Analysts says Fatah al-Islam “confessions” aimed to bully Syria”s foes in Lebanon
Broadcast designed “to tarnish” Hariri”s image during elections
Syria was trying to bully its antagonists in the March 14 coalition by airing on state television "confessions" of alleged Fatah al-Islam members last week linking the group to March 14″s Future Movement, a number of analysts told The Daily Star on Wednesday.
The suspects said in the broadcast that they had carried out a deadly car bombing in Damascus on September 27 and had received money from the Future Movement of parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri. Hariri, who has denied the allegations, asked Arab League chief Amr Moussa on Tuesday to form a fact-finding commission to look into the charges. Fatah al-Islam militants fought the Lebanese Armed Forces for more than three months last summer at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli.
The accusations leveled in the confessions found little traction among the analysts.
"First of all, confessions on Syrian television impress nobody," said Hilal Khashan, chair of the department of political science and public administration at the American University of Beirut. "These confessions were obtained under duress."
Members of the Hariri family had supported some Sunni Islamist groups in past years as a counterweight to Hizbullah, but they broke off contact with people close to Fatah al-Islam after militants tried to attack the Danish Consulate in Achrafieh in February 2006 in response to a Danish newspaper publishing a caricature of the Prophet Mohammad, Khashan added.
Instead of demonstrating the complicity of Hariri”s Future Movement in terror attacks, the broadcast was more likely designed to tarnish Hariri and put pressure on him and his allies in the March 14 camp, said Paul Salem, head of the Carnegie Middle East Center.
Syria and Lebanon have recently established formal diplomatic relations, and Damascus might also be wielding the confessions as a tool to force Lebanese officials to give ground on the agendas put forth by their Syrian counterparts, said retired General Elias Hanna, who teaches political science at Notre Dame University.
In particular, Syria might be trying to push the Lebanese to sign off on the resurrection of joint security committees, a fixture during the Syrian military”s presence in Lebanon from 1976 until 2005, said Shafik Masri, professor of constitutional law. Lebanese Interior Minister Ziyad Baroud visited Damascus on Monday and agreed there only that Syrian proposals for security cooperation would require Cabinet approval. In any case, airing the confessions represented a clear breach of security and judicial protocol, Masri added.
"It bypassed all the proper channels of any legal process," he said. "Any such case should be communicated between the two states, either between security officers or judicial officers. In principle, any judicial investigation should remain secret."
Syria might also have been looking to weaken Hariri in the hotly anticipated general elections slated for next May here, Khashan said. Syria might see an opening to whittle away Hariri”s traditional electoral base in the North, after frequent unrest there following the Fatah al-Islam episode and Hariri”s uneven performance since assuming his father”s political mantle in 2005, Khashan added.
For Damascus to air claims that Sunni extremists were targeting Syria also demonstrates that any reconciliation between Syria and Saudi Arabia or Saudi allies in Lebanon was "far-fetched," said Oussama Safa, executive director off the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. Relations between Syrian President Bashar Assad and Riyadh froze after the February 2005 assassination of Hariri”s father Rafik, the five-time former prime minister of Lebanon and a close ally of the Saudi leadership.
On the contrary, Syria might have been striving to "lash out" at the Saudis and expose them to an international audience as sponsors of Sunni terrorism, Salem said.
Syria has long sought a closer relationship with the US, and the confessions could serve to show the incoming US administration that Alawite-ruled Syria has, like the US, been the victim of Sunni terrorists, Salem added.
Syria remains in a close alliance with US arch-foe Iran, as well as with Hizbullah and Hamas, but Syria has for some time been inching its way out of diplomatic isolation by the West, Salem said. Syria has established diplomatic relations with Lebanon – which has not seen the political assassination of a March 14 figure since September 2007 – and is in indirect peace talks with Israel. French President Nicolas Sarkozy broke the diplomatic ice in July this year by inviting Assad to Paris for the Mediterranean Union”s founding summit.
The Syrians "are also angling to be seen differently," Salem said. "They certainly want better relations with the US. I”m concerned that Syria and Iran might want to test the new administration – how strong is it?"
Syria is also facing possible political fallout from the UN tribunal investigating Hariri”s killing and a number of other attacks, but analysts differed on whether the confessions were also directed toward the tribunal.
On the one hand, the timing of the broadcast could help distract attention from the latest progress report – expected in a matter of weeks – by the UN investigation commission, Safa said. Later, the Syrians could whip out the confessions to offset any charges about Damascus” culpability in Lebanon violence by saying Lebanese groups – and, in a supreme irony, the Hariri family – were behind terror attacks in Syria, Khashan said. At the very least, Damascus believes that it can negotiate over the tribunal, and the confessions might be a card to play in that bargaining, he added.
"They realize that the tribunal will be formed early in 2009, and they need to have some bargaining position against the tribunal," Khashan said.
On the other hand, Salem said Assad knew the establishment of the tribunal could not be stopped, and while he might in the future have to cut deals to limit the repercussions of the tribunal”s verdicts, the confessions provide little ammunition for any such damage control.
"They know very well that while [the confessions] might be an interesting PR stunt, they”re not going to affect the tribunal in any way," Salem said. "They”re quite aware that they can”t bargain vis-a-vis the tribunal, [but] they can soften the political effects."
The broadcast of the confessions marks a change from the accommodating Syrian behavior during the past six to nine months, a period when Syria refrained from being outspoken on Lebanon and turned a responsible and moderate face toward the West, Salem said. Trotting out the confessions belongs to a previous, heavy-handed model of Syrian behavior toward Lebanon, and it might signal that while Damascus still badly wants engagement with the West, it can be tough with its smaller neighbor, he added.
"It seems to be a departure from the good-behavior pattern that they were very adamantly putting forth – they were gaining a lot of mileage from that," Salem said. "Is Syria sort of baring its teeth a bit more? Does it sense weakness? It”s rather rough politics."