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Assassination brings Lebanon closer
to brink
By Robert Fisk
06/14/07 "The
Independent" -- -- A sign of the times. I arrive
home in Beirut from Paris, am just 20 minutes into my apartment
when the windows of my office blow open with a single "crack". A
tremendous explosion rolls across the Lebanese capital. Out of
the house, 500 metres running down the Corniche and smoke is
billowing from the Staff Sporting Club. Soldiers shouting, cops
trying to keep the first reporters away, but I skulk through the
ruins next to the sea with an old Lebanese photographer friend
and we find ourselves in the wreckage of a tourist ghost train,
all mangled tracks and carriages. "Enter at Your Risk," it says
over the tunnel and on the other side is a burning car
containing the corpse of Lebanon's latest assassination victim.
And not just "any" victim. The man in the smouldering vehicle is
Walid Eido, a Beirut member of parliament, a former judge, much
revered - anti-Syrian, of course, otherwise he would not be
dead, would he? - and a supporter of Saad Hariri, son of the
murdered former prime minister Rafik who was killed in an even
bigger explosion on 14 February 2005, a thousand metres on the
other side of my apartment. What is it about Beirut that turns
this beautiful, sun-blessed city into a crematorium so quickly?
Eido was killed with his son Khaled and I saw their corpses,
roasted, covered in cheap plastic bags so that Lebanon's greedy
photographers could not use their last mortal remains on page
one. Walid Eido's two bodyguards died with them. The "Sporting"
was a hangout for Hariri's men but, as usual, this assassination
must have been well planned, well co-ordinated, paid for way up
front.
And what a knife into the body politic of the Hariri camp.
Hariri's majority party is the reason why the government of
Fouad Siniora survives, supported - heaven help them - by the
Americans, abandoned by the Hizbollah who persuaded six Shia
ministers to resign from the cabinet last year. Could there have
been a more devastating target for the government's enemies last
night?
Walid Eido represented a constituency in Beirut's tough Sunni
Muslim Basta area, a populist politician who had constantly
condemned Syria's "interference" and had more recently turned on
Hizbollah's political action against the government. When the
pro-Syrian militia group, who withstood Israel's devastating
bombardment of Lebanon last summer, pitched their tents across
the centre of Beirut in an attempt to bring down Siniora's
government, it was Eido who referred to this as "occupation".
And what will be the reaction to this latest and most outrageous
of murders? In the aftermath of the bombing, amid the
ghost-train wreckage and the overturned dodgems and the
ash-covered swimming pools, there was only shock. But each
crisis is worse than the previous. Each assassination - of a
communist politician, of a journalist, of a Christian MP - each
outbreak of guerrilla violence - 61 soldiers have now been
killed fighting Fatah al-Islam in the north - quick-marches
Lebanon faster towards the abyss. Over the past few months, the
bombs have gone off close to midnight, an industrial estate
here, a Christian or Muslim shopping mall there, always too late
to cause mass casualties. And that is the point, of course, to
threaten rather than kill. But what if the next bomb goes off at
midday rather than midnight? How many casualties then? This is
the nightmare with which Lebanese live. If, in working-class
Basta tonight, the crowds can be contained (by a largely Shia
Muslim army), what of tomorrow?
It is to the enormous esteem of the Lebanese that they have
refused to embark on another civil war despite every
provocation. But the provocations have not run out. It can get
much, much worse. Next to the dodgems last night lay a burned
registration: 101437. Lebanese detectives duly made note of the
number. But - and I tire of repeating this in my reports - not a
single Lebanese assassination has been solved since 1976.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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