lebanese refugee camps for use against Israel. The United States also wants to punish Syria for permitting the funding and aiding of insurgents who cross the Syrian border to join the insurgency against U.S.-led forces in Iraq.  And the bad news doesn’t stop: Next week, a separate report by UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen will be delivered to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Roed-Larsen’s report will detail the progress toward implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which mandates the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon and dismantling Hezbollah and other militias. Hariri’s support for this resolution, which passed in September 2004, is what prompted Syrian officials to plan to kill him, according to the Mehlis report.  The consequences of “targeted assassinations”How did things fall so far, so fast? Bashar al-Assad, who inherited a country dominated by the security and intelligence apparatus run by his minority Alawite group, seems to be presiding over the potential demise of the Alawite regime. Investigators are closing in on Assad’s closest advisers and officials: On Mehlis’ recommendation, Lebanese authorities arrested four pro-Syrian generals and charged them with murder in the Hariri case. The four—Major General Jamil Sayyed, former chief of General Security; Major General Ali Hajj, former director general of the Internal Security Forces; Brigadier General Raymond Azar, former director general of military intelligence, and Brigadier General Mustafa Hamdan, former head of the Republican Guards—worked closely with Ghazi Kenaan, who ran Syria’s intelligence apparatus in Lebanon from 1982-2002, which meant he effectively ran Lebanon. Kenaan was questioned extensively by Mehlis in September; only weeks later, Kenaan was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in his Damascus office October 12, days before the Mehlis report was due. Syrian authorities ruled Kenaan’s death a suicide. Syria watchers immediately suspected otherwise. “Most people think it was an assassination,” says Emile el-Hokayem, an expert on Syria and the Middle East at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. Kenaan had amassed great wealth—some estimates say more than $200 million—skimming money from Lebanese trade and industry in his time there. He could have retired or gone into luxurious exile, experts say. Instead, he was probably either “convinced” to commit suicide or murdered, says Rick Francona, a former U.S. military attaché in Damascus and a Middle East analyst for NBC News. He says Syrian officials, afraid Kenaan would implicate them to Mehlis, likely ordered him killed. This way, some experts say, Syria could try to blame Hariri’s assassination entirely on Kenaan and isolate the damage caused by the UN probe. But “anyone who knows anything about the power structure in Lebanon knows that it’s impossible that the generals decided to [assassinate Hariri] on their own,” says Gary Gambill, a Middle East expert and political analyst. A decision that weighty would definitely come from the top, he says. “It’s not really a question of, ‘Is Assad guilty?’” Gambill says. “In my view, he ordered Hariri’s death.” Hariri’s murder, in a massive explosion in downtown Beirut in broad daylight, was the last straw in a series of events that showcased the recent deterioration of Syria’s international relationships. Bashar’s decision to oppose the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq earned him U.S. enmity; he has exacerbated the damage since by aiding insurgents who attack U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. Hariri was a particularly provocative choice of target because he had very close ties to both Saudi Arabia—where his multibillion-dollar business empire was based, and whose king, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, was a personal friend—and France, where his money was said to have financed part of President Jacques Chirac’s latest presidential campaign. Hariri was also a frequent and welcome visitor to Washington . As a result, the United States, France, and Saudi Arabia all explicitly warned Bashar to leave Hariri alone, experts say. In that context, “killing Hariri was a declaration of open war,” Gambill says. And the fact that Hariri was killed by a highly sophisticated car bomb in the signature manner of Syrian intelligence shows the Syrians were thinking more about the political-intimidation effect of their act than covering their tracks. “They got sloppy,” Gambill says. “They’d been in Lebanon – which they call “the province”—too long. They didn’t think they’d ever have to account to anyone for what they did.” Syria’s past impunitySyrian officials killed opposition figures with shocking casualness for a good reason: It worked. “Past Syrian assassinations were usually effective at causing the Lebanese political establishment to fall into line,” Gambill says. This year alone, there has been a steady stream of politically-targeted attacks: Hariri was killed in February; journalist Samir Kassir and the former leader of Lebanon’s Communist Party George Hawi were killed by car bombs in June; Lebanon’s defense minister Elias Murr narrowly escaped a car bomb attack in July; and in September, Lebanese journalist May Chidiac lost her left arm and leg to a bomb placed under the seat of her car. “Assassination and intimidation are part of the political culture of both these countries,” Hokayem says.  But after Hariri’s death, some experts say, the culture of impunity has lifted. Countries that, in the past, were willing to look the other way are now saying Syria must pay for its crimes. “The violence taking place under Bashar is weakening Syriaand threatening the regime,” says Hussein Ibish, a Washington-based journalist and Lebanon expert. “The continuing campaign of violence has only served to further isolate Syria, galvanize opposition to Syria-backed President Emile Lahoud, and bolster a nonsectarian Lebanese national identity. With every new attempt at intimidation, Syria’s grasp [on Lebanon] slips a bit more,” writes Christopher DeVito in an October 2005 Foreign Policy article titled “Syria’s Self-Defeat.” Mistakes and bad judgmentTo veteran Syria hands, Bashar has displayed a shocking degree of ineptitude in his repeated misjudgments of the reactions Syria’s policies will inspire. “Bashar’s not the leader his father was,” Francona says. “He’s a technocrat. He never consolidated his power, he’s trying to please too many people, and he’s deluding himself.” Bashar is repeatedly accused of being tone-deaf to international opinion and too weak to master the fractious tribal and regional demands of leading a country like Syria. “He was placed in that position [president] by his father’s associates, and the sad part is he hasn’t grown into his own man,” says Richard Murphy, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia who served in Damascus during Hafez al-Assad’s reign. Hokayem agrees, saying Hafez al-Assad was much better at consolidating Alawite support than Bashar. Hafez spread out power and played ambitious courtiers against one another; Bashar has concentrated influence within a small circle of close advisers and generally does not seek to build consensus, experts say. Some experts trace the trouble to Bashar’s mishandling of Lebanese politics. “All of this violence and instability follows from the imposition of a second term for Lahoud with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy,” Ibish says. “Once they decided to unconstitutionally extend Lahoud’s term, events followed a grim, logical, and perfectly predictable pattern.” Even the decision—if there was one—to murder Kenaan shows the current turmoil in Damscus. Kenaan was from a very respected Alawite family, more prominent than the Assads, and was accepted by the Alawite leadership in a way Bashar is not. He had proven his management ability in Lebanon and had the credentials and qualifications to lead Syria —also, in ways Bashar does not. Some U.S. and European officials reportedly thought so too, and Kenaan was discussed as a possible replacement for Bashar al-Assad. “People saw Kenaan as the most credible alternative to Bashar,” Hokayem says. “If Kenaan’s death was an assassination and not a suicide, it’s the best evidence of a power struggle within Syria.” A possible deal?There may be a way out for Bashar. News reports say the beleaguered Syrian president has been offered a deal similar to that accepted by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in 2003: If Syria stops its support for regional terror groups, its aid to the insurgency in Iraq, and its interference in Lebanon, Damascus can head off sanctions and further international isolation. “It’s a variation on, ‘We’ll leave you alone if you cooperate by disengaging from Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories,’” Gambill says. “Assad’s basically offered to do that, but there’s some question on whether he can deliver on those promises.”But there would be a heavy price to pay if Bashar publicly accepted such terms from the west. Under Hafez al-Assad, Syria was seen as a staunch and unyielding defender of Palestinian rights and Arab pride. If Bashar caves, “he’ll be seen as selling out the goal of pan-Arab unity to save his own skin,” Gambill says. That would be unacceptable to Syrians, and thus makes such a compromise unlikely, he says. But if there’s no international compromise, then what? After five years in power, experts say, Bashar has dashed early hopes he would reform Syria and open it up to the world. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Syrians have seen missteps, foreign policy mistakes, and the loss of Syrian power, territory, and friends (former allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt are siding with France and the United States against Syria on the Hariri issue.) The country as a whole is weaker, and many people blame Bashar. Instead of opening Syria up, Bashar has isolated the country further. “Syrians aren’t used to pariah status,” Gambill says. Will Bashar survive?Worldwide speculation is focusing on Bashar’s future. He has no clear successor, and most of the Syrian establishment still views him as the leader. “There’s no obvious alternative at the moment,” Hokayem says. “I think the regime is a bit more stable than people think,” he says. Francona says the vested interests of the Alawite establishment also work in Bashar’s favor. “Too many people in Syria owe their lifestyles and everything they have to the continuation of this regime,” he says. But “if they think Bashar will give everything away, they’ll remove him.” And if he goes, “some other power clique will emerge” that will likely be much more authoritarian, he says. Murphy also thinks Assad is there for the moment: “The role is his to play,” Murphy says. “The present power structure will keep control and try to muddle through. Better to stay with the one you know, even if you don’t think he’s up to the job.” Syria’s futureSome experts say Syrians view their future prospects as bleak. “They’ve been terribly isolated. The economy’s tanking. They were basically forced from Lebanon under international pressure. A lot of Syrians think Bashar caved when he didn’t need to, and it’s hurt them,” Francona says. In reaction to the growing dissent, experts say, Bashar is cracking down harder on Syrian society. “Colossal external pressure is forcing the regime to keep an iron fist inside the country,” says Murhaf Jouejati, a specialist in Syrian foreign policy and director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Washington University. This may be exactly the wrong tack. “The only way forward is maybe to introduce some reforms, but that would require subtle political skills, which Assad has not shown,” Gambill says. “My guess is that he’s in trouble, no matter what happens.”There is some sympathy, though, for the leadership within Syria. “Syrians think Washington and Paris have been very demanding of Bashar, that as soon as he meets a condition they impose several more,” Murphy says. “There’s an idea that there’s nothing he can do to please them.” And too much direct international pressure might backfire, experts say. “If pressure from the United States is applied to Syria in the wrong way, it could drive support to Bashar,” Hokayem says. It remains to be seen if Bashar al-Assad can learn from his mistakes and manage to keep control of the country he inherited from his father.

Likening the leadership in Damascus to The Sopranos, Steven A. Cook, an Arab affairs expert at the Council, says the UN report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is clear in holding high-level Syrian and Lebanese security and intelligence officials responsible. But he says it will be hard to bring about regime change in Damascus without “a palace coup.”“What can we look for if there really is an unraveling or dramatic weakening of the Syrian regime?” asks Cook, the Council’s Douglas Dillon Fellow. “It would probably be a palace coup in effect in which members of the Alawite clique who run the government believe that President Bashar Assad has not played his hand very well and that these people have significantly sullied Syria’s reputation and put the regime in such jeopardy that they have to take action to put things back together again.”He was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on October 21, 2005. The report of the Mehlis Commission is now out. It holds Syrian and Lebanese security and intelligence officials responsible for the assassination last February 14 of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. What struck you about the report?Well, first it is a straightforward deconstruction of the events and it is very clear in its conclusions. It is very straightforward in suggesting that it was Syrian security and Lebanese officials who were responsible for the assassination. In fact, I am reading the unedited version of the report right now and the unedited version actually names top Syrian and Lebanese security officials who it says are responsible for the assassination.Now the Lebanese authorities have arrested four of these high-ranking Lebanese security officials and presumably they will go on trial eventually inLebanon. I guess the main question is the extent ofSyria’s role in all this. Syria is a major player in this part of this world. The United States is at odds with Syria over many issues, including Syria’s role in allowing foreign insurgents into Iraq. How is this report going to play in Syria itself?It is hoped here and in France that the trial of the four Lebanese security officials will lead to their implicating the Syrians. You have to look at Syria’s power structure as more like The Sopranos, than as a government. It will reveal that in fact, at the highest levels of the Syrian government, they were calling the shots and ordered the assassination of Hariri. It is hoped that this will be one of the factors that will lead to the unraveling of the Assad regime in Syria. The problem as I see it is that it may increase international pressure on the Syrians, but in terms of domestic political pressure, there is no coherent, unified, strong opposition in Syria. So if there is going to be any change in Syria, it’s going to have to come from within.What can we look for if there really is an unraveling or dramatic weakening of the Syrian regime? It would probably be a palace coup in effect in which members of the Alawite clique who run the government believe that President Bashar Assad has not played his hand very well and that these people have significantly sullied Syria’s reputation and put the regime in such jeopardy that they have to take action to put things back together again. In passing, the interior minister who supposedly committed suicide last week, General Ghazi Kanaan, was an Alawite, and I guess there might have been fears of his leading a coup. I guess it is hard to believe he voluntarily took his own life.There are two theories about it: Either he was about to spill the beans—he was Syria’s proconsul in Lebanon for many years—or that he was going to lead a coup. What I thought was extraordinary was that, even though a number of names were omitted from the final draft, the report nevertheless accused Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara and his deputy, Walid al-Mualem, of giving false information. You don’t normally accuse a foreign minister of lying in a UN document.Basically, the report accused every Syrian official they interviewed of lying. What the report says is that the Syrian government cooperated in form but not in substance. It said that the statements of officials were meant to mislead the commission. It’s very clearly stated that the Syrians intended to mislead the commission and that other witnesses gave testimony that wasn’t directly relevant to the Hariri assassination. But, that information could lead to additional criminal investigations in Lebanon and would be forwarded to the appropriate Lebanese authorities. This meant, in my reading, that there was more evidence of what the Syrians were up to inLebanonover the last twenty-five years or so. Let’s go back to the origins of this. It began on August 24, 2004, when President Bashar Assad met with Hariri in Damascus and told him, according to Hariri’s account, that Assad wanted Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s term in office extended, even though this would require a change in the Lebanese constitution. Why was this such a big deal for Assad that he would in effect threaten Hariri if he tried to block it?This is one of the Syrians’ great blunders in Lebanon. There was a whole host of characters in Lebanon who were willing to be a Syrian lackey. I don’t know why they were insisting that Lahoud’s term be extended. That event galvanized Lebanon’s fractious opposition and produced a unified front. There had been growing tensions in previous years about the Syrian presence, and increasingly, people were beginning to start to speak out. This heavy-handed approach to Lebanese politics really brought the disparate elements of the opposition in Lebanon together. Is that what led France and the United States to put forward Resolution 1559 in the Security Council in September 2004, which called on Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon? The extension of Lahoud’s term was certainly a justification to ratchet up the pressure. There were a whole series of other things that the United States and France were upset with, however.President Lahoud, of course, is now left out there hanging. He looks like a complete lackey of the Syrians, which everyone in Lebanon apparently believes he is, but will not resign. He won’t resign and there is no institutional mechanism to remove him from office. What the Lebanese government is doing now is to basically ignore the Lebanese president. Who is the prime minister?Fouad Siniora, who is a minister from a previous government, but is not tainted by a close connection to the Syrians.The Security Council is due to meet on Tuesday to discuss this report. Clearly, some action will be taken. And when Secretary of State Coldoleezza Rice was in Paris, she spoke to President Jacques Chirac about this and they both seem to be united in their determination. What do you think will happen?Clearly, they will use the report to ratchet up the pressure on the Syrians. And United Nations Security Council sanctions are certainly a possibility. There are two options: One is more forceful—the use of sanctions; the other is to try to resolve the situation through negotiation and mediation. I don’t think, given the recent history of relations between the United States and Syria, we are going to opt for the lesser of the two. So I would expect that the United States and France would push for further economic and diplomatic isolation of Syria in the coming future.The problem is what to do. Some might call for military action against Syria, regime change in Syria. Certainly regime change in Syria is desirable over the long term. The problem is: What comes after the Assad regime in Syria? And nobody quite knows. As I said before, there really isn’t a unified opposition in place that could take the reins of power. What you have are disparate groups within the orbit of the regime who would fight it out over control of Syria. We would add to the instability of the region by pushing this regime over, but certainly we need to take action against essentially an outlaw region that is sanctioning the assassination of leaders of other countries.I assume that right now President Assad is meeting with his family and advisers to try to map out a strategy here. They have to come up with something by Tuesday, I would think, beyond just denial.There is always the so-called “Libyan solution.” [This refers to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s decision to turn over some intelligence agents as responsible for a 1988 bombing on board a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, and agreement to pay compensation to families.] They can offer up a number of mid- to lower-high-level security officials as sacrificial lambs for state policy. They can say they did it, and it was not officially sanctioned. That is a way to try to wiggle out. But this Mehlis report is so focused, and given the fact that the unedited version was leaked and that individuals at the highest levels of the Syrian government are named—Maher Assad, the brother of the president who is commanding general of the presidential guard, and Assad Shawkat, who is the president’s brother-in-law in charge of military intelligence. This is damning to say the least. I am not quite sure what the Syrians can do. Certainly, the Syrians are in for a period of international isolation. Previously, they were able to count on the French and others who would undermine American efforts to isolate them. But now, the United States and France are together on this policy. This is a straightforward report pointing at the highest levels in Damascus, written by a nonpartisan investigator from Germany with a reputation for integrity. It’s going to be very difficult for the Syrians to wiggle out of this one.Why do you think Chirac and the United States were able to get together on this, when they were so apart onIraq ?I think there is a confluence of interests on the question of Lebanon and Syria, even though the United States and France do not always have the same goals in the Middle East. France is the former colonial power in Lebanon and Syria; there were close connections between Chirac and Hariri. This action by the Syrian government could not go unanswered given France’s belief in its historic responsibility to this area. The Bush administration, for the last several years, has been interested in isolating Syria and getting Syria to change its behavior and ultimately, it is hoped, to have a new beginning in Syria. So in this one instance in the Middle East, if you forget Iraq, if you forget the Arab-Israeli conflict, France and the United States are on the same page.Would economic sanctions really hurt Syria ?The issue with Syria is that, first of all economically, it is in a deplorable situation. Lebanon has essentially been Syria’s economic lifeboat. Further economic sanctions on Syria would further its isolation and its economic pain. The problem is that Syria is relatively isolated from the outside world anyway. The Assad regime has been able to withstand the pain applied by the international community and the Syrian people have not demonstrated their willingness to rise up against the regime in any significant kind of way. So if the theory behind these sanctions is that we will apply enough pain to galvanize the Syrian people to take down the regime, it will be a long time coming. Could the Syrians make a “deal” by cutting off the Iraqi insurgents?That’s one place the Syrians might look to ease the political pressure on them, by actually taking action against the insurgents or trying to shut down [the Shiite militant group] Hezbollah in Lebanon, which they have sponsored.

Joshua M. Landis, a Syrian specialist on a Fulbright fellowship in Damascus, says the ongoing UN investigation led by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis into the possible involvement of the Syrian government in the assassination last February of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Harriri, has produced “great speculation” in Damascus on whether the top leadership of the Syrian government will become embroiled. Noting that the United States is bringing great pressure on Syria to do more to stop infiltration of insurgents into Iraq, Landis said there is no real dialogue going on now between the two countries. He says, “People here feel there is nothing they can do to satisfy Washington—that Washington, constitutionally, is anti-dialogue with Syria.” He adds that the question everyone is asking is, “Are there some terms that they could actually offer the United States” to satisfy Washington?Landis, who is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and who publishes a blog called Syria Comment, was interviewed by phone from Damascus by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org.On Monday in New York, there was a meeting with Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a group of Western and Arab leaders involved with the situation in Lebanon, in which Syria has been accused of having a role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harriri. After the meeting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “We’re interested in only the following with Syria: First of all, that there be full and complete cooperation with the Mehlis [UN] investigation and that the truth be found—whatever that truth is.” And of course, the special UN investigator Detlev Mehli has apparently arrived in Syria today, so what’s apt to happen? Is he going to have a real investigation in Syria? Yes, I think he is. He’s scheduled talks with some people that are high up in the government, including Ghazi Kanaan, the interior minister, and with the person who was the head of intelligence in Lebanon [Rustom Ghazali]. He has a slate of some very important people that he’s going to talk to, and that’s just the beginning. He’s going to ask for more. He has forty more days to do his investigation. So the big speculation in town is where this is all going to lead, and obviously, it’s going to lead to the Syrian government. How far up the line is he going to go? One question is, Will the president [Bashar Assad] be implicated somehow? Will Mehlis implicate someone in the president’s family, like Assef Shawkat, who is the brother-in-law of the president, or even Maher Assad, the president’s brother and the head of the presidential guard? If it was somebody in the immediate family, this would be a real crisis, because obviously the president could not sacrifice somebody like that. That’s the kind of talk that goes around Damascus. If it’s not somebody in the immediate family, then maybe that person could be sacrificed. The foreign diplomats here believe there’s not going to be complete conclusiveness in the end—that [opinion is] just based on other investigations in the past—and that this is going to leave the door open for wrangling.Under what legal obligation do Syrian officials have to speak to Mehlis? Can’t they just take the equivalent of the U.S. Fifth Amendment, which protects witnesses from having to testify to anything that will incriminate him/herself? Yes, I suppose they can just say, “We don’t do this; this is our sovereignty.” If an international court came to the United States, I’m sure the United States would do something similar. Many governments do not like to have international courts coming into their sovereignty. On the other hand, Syria wants to go along with the process. The Syrians have maintained they are innocent from the beginning and that the assassination of Rafik Hariri was not devised by them. In a sense, they need to come clean. Also, they do not want to be completely isolated. Clearly, America is going to put pressure on them. Since Syria was the major Arab country opposed to America’s involvement in Iraq, relations have gone from bad to worse. Bashar [Assad] is not with the Americans; he stood against them. He said it was a big mistake for Americans to invade Iraq and he compares it with the Balfour Declaration [The Balfour Declaration, issued by the British foreign secretary during World War I, offered Jews a homeland in Palestine], with the design of taking over a chunk of land in the Middle East. He believes that to have a foreign power take a big chunk of the Middle East was something Arabs could not stand by. So now the U.S. is pressing Bashar to stop the foreign insurgents from going into Iraq. And Syria officially says they’ve done all they can, but no one believes them in the United States. Syria has done the easy things: It has put several thousand troops on the 350-mile border with Iraq; it has built this big sand dune so that vehicles cannot cross the border, but people are smuggled in. And Syria does not have any night-vision goggles or night equipment; it has asked the United States for them. There are of course, no American guards on the other side of the border or Iraqi guards along the 350 miles. So Syrians are doing the complete job of guarding this border. And America wants them to do it and doesn’t want to pay them for it. They want them to do it for free, as part of their duty as an international player. What I think is more important is the issue of visas. The United States wants Syria, in effect, to establish a homeland security department. Syria is now the one Arab state allows every Arab into its country without a visa. They show their passport at the border and they can come in. There are 5 million Arab tourists a year to Syria.Of course, if the Syrians really wanted to, they could crack down inside Syria on the people running the insurgent program, right? This is what America wants. The major way to do that is by seeing who the people are who are coming in here, because Syria says it doesn’t know. There are five million Arabs coming to this country every year. Syria doesn’t know who they are. The United States wants the Syrians to do what America does to the Arabs coming in to the United States—do backgrounds, get the mother and father, and post this information back to Saudi Arabia, because we believe about 80 percent of these mujahadeen are coming from the Gulf. If you could get the information back to Saudi Arabia and get good coordination with the Americans and Saudis and so forth, then you could find out if these mujahadeens are bad guys or businessmen or whatever they are. Theoretically, Saudi Arabia could issue some kind of exit visas, because Syria gives exit visas. And that way the Saudis would know who is leaving their country and they could do a background check and share it with the Syrians.The question about how people are getting through Syria is one of the toughest to answer. America says that there are training camps. The Syrians deny this. We really don’t know the truth of this, but the United States has not put anybody on TV from the Iraqi side to say, “Yes, that is the truth.” We really don’t have the evidence on that. It is easy, on the other hand, to sneak into Iraq. If I wanted to get into Iraq, I could do it. I know many people from Arab tribes, who are here in Damascus, who make their living by smuggling. And the tribes here really see themselves as Iraqis in many ways. A major tribal district is in Ramadi; the big tribes in the east, like the Shammar and Agebap, are really Iraqi tribes. The center of these tribes is in Iraq, but they’ve washed over the Syrian border into Syria. And those people really feel Iraqi—they speak the same dialect, they have the same customs, and so forth, and they feel connected to Saddam Hussein. In 1991, when Syria sided with George H.W. Bush against Iraq, there was a little intifada in Abu Kamal, which is the major city along the border. And the people went out on the streets and demonstrated saying, “Long live Saddam Hussein; long live Iraq.” The Syrian army sent out some divisions out there and arrested a whole bunch of people for doing this. This was the situation in 1991, and I’ve asked many people who I’ve met from Abu Kamal if the people are sending fighters to help [the insurgency] and they say, “Of course we are, because these are our people, these are our tribes, and they’re being killed.”Let’s go to a question you discussed in your op-ed in the New York Times last week: How to develop a relationship that’s satisfactory to both Syria and the United States? What should the United States do that it’s not doing now? There’s a big clash. The Syrians feel America should not be in Iraq and that they’ve been pushed out of Lebanon—the government of course feels like it lost a big asset being pushed out. And of course, you can see the result of that today. The Lebanese have turned very anti-Syrian and they’re helping with the Mehlis report. The Christians in Lebanon are talking about how Israel would be a much better partner than Syria and that they should make peace with Israel, run their commerce through Israel and into Jordan, and then sell all their all trans-Arab trade to the Gulf through Israel. It’s hard to imagine Hezbollah and the other Muslim groups would allow that. Hezbollah is the major roadblock. And here we have Resolution 1559 that aims to disarm Hezbollah and make the Lebanese army the only force in the land. And if that were accomplished, then what would keep Lebanon from signing a deal with Israel?Israel and Lebanon were ready to sign a peace treaty in 1983 after the 1982 Israeli invasion, which Syria blocked Beirut from signing? Yes, they were about to sign in 1983. The Christians that were pushing for that then are still pushing now. That’s something that could happen. The Lebanese have said that they won’t go off and sign an independent deal without Syria and a resolution of the Golan Heights issue with Israel, but they could change their tune. Syria has nothing going on with Israel right now, right? Nothing. Syria is totally isolated. Bashar Assad had visits lined up to go to Austria and to go to Brazil, but both of those were stopped several months ago because of U.S. pressure on those two countries to not greet him. The Turkish Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip Erdogan] was supposed to come here a few months ago and he ultimately had to apologize and not come, but all the papers were saying it was because of U.S. pressure. The Europeans are not opening their doors to the Syrians.How does Syria get out of this? I don’t think they can get out of this in the short term. What I think America wants to do is get Syria by the throat; they have to wait for the Mehlis report to be thoroughly investigated and for the court case to begin. I think the United States will try and get European partners to do what they did in Libya, which is direct sanctions not against the people—they won’t turn him into Saddam Hussein or Arafat. What they’ll do is they’ll turn him into [Libyan leader Muammar] el-Qaddafi. Instead of putting sanctions against the people, they’ll stop all international flights—I think this is what they’re moving towards—and pull all the European ambassadors so there really isn’t anyone for Bashar to talk to.I think they’re going to try and get him by the throat and shake him really hard and see what kind of change falls out of his pocket. Pressure has worked so far; they’ve gotten Syria to withdraw all their forces from Lebanon. That’s a major achievement. They’ve gotten Syria to work with the United States, or at least to not make trouble in Palestine. The whole [Israeli] Gaza withdrawal went very smoothly and there weren’t any attacks by any of the extremist groups. And that’s because Bashar met with all the Palestinian [Authority] leaders and he backed them. He said, “You have my blessings.”Bashar asked them not to cause trouble in Gaza? Yes. He met with [Palestinian Authority President] Abu Mazen and [Prime Minister Ahmed] Qurei and brought the heads of the local, more extreme groups, like Islamic Jihad and so forth that have representatives in Damascus, all together in a room and he made an understanding between them in order to show that he was willing to work with them. Of course, he has not kicked those people out of Damascus, which is something that America wants him to do. For Americans, that’s provocation. But he could use his power there further down the line if there are withdrawals in the West Bank; all that could be reactivated.From the outside, you wonder why Bashar doesn’t make a bigger effort to really improve relations with the United States instead of antagonizing Washington. I think he thinks he is. He’s maintained that he wants dialogue; he’s maintained that he wants peace with Israel; he’s pulled out of Lebanon; he’s said that he will go along with policing. I think he feels he is making these concessions. Now of course, the dialogue has not always been warm. But the people here feel there is nothing they can do to satisfy Washington—that Washington, constitutionally, is anti-dialogue with Syria. And this is the question that everybody is debating: Are there some terms that they could actually offer the United States that would be the equivalent to Qaddafi’s?On the other hand, the Americans have left the door open for bargaining. Because if we look at what Rice is saying—she said about two months ago, “We want to change the regime’s behavior, not change the regime”—those were very important words that we hadn’t heard clearly from the American administration. Rice has taken a very cautious line. She’s given every indication that they don’t necessarily want to change the regime here. And it would be very frightening, I think, for them to contemplate that because they have absolutely zero alternatives. The Americans know almost nothing about Syria and they don’t have any clue what would happen here should the regime collapse. Has the American ambassador returned to Damascus? Nobody is expecting the ambassador anytime soon. We’re looking forward to another half year—it could be more than that—of isolation. There is no dialogue.

This is an article about Lebanon’s 2005 general election. For analysis of results from Lebanon’s 2009 vote, click here.This publication is now archived. What was the result of the final round of Lebanese elections?An anti-Syrian opposition coalition won a majority in Lebanon’s parliament in the first democratic elections since 1976, when Syria began a 29-year occupation of its neighbor. Many experts say the elections, and the government formed after them, will determine whether Lebanon can begin to build a genuine democracy free of Syrian control. Others warn, however, that the sectarian tensions that led to Lebanon’s brutal 1975-1990 civil war are rising again. What were the events leading up to the elections?The elections had already been scheduled for the end of May. But after former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in Beirut February 14, weeks of street protests--dubbed the "Cedar Revolution"--forced the resignation of pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami and his cabinet, greatly raising the stakes of the parliamentary vote. The demonstrations, along with international pressure that had been building for several months, also prompted Syria to withdraw the tens of thousands of troops and security forces that had enabled Damascus to control Lebanon for decades. Syria completed its withdrawal April 26. The elections began May 29 and were held in the country’s four main regions over successive Sundays. Which parties won seats?Voters selected candidates for all 128 parliamentary seats from slates put together by several parties. The most successful were: Tayyar al-Mustaqbal (Future Tide) coalition, 72 seats. An anti-Syria opposition coalition led by Said Hariri, a 35-year-old businessman and son of the former prime minister. Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, joined forces with Walid Jumblatt, head of the minority Druze community and leader of the al-Taqadummi al-Ishtiraki, or Progressive Socialist Party. Jumblatt led a Syria-backed armed militia against Christian groups during the civil war; after the war he served as a cabinet official in several pro-Syrian Lebanese governments. In 1988, Jumblatt responded to attempts by Syrian President Hafez al-Assad to strip him of power by leaving government and joining the anti-Syria opposition movement. Future Tide also includes several notable Christian politicians. Amal Party/Hezbollah, 35 seats. Hezbollah is an armed Shiite militia backed by Iran that has wide support in Lebanon’s Shiite south, where it is credited with ending the Israeli occupation. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, formed a coalition with the Amal Party, a Shiite group led by Nabih Berri, a former military officer considered one of Syria’s main collaborators in Lebanon. The Amal/Hezbollah group, which polled strongly in the south, is now the main Shiite party in Lebanon. Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), 21 seats.General Michel Aoun, the FPM leader, is a Maronite Christian and former military officer who led a failed coup against Syria in 1989 and served briefly as Lebanon’s prime minister and acting president before fleeing to France. He returned to Lebanon May 7 after 14 years in exile. Aoun shocked many supporters by forming a last-minute alliance with Suleiman Franjieh, a Maronite Christian former cabinet minister and part of a prominent pro-Syrian clan. The alliance made strong gains in the third week of voting in the Christian areas of central Mount Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley. That showing made Aoun the most influential Maronite leader in the country. "It’s clear now that Aoun speaks for the Maronite interests," says Hussein Ibish, vice chair of the Progressive Muslim Union and former Washington correspondent for Beirut’s Daily Star. Maronite Christians in Lebanon’s heartland voted overwhelmingly for Aoun and against the Christian leaders who ran on their own or joined the Future Tide coalition. Were the elections free and fair?Lebanon allowed international election observers to monitor the ballot, a first in Lebanese history. A 100-member European Union (EU) delegation monitored voter registration, campaigns, and voting, and approved the election as free of foreign influence and fair, despite some late accusations of vote-buying. EU officials did say, however, that the country’s entire election system needed reform. Other international observers included U.N. Envoy Terje Roed-Larsen and U.S. Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del). What is the balance of power in Lebanon’s governmental system?Members of the national assembly choose both the president and the prime minister. The incumbent president is Emile Lahoud, a pro-Syria politician whose term was extended by three years to 2007 by a controversial, Syria-backed constitutional amendment last year. As a result of the elections, Lahoud’s future is unclear; some experts say he may resign or be forced out. After an official tally is reached from the June 19 round of voting, the newly elected parliamentarians will select a prime minister. Once approved by the president, the prime minister will form a cabinet. Experts say the prime minister and president share power and have roughly equal influence. The prime minister oversees the day-to-day running of the government through his cabinet, while the president controls national security and foreign policy. How did Lebanon’s mix of ethnic and religious groups factor into the election?Lebanon’s population is divided among Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, the Druze sect of Islam, Christians, and others. The country has long wrestled with sectarian strife. At the end of French occupation in 1943, a so-called confessional system was set up, dividing the parliament between Christians and Muslims and reserving certain political posts for certain religious groups. Some experts say Lebanon’s sectarian tensions, which were muffled by the anti-Syrian sentiments that fueled the Cedar Revolution, are as strong as ever. Under the confessional system, the country’s president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, and the parliament’s speaker must be a Shiite Muslim. Critics say this system perpetuates unfair religious discrimination and are agitating to switch to a secular, one-person, one-vote system in which political posts are open to all. What is Lebanon’s current election law?Under a law drawn up in 2000 under Syrian rule, Lebanon is divided into a complex web of districts and provinces designed to give each of 18 different Muslim and Christian sects a fixed number of seats in parliament. These seats were gerrymandered to elect pro-Syrian politicians and do not reflect current demographic realities. Overall, parliamentary seats are divided equally between Muslims and Christians. This is a consequence of the October 1989 Taif Accords that ended the civil war; before that, the confessional system gave Christians 60 percent of parliament and Muslims 40 percent. While Lebanon has not held a census in more than 70 years, most observers agree that Muslims outnumber Christians among the roughly 4.5 million Lebanese. Some estimates put the country at about 70 percent Muslim--of which about half are Shiite, many are Sunni, and a minority are from the Druze sect of Islam--and roughly 30 percent Christian. How long were Syrian troops in Lebanon?From 1976 to 2005. Full-scale civil war broke out in April 1975 between the Maronite Christian groups of the Lebanese Front and the Lebanese National Movement, which was made up of left-leaning Muslims who wanted a greater share of political power. Fighting was intense, and in June 1976 the Maronite-dominated government asked for support from Syria. Syria had previously mounted several failed diplomatic efforts to stop the war. For then-Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad--the late father of current president Bashar al-Assad--the Lebanese conflict presented a range of possibilities, all of them unappealing: sectarian strife spilling over into Syria, which had its own Christian-Muslim tensions; an Israeli invasion of Lebanon; or the establishment of a radical, left-wing Muslim state, if the Lebanese National Movement won. Assad sent in troops to strengthen the Maronite government, which he calculated he could manipulate, according to Mideast analysts. Assad’s move earned the wrath of the Muslim world, because he backed the Christian side. Still, small contingents of troops from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Sudan later joined the Syrian-dominated Arab Deterrent Force. The war lasted 15 years. What caused the war?Tensions among Lebanon’s Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, and the Druze Muslim sect. Those groups had long jockeyed for power and influence. Under the confessional system, Christians had the upper hand in the national assembly. This arrangement bred resentment among Lebanese Muslims, especially as they grew to outnumber Christians. In the early 1970s, the arrival of Yasir Arafat and thousands of his fellow Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) militants exacerbated Christian-Muslim tensions and swelled the Muslim ranks with thousands of experienced gunmen. Lebanese Muslim groups supported the PLO fighters, recently expelled from Jordan, while Maronite Christian groups worried that PLO raids against Israel would invite retaliation and destabilize Lebanon. Throughout the 1970s, the PLO increasingly used Lebanon as a base from which to attack Israel. Israeli forces invaded in 1978 and 1982; after the second invasion, they remained and occupied a strip of southern Lebanon for nearly 20 years. Egypt, Iraq, and Libya supported Muslim factions in the civil war, while the United States and Israel backed Christian groups. During the long course of the conflict, Syria alternately supported the Christian and Muslim sides. What ended the war?The Taif Accords, an agreement brokered by Arab nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, that gave Lebanese Muslims a greater share of political power in Lebanon and formalized "preferred relations" between Lebanon and Syria. Syria’s internationally recognized role as "the guarantor of Lebanon’s security" was also established in these accords, says Murhaf Jouejati, director of the Middle East Studies program at George Washington University. What impact did the Taif Accords have on the Syria-Lebanon relationship?Experts say the agreement gave Hafez al-Assad effective control over most of Lebanon in return for a promise to maintain internal stability. The Syrians were supposed to set a timetable for a withdrawal of their troops to the Bekaa Valley, a strategic security zone between Syria and Lebanon, by 1992 or another date negotiated with the Lebanese government. Lebanon’s pro-Syria government, however, did not request a Syrian withdrawal until forced to by massive public pressure in February 2005.

This publication is now archived. What’s the significance of Lebanon’s parliamentary elections?They are the first democratic elections since 1976, when Syria began a 29-year occupation of its neighbor. The month-long polling could lead to significant democratic advances in the small Middle Eastern nation, says Theodore Kattouf, president of the nonprofit AMIDEAST group and a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and the United Arab Emirates. Other experts are less optimistic. They contend that historic Lebanese rivalries that were submerged by a shared animosity to Syria are now resurfacing, and add that laws enacted under Syrian domination will prevent genuine democratic change. Why are elections being held?They were already scheduled for the end of May, but after former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated February 14 in Beirut, weeks of street protests--dubbed the "Cedar Revolution"--forced pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami and his cabinet to resign. Karami briefly resumed his post, but he failed to form a new cabinet and was replaced by Najib Mikati, who is interim prime minister until the election results are in. The demonstrations sparked by Hariri’s assassination and international pressure that had been building for several months also prompted Syria to withdraw its tens of thousands of troops and security agents from Lebanon; the withdrawal was completed April 26. Many suspect Damascus orchestrated Hariri’s death to silence his increasingly vocal opposition to Syrian domination; Syria denies involvement. What’s at stake in the elections?Political control of the country. Many experts say the elections, and the government formed after them, will determine whether Lebanon can begin to build a genuine democracy free of Syrian control. Opposition leaders hope their anti-Syria slates can gain as many as 80 seats in the 128-member national assembly. While this figure may be optimistic, opposition candidates will likely pick up about 60 seats, dividing the parliament almost evenly between pro- and anti-Syrian members, says Murhaf Jouejati, director of the Middle East Studies program at George Washington University. As a first priority, Lebanese citizens will likely push for long-promised changes to the country’s "confessional system," which allots government posts by religion. "The body politic of Lebanon has changed," Jouejati says. "They want a secular, non-confessional political system." What is the balance of power in Lebanon’s governmental system?Members of the national assembly choose both the president and the prime minister. The incumbent president is Emile Lahoud, a pro-Syria politician whose term was extended by three years to 2007 by a controversial Syria-backed constitutional amendment last year. After the current voting ends in late June, the newly elected parliamentarians will select a prime minister. Once approved by the president, the prime minister will form a cabinet. Experts say the prime minister and president share power and have roughly equal influence. The prime minister oversees the day-to-day running of the government through his cabinet, while the president controls national security and foreign policy. How does Lebanon’s mix of ethnic and religious groups factor into the election?Lebanon’s population is divided among Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, the Druze sect of Islam, Christians, and others. The country has long wrestled with sectarian strife. At the end of French colonial rule in 1943, the confessional system was set up, dividing the parliament between Christians and Muslims and reserving certain political posts for certain religious groups. After the brutal civil war of 1975-90, experts say Lebanon’s sectarian tensions are as strong as ever--though they were muffled by the anti-Syrian sentiments that fueled the Cedar Revolution. Under the confessional system, the country’s president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, and the parliament’s speaker must be a Shiite Muslim. Critics say this system perpetuates unfair religious discrimination and are agitating to switch to a secular, one-man, one-vote system in which political posts are open to all. Who are the main candidates contending for office?Voters may choose an entire slate of candidates or pick individual candidates from several lists. Some of the prominent politicians running for office include: General Michel Aoun, a Maronite Christian and former military officer who led a failed coup against Syria in 1989 and served briefly as Lebanon’s prime minister and acting president before fleeing to France. He returned to Lebanon May 7 after 14 years in exile. Aoun is supported by the Free Patriotic Movement as well as many Christians, members of the armed forces, educated youth, and those who favor secular government. Walid Jumblatt, head of the minority Druze community and leader of the Hizb al-Taqadummi al-Ishtiraki, or Progressive Socialist Party, which was founded by his father Kamal Jumblatt in 1949. Jumblatt is a well-known, outspoken, and charismatic politician. In the 1980s, he led a Syria-supported armed militia that fought another Lebanese Christian group that was backed by Israel; after the war ended, he served as a cabinet official in several pro-Syrian Lebanese governments. In 1988, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad moved to consolidate his power in Lebanon, stripping Jumblatt of his portfolio as part of efforts to sideline both him and Rafiq Hariri. Jumblatt responded by leaving government and joining the anti-Syria opposition movement. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, an armed Shiite militia heavily supported by Iran that has wide support in Lebanon’s Shiite south, where it is credited with ending Israeli occupation. Experts say Nasrallah is positioning Hezbollah, which resists all calls to disarm, as the main Shiite political party. Nabih Berri, head of the Amal Party. Berri, a former military man installed by Syria as speaker of the house in 1992, has long been seen as one of Syria’s main collaborators in Lebanon. Critics say he has used his post to enrich himself and implement Assad’s orders, including signing dozens of questionable agreements that have inextricably tied Lebanon’s government and economy to Syria’s. Are there strains in the anti-Syrian opposition?Yes. Some experts say the demands that dominated the movement to push out Syria--disarming militias, changing the election law, controlling national debt, and dealing with corruption--have fallen by the wayside as some political leaders squabble and make electoral deals. Are any slates managing to stay united?Yes, says Richard Murphy, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia. He points to the ticket of Saad Hariri, a 35-year-old Sunni who is a son of the slain former prime minister. Notable Christian politicians have joined Hariri’s slate. These include Solange Gemayel, the widow of former Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, who was killed in a 1982 Beirut bombing. "The most encouraging thing from the sectarian standpoint is that the Sunni and Christian communities stayed together" on that ticket, Murphy says. How are the elections organized?They began May 29 and will take place over four successive Sundays. Voters in different regions of the country will elect all 128 members of parliament. The Beirut district, with 420,000 eligible voters, voted first. The Shiite-dominated south votes on June 5, the Bekaa Valley and Mount Lebanon on June 12, and the north on June 19. What were the results of the first round of voting?Hariri’s Tayyar al-Mustaqbal, or Future Tide, ticket won all 19 seats. Only about 28 percent of eligible voters turned out for the ballot, whose results had been widely predicted. After the Hariri slate was announced, several candidates for parliament--including Lahoud’s son--withdrew from the race, giving nine members of Hariri’s ticket uncontested victories. What are Hariri’s credentials?He is a billionaire and relative newcomer to Lebanese politics. Still, he is widely seen as the front-runner for the prime-minister post. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1992 with a degree in international business, Hariri ran his father’s vast construction company, Saudi Oger. He also has extensive holdings in telecommunications companies across the Middle East and controls a fortune estimated at $1.2 billion. He is married and has two young children. Why was turnout so low in the first round of voting?Many Lebanese are disillusioned that, after the excitement of the Cedar Revolution, many politicians considered Syrian collaborators remain in power. Efforts by some opposition leaders, particularly Jumblatt, to form coalitions with pro-Syrian politicians are also viewed by jaded Lebanese citizens as a sign of business as usual, experts say. "They feel that the fix is in," Murphy says. "The elections will be played out ... but how much will change? It depends on how the new government is put together." Are the elections considered to be free?Lebanon is allowing international election observers to monitor the ballot, a first in Lebanese history. A European Union delegation of about 100 people monitored voter registration, campaigns, and voting on the first day polls were open. The observers will continue their work until the election is complete. Other international observers for the first round of voting included U.N. Envoy Terje Roed-Larsen and U.S. Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del). No international observers have raised objections about the polling thus far. What is Lebanon’s current election law?Under a law drawn up in 2000 under Syrian rule, Lebanon is divided into a complex web of districts and provinces designed to give each of 18 different Muslim and Christian sects a fixed number of seats in parliament. These seats were gerrymandered to elect pro-Syrian politicians and do not reflect current demographic realities. Overall, parliamentary seats are divided equally between Muslims and Christians. This is a consequence of the October 1989 Taif Accords that ended the civil war; before that, the confessional system gave Christians 60 percent of parliament and Muslims 40 percent. While Lebanon has not held a census in more than 70 years, most observers agree that Muslims outnumber Christians among the roughly 4.5 million Lebanese. Some estimates put the country at about 70 percent Muslim--of which about half are Shiite, many are Sunni, and a minority are from the Druze sect of Islam--and roughly 30 percent Christian. How long were Syrian troops in Lebanon?From 1976 to 2005. Full-scale civil war broke out in April 1975 between the Maronite Christian groups of the Lebanese Front and the Lebanese National Movement, which was made up of left-leaning Muslims who wanted a greater share of political power. Fighting was intense, and in June 1976 the Maronite-dominated government asked for support from Syria. Syria had previously mounted several failed diplomatic efforts to stop the war. For then-Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad--the late father of current president Bashar al-Assad--the Lebanese conflict presented a range of possibilities, all of them unappealing: sectarian strife spilling over into Syria, which had its own Christian-Muslim tensions; an Israeli invasion of Lebanon; or the establishment of a radical, left-wing Muslim state, if the Lebanese National Movement won. Assad sent in troops to strengthen the Maronite government, which he calculated he could manipulate, according to Mideast analysts. Assad’s move earned the wrath of the Muslim world, because he backed the Christian side. Still, small contingents of troops from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Sudan later joined the Syrian-dominated Arab Deterrent Force. The war lasted 15 years. What caused the war?Tensions among Lebanon’s Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, and the Druze Muslim sect. Those groups had long jockeyed for power and influence. Under the French occupation, which lasted from the end of World War I until independence in 1943, the confessional system evolved. Under this system, Christians had the upper hand in the national assembly. This arrangement bred resentment among Lebanese Muslims, especially as they grew to outnumber Christians. In the early 1970s, the arrival of Yasir Arafat and thousands of his fellow Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) militants exacerbated Christian-Muslim tensions and swelled the Muslim ranks with thousands of experienced gunmen. Lebanese Muslim groups supported the PLO fighters, recently expelled from Jordan, while Maronite Christian groups worried that PLO raids against Israel would invite retaliation and destabilize Lebanon. Throughout the 1970s, the PLO increasingly used Lebanon as a base from which to attack Israel. Israeli forces invaded in 1978 and 1982; after the second invasion, they remained and occupied a strip of southern Lebanon for nearly 20 years. Egypt, Iraq, and Libya supported Muslim factions in the civil war, while the United States and Israel backed Christian groups. During the long course of the conflict, Syria alternately supported the Christian and Muslim sides. What ended the war?The Taif Accords, an agreement brokered by Arab nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, that gave Lebanese Muslims a greater share of political power in Lebanon and formalized "preferred relations" between Lebanon and Syria. Syria’s internationally recognized role as "the guarantor of Lebanon’s security" was also established in these accords, Jouejati says. What impact did the Taif Accords have on the Syria-Lebanon relationship?Experts say the agreement gave Hafez al-Assad effective control over most of Lebanon in return for a promise to maintain internal stability. The Syrians were supposed to set a timetable for a withdrawal of their troops to the Bekaa Valley, a strategic security zone between Syria and Lebanon, by 1992 or another date negotiated with the Lebanese government. Lebanon’s pro-Syria government, however, did not request a Syria withdrawal until forced to by massive public pressure in February 2005.