June 4, 2010 - Now Lebanon - Trial and error in Leidschendam

Michael Young, June 4, 2010

Italian Judge Antonio Casesse is trying to convince the public that everything is going well with the Special Tribunal.
When another senior employee of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon resigns, I develop warm feelings for Antonio Cassese. In his annual report earlier this year, the tribunal’s president reassured us that these departures were quite normal. Yet his increasingly strained assertions that the investigative process is going well suggest that what he’s really trying to do is avert a complete breakdown.

Radhia Achouri’s resignation last week as spokesperson for the prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, was odd. Unlike the tribunal’s first registrar, Robin Vincent, and chief investigator Neguib “Nick” Kaldas, Achouri seemed to have a good relationship with Bellemare, and was part of his inner circle. I tried contacting Achouri to ask why she had left, but all I received was an out-of-office emailed response informing me that she would not return to work before February 2013.

It’s useless to speculate why Achouri walked, but there are two similarities between her exit and those of Vincent and Kaldas, as well as of the second registrar, David Tolbert, who departed earlier this year. The first is that in all cases there was no transition period; the resignations were relatively sudden, so that there was a lag between the time the individuals left and replacements found. If nothing else, this implied there was minimal coordination over the resignations.

The worst message an institution can send, particularly one dealing with a sensitive political assassination, is that it is prone to vacuums. And yet that is precisely the impression the Special Tribunal has created on four separate occasions, all in less than a year!

The second similarity between the resignations is that they intimated that leading tribunal officials found no compelling reason to stay on at their post. That may have been because they had received better job offers (as in the cases of Tolbert and Kaldas), or because they didn’t feel that indictments were forthcoming. Or it could have meant that they did not feel the tribunal would advance their career.

Whatever the reason, recall that the Special Tribunal is a revolutionary institution, the outgrowth of the first investigation of a political assassination ever by the United Nations. That so many of its members have jumped ship before indictments are issued hardly conveys that they view the body in such an exalted light.

Which brings us back to Cassese. The president, though a man of experience, has repeatedly blundered in recent months. A few weeks ago he told the Daily Star newspaper that he expected indictments to be issued later this year. Soon thereafter Cassese backtracked, issuing a less affirmative clarification: “What I in fact intended to say was that there are indications the prosecutor might submit an indictment by December 2010. I am sorry that I unwillingly caused this misunderstanding. Let me also add that of course the issuance of an indictment will depend on when the prosecutor determines there is enough evidence to support the submission of an indictment.”

Of course. But that statement of the obvious did not explain why Cassese committed an earlier mistake. In his report on the tribunal’s work, the president went into details of the Hariri assassination, discrediting himself as an objective arbiter over those details. Cassese later retreated, underlining that the information had been supplied by Bellemare, and therefore that he had reached no conclusions himself. However, the report was under his name, and the defense can argue that Cassese thus substantiated his lack of objectivity.

The real problem, however, and perhaps a reason why Achouri decided to call it a day, is that Cassese has too often spoken in the name of the prosecution. His ill-advised comments to the Daily Star, his repeated promises that indictments would be coming – and coming soon – and his transparent efforts to lend momentum to Bellemare’s sluggish work all hint strongly that the tribunal president is anxious.

And anxious he should be. This past Wednesday was the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Samir Kassir. That killing, like the many others that followed in the period 2005 to 2008, is also part of the mandate of the Special Tribunal. United Nations investigators never gave those ancillary killings the time and effort that they did the killing of the former prime minister, but in absolute terms they are just as important. Yet we are evidently no closer today to discovering who was behind all the crimes than we were five years ago.

Cassese knows this. If his surfeit of energy comes from a conviction that Bellemare needs a push, then we must ask what Bellemare needs to be pushed on. Does the prosecutor have enough material to indict, but fears presenting it to the tribunal? Does he not have enough to indict, but is telling Cassese otherwise? And where on earth is the trial process today? Now, we don’t even have Radhia Achouri to feed us the pitiful line that all goes well in the best of all worlds.

Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut. His book, The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle (Simon & Schuster), has just been published.