Wearing a neatly pressed dark gray suit and blue silk tie, Rustom Ghazaleh, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, sat among rows of uniformed Syrian army officers watching without expression a short but colorful ceremony at Rayak military airport in the Bekaa Valley. It was April 26, 2005, and these were the last moments of Syria’s military presence on Lebanese soil after 29 years.
The assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister two months earlier, was widely blamed on Syria and had sparked a momentum through mass street protests in Beirut and international pressure that compelled Damascus to withdraw its forces from Lebanon.
A United Nations investigation into Hariri’s murder was about to begin and many believed that it would lead to indictments against senior Syrian officials, possibly Ghazaleh and even Bashar Assad, the Syrian president. The Syrian regime, it seemed, was in deep trouble. Rumors abounded that Assad was packing his suitcases and that one of his top advisors was exploring job opportunities with the United Nations.
Fast forward to December 2009, and a very different picture emerges. Saad Hariri, son of the slain Rafik and the newly-appointed prime minister of Lebanon, embraces Assad in Damascus, symbolically marking the end of five years of bitterness and tension between the two countries and confirming Syria’s remarkable comeback from the doldrums of 2005.
How the relationship evolves in the months ahead remains to be seen, but already Lebanese politicians, sensing Syria’s restored fortunes, have once more begun treading the well-worn path to Damascus, a ritual act of obeisance toward Lebanon’s powerful neighbor.
Syria’s survival strategy during this period was based on the element of time. President George W. Bush had just begun his second term in office when Hariri was killed and Syria decided to hunker down for the next four years while strengthening its alliance with Iran. After decades of experience, the Syrians understand the Lebanese political milieu very well, and, along with their Lebanese allies, chiefly Hizbullah but also a smattering of individual politicians who gambled on a Syrian comeback, manipulated the situation in Lebanon with consummate skill.
Syria’s involvement in the assassinations and isolated bombings that occurred following Hariri’s murder is unclear, but it created a climate of fear in Lebanon that played to the advantage of Damascus. Hizbullah, of course, had other calculations than merely pleasing the interests of Damascus, but the grinding political crisis that polarized the country helped weaken the US- and Saudi-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. The March 14 coalition of Sunnis, Druze and Christians, which had led the anti-Syria demonstrations of the “Beirut Spring” in 2005, began to fragment.
Everyone knew that the Annapolis summit in November 2007 to help revive Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking was doomed to failure and smacked of insincerity from a Bush administration that had disregarded Arab-Israel peace for seven years. But many March 14 leaders could look no further than the fact that Syria had been invited to the summit and concluded they had been “sold out” by the Bush administration.
Syria’s “bunker” policy began to bear fruit in May 2008 when Hizbullah and its allies briefly seized West Beirut in an armed insurrection that raised the specter of civil war. Qatar, a wily Gulf player and one of Syria’s few friends in the Arab world, hosted a fence-mending conference that brought some welcome stability to Lebanon.
In the wake of that Doha meeting, Assad was feted in Paris by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The Syrians had even side-stepped Washington’s traditional role as Middle East peace broker by relying on Turkey to host a series of indirect talks with Israel, the first in eight years, which only ended with Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip beginning in December 2008. In the aftermath of that war, in early 2009, there was a substantial new development affecting the balance of power in Lebanon, when the Saudis healed their rift with Damascus. This paved the way for Saad Hariri’s groundbreaking visit to Damascus last month.
Walid Jumblatt, the “weathervane” of Lebanese politics who had been an arch critic of Syria since Hariri’s death, began his latest U-turn after the Doha conference. By August 2009 this had resulted in him formally leaving the ranks of March 14 and charting a new centrist position.
Although the Syrian-backed opposition was narrowly defeated in the Lebanese parliamentary polls in June 2009, the March 14 bloc was unable to form a government of its own choosing and was forced, after four months of deadlock, to accept a compromise over the share of Cabinet seats.
In tandem with Syria’s rising fortunes, the mixed international-Lebanese tribunal investigating Hariri’s murder dragged on with little indication that the truth about who had killed the former premier was imminent. The slow pace of the investigation and the lack of details of progress have fostered doubts that the case will ever reach trial.
Given all that has transpired of late, Assad could be forgiven for feeling a little pleased with himself right now. Even Rustom Ghazaleh can perhaps afford a little smile after the humiliation of that military farewell ceremony nearly five years ago: The prosecutor of the Hariri tribunal recently agreed to allow his Lebanese bank account, which was frozen in 2005 on the advice of an earlier UN investigator, to be unfrozen.
Nicholas Blanford is a Beirut-based correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons-international.org, an online newsletter.
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