Serving 2 masters is a dangerous Game
Nasrallah Runs from Rat Hole to Rat Hole!
Hizbullah makes an Eleventh Hour Decision,
After PM Nasrallah makes a Quick Trip to Syria,
Calling Off His Plan to Siege Beirut U.N. Buildings!
Nasrallah Has to Please Both the Syrians & Iranians!
Many local assassin ation
s let him think ‘I could be Next’!
January 21, 2010
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt 1 from DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
Hizballah’s eleventh-hour pullback from siege of UN sites and troops
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
January 21, 2011, 6:40 PM (GMT+02:00)
With minutes to spare, Wednesday night, Jan. 19, Hizballah called off its plan to hold to siege UN buildings in Beirut and their staff of 1,000, as a show of strength in the face of the threatened UN Hariri
tribunal’s indictment of its high officials for the Hariri assassination six years ago. DEBKAfile’s military sources report.
The sites targeted were the offices of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia which Hizballah militiamen were ordered to seal against ingress and egress, while its armed units were to encircle and pin down UNIFIL patrols in South Lebanon and cut off isolated UN outposts and lookout posts.
Hizballah also planned to besiege the offices of the UN’s Special Lebanon Emissary Michael Williams, UNWRA which deals with Palestinian refugees and various UNIFIL contact offices in Beirut.
This desperate action was planned to blackmail UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon into discussing the reassessment of the STL’s indictment of Hizballah’s security and intelligence chiefs for the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
According to our sources, at 1800 hours Lebanese time, as Hizballah forces were about to set out on their missions, they received an order from their leader, Hassan Nasrallah to hold their horses for now. He offered no explanation for the postponement but, according to some sources, he was deterred by being informed of consequences of this act. Ban would have asked the Lebanese government to send troops to relieve
the Hizballah siege on UN institutions, failing which he would have called on the UN Security Council to send armed units to Beirut to rescue the beleaguered UN staffers.
This step might well have ended in US, French and German marines lifting of the warships opposite Lebanese shores and landing in Beirut.
A day earlier, on Tuesday, militiamen of the Shiite Hizballah and Amal movements, unarmed and clad in black uniforms, took up positions in seven quarters of the capital, to prove the Shiites capable of capturing Beirut. They were withdrawn that night after making the point.
That was the Lebanese Shiites’ concerted response to the gauntlet thrown down Monday by the Special Lebanon Court probing the 2005 Hariri murder, as reported earlier by DEBKAfile.
The Special Lebanon Court registrar Herman von Hebel announced Tuesday, Jan. 18 that if things go well, “we may see the start of the trial toward September or October … with or without an accused.” A day earlier, the STL prosecutor Daniel Bellemare submitted his draft indictment to the pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen in The Hague, thereby establishing three facts in the case of the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
1. An approximate date has been set for the trial to begin, irrespective of the extreme upsets in Lebanon over the case.
2. The prosecution file includes names of accused individuals, members of Hizballah, who will be summoned to appear before the UN court. Bellemare stated in a video clip Tuesday that the accused he cited are presumed innocent even after they are confirmed by the judge – until the prosecution proves their guilt beyond reasonable doubt in court.
3. Any of the accused defying the court summons will be tried in absentia as DEBKAfile reportedly exclusively first in its weekly edition on Dec. 24, 2010 and again in daily DEBKAfile on Jan.
13.
The registrar also stated Tuesday: “The pretrial judge is very keen to move the process forward as fast as possible.”
This means that Fransen will make an effort to hand down his decision on the indictments within 6-10 weeks, much earlier than the several months originally reported, according to DEBKAfile’s sources. The court realizes that the longer the court process, the deeper Lebanon will sink into crisis.
Von Hebel also referred to the joint effort Syrian president Bashar Assad, Turkish premier Recep Erdogan and the Qatari emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani were making in Beirut for a compromise that would free the Lebanese government of its commitment to honor the international tribunal’s warrants and contribute to its funding. The registrar said: “We know for sure it is not easy to get accused persons arrested.
The problem with international tribunals is that they do not have a police force. We are dependent on the cooperation of states.”
He then remarked: “The tribunal’s budget is $65.7 million for 2011 should not be affected by the collapse of the Lebanese government which is obliged to pay 49 percent. The obligation is for the state, not a government.”
That comment is the key to the dispute – both over the tribunal’s funding and its legitimacy which Hizballah challenges by refusing to hand over its officials for trial.
Von Hebel, the tribunal’s registrar. made it clear that the Lebanese state, not its government, will be held accountable for upholding the UN court’s decrees. In other words, the effort engineered from Tehran and Damascus to replace the Hariri government with an alternative will not get Hizballah off the hook. Indeed any administration in Beirut that defies the court lays Lebanon open to a complaint to the UN Security Council by the UN tribunal’s judges and a demand for sanctions pending compliance.
Begin Excerpt 2 from the Lebanon Daily Star via World News
Is Hezbollah’s eye mainly on Syria
?
By Michael Young
Commentary
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Two questions are essential in approaching the events of the past week in Lebanon. The first is, Can Syria can accept a Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut? The second, Why did Damascus push its political allies to bring down the government of Saad Hariri before ensuring beforehand that Walid Jumblatt and his bloc would decide against naming Hariri as prime minister?
The answer to the first question is, bluntly, no. Syria cannot any more accept formal Hezbollah hegemony over Lebanon than it could a Lebanon ruled by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1976, when it intervened militarily to prevent such an outcome. The reasons are obvious.
A Hezbollah-led government would substantially heighten the prospect of war between Lebanon and Israel, leading to an Israeli intervention that could drag Syria into a conflict not of its choosing.
Another reason, equally compelling as far as Syria’s President Bashar Assad is concerned, is that ceding to Hezbollah the power of governance in Lebanon would mean effectively surrendering the country to Iran. Instead, Assad wants Lebanon to be surrendered to Syria. That is why Damascus has sought to exploit the discord over the government to do the only thing it can do to enhance its influence over Lebanese affairs: play Hezbollah off against Hariri.
This leads us to the second question. In fact, it answers it. The Syrians never had any illusions that Jumblatt would abandon Hariri.
For the Druze leader, that would have been political suicide. Jumblatt’s power of financial patronage comes mainly through Saudi Arabia; several of his parliamentarians are elected in Sunni-majority districts; and around 30 percent of the electorate in the Shouf is Sunni.
Jumblatt never wanted to abandon Hariri, and Assad didn’t make him do so. If I were a Hezbollah member, that would worry me.
And it may well have, because the party’s threat of escalating actions in the street may, partly, be understood best as one facet of a complicated minuet between Syria and Hezbollah. This could be Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah’s way of saying that enough room was given to the Syrians and Saudis, to no avail. Now Hezbollah will try something different. Which still doesn’t answer why Syria compelled its allies to take a far-reaching decision leading nowhere, that has bought more time for Daniel Fransen, the pretrial judge of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, to confirm prosecutor Daniel Bellemare’s indictment.
One explanation is that Syria had no other choice.
For Assad, the Syrian-Saudi dialogue was always a cover for Syria’s political comeback to Lebanon. Iran and Hezbollah sanctioned it because they could not avoid doing so, but on the assumption that it would ultimately compel Saad Hariri to break off Lebanon’s ties with the Special Tribunal. Assad was more flexible. The Syrian leader grasped that if Hariri went that far, he would be politically weakened and unable to stand up to Hezbollah, therefore of no use to Syria in its game of manipulating Lebanese contradictions. So the Syrians showed a double face, urging the Lebanese government to undermine the tribunal but otherwise doing nothing to impose this
When the Obama administration blocked a Syrian-Saudi deal that would cripple the tribunal, Assad found himself in a tight spot. Without a Syrian-Saudi mechanism, how would Damascus maneuver in Lebanon? Iran and Hezbollah were seeking to pursue a more aggressive path, and the Syrians were at risk of losing the political initiative to them. So Assad hoped to avert this by toppling the government, leading to deadlock, in that way keeping the keys of a solution in his own hands. Expecting Saudi Arabia to withdraw from Lebanese affairs, which it did yesterday, Assad sought to use the summit with Qatar and Turkey to maintain the upper hand in any settlement over a new government. While the Syrian-Saudi label may still be employed, the reality is that Assad is on his own, in search of an elusive Qatari and Turkish fig leaf to press his advantage. The Saudis, in turn, are said to be far less enthusiastic about the Syrians than they were.
Assad sees opportunities ahead.
Unless Hezbollah steps in to prevent it, Saad Hariri will be asked to form a new government next week. The Syrians will not oppose this, their major incentive being that Hariri’s return will mean heightened tension between him and Hezbollah, which Damascus will exploit in its own favor. Hezbollah’s pressure on Hariri will ultimately play into Syria’s hands, until the moment when the Special Tribunal’s indictment is confirmed and Assad will contrive to step in and broker a settlement allowing him to seize a large share of the Lebanese pie. Ironically, the organization that today holds the largest share of that pie, the portion Syria covets most, namely leadership of the main security and intelligence services, is Hezbollah.
Hezbollah may escalate its actions, but this will only complicate matters.
Making Lebanon ungovernable will not sway the Special Tribunal. And against whom will destabilization be directed
? There is no government. If Hariri is tasked with forming one, Hezbollah will use instability to curtail the prime minister-designate’s ambitions. The downside is that this may delay the cabinet’s formation, giving Fransen ample time to approve the indictment.
Hezbollah is in a bind. There is no reason to celebrate, however, because Lebanon as a whole will pay a heavy price. But that won’t affect what goes on in The Hague. Which is why Hezbollah should seriously consider looking for a negotiated way out of its impasse.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR and author of “The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle” (Simon & Schuster)
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