March 22, 2010 - Now Lebanon - New Opinion: No one is untouchable

Syria mouthpiece Wiam Wahhab (Dalati and Nohra)

Cometh the hour; cometh the man. In this case the hour is a period in which a Syrian regime feels it can turn the screw on what it sees as a wobbly Lebanon, a country stripped of the international cover it enjoyed in 2005 and one with a majority alliance in disarray. The man is pro-Syrian “politician” Wiam Wahhab, whose Faustian pact has ensured that his legacy will forever be associated with doing Damascus’s bidding.

The leader of the largely irrelevant Tawhid Movement and a former journalist, whose unstinting allegiance to Syria was rewarded with a ministerial portfolio in Omar Karami’s short-lived 2004-2005 administration, is once again being deployed as a scatter gun by his masters.

Last week, Wahhab controversially called on Lebanese President Michel Sleiman to resign, while on Sunday he finished off his one-two combination punch by warning that there would be trouble if investigators for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon poked their noses where they shouldn’t by questioning Hezbollah members about the February 14, 2005 bomb blast that killed former prime minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others.

“A problem could take place in the country because the investigating panel will create strife,” Wahhab warned us on al-Jadeed TV over the weekend, advising Prime Minister Saad Hariri to “avoid the trap of the international tribunal.”

Hezbollah said nothing. Why should it when it has Wahhab and his soap box at its disposal? This way the message is sent while the party maintains the dignified silence its supporters would approve of. Only Hezbollah MP Nawaf Moussawi offered, also to al-Jadeed TV, a terse “We don't comment on everything related to the international tribunal.”

And yet March 8 has a proud history of throwing its toys out of its collective pram when it is challenged, most famously on May 7, 2008, when in response to the government decision to dismantle its illegal telephone apparatus and sack senior security personnel at Beirut airport it felt were too close to Syria, Hezbollah, Amal and the SSNP took over West Beirut in a bloody action that was nothing short of an attempted coup.

It was clear that March 8 considered the perpetuity of the Resistance more important than the authority of the state, and the message to the government back then was clear: go after Hezbollah and its infrastructure at your peril.

Now new red lines are being drawn. With Syria back at the table and in the game, it is time to respond to the whispers that were around for years, but which in May 2009 became murmurs with the publication of an article in the German magazine Der Speigel that pointed the finger at Hezbollah involvement in the Hariri killing.

Whether the Der Spiegel story was a political plant or the result of thorough reporting, Hezbollah has not been formally indicted. Nonetheless, its members are by and large Lebanese nationals, patriotically out of the top drawer, so there should be no reason why they should shy away from investigation. It would be unfortunate if the party, once again, cited security reasons for not collaborating with an investigation that seeks answers to a crime that traumatized a nation, and, that if push came to shove, it reacted in the same way it did two years ago by cocking its weapons.

If the message to Saad Hariri is that he should, for the sake of internal stability, not insist the investigators look too deeply into the murky world of Hezbollah, the counter message is equally robust: that the tribunal always has investigators in Beirut, that it is an ongoing inquiry, that there has been no sudden increase in activity, and that the investigation is not an international tool to bring down the Resistance.

In the Lebanon we all strive for, no one is untouchable.