SILENT FOR TOO LONG, THE WITNESSES TO EVIL
Robert Fisk
The Independent – United Kingdom
Apr 08, 2006
A quote from the cops. I was in Oslo when I received the SMS on my
Lebanese mobile phone from the country’s Internal Security Forces,
Lebanon’s paramilitary ISF. “Dear citizen,” it began – and I have
to admit, I liked the assumption of Lebanese citizenship. “Starting
March 15th, the Internal Security Forces will be dealing strictly
with traffic contraventions. Be co-operative for your safety. The ISF.”
Now I’m sure the “for your safety” bit was just a figure of speech’
I would be safer in my car if I wore my seatbelt, wouldn’t I? Was that
why my driver Abed met me at Beirut airport strapped into his seatbelt
for the first time? Or was there a threat? That in order to be “safe”
I should be “‘co-operative”?
All the same, I like cops. They know what we journalists want to know
(along, I suppose, with criminals whose own mentality, I suspect,
has a lot in common with policemen and reporters). But in Lebanon
these past few days, we’ve been learning quite a lot about what the
cops know – or knew – about the past: like who killed the Lebanese
Druze leader Kemal Jumblatt.
Jumblatt Senior – as opposed to his mercifully still living son Walid
who is under constant threat of Syrian assassination – was murdered
on 16 March 1977, shot dead in his car as he drove near his home in
the Chouf mountains. We all suspected at the time that the Syrians
were involved’ Kemal had turned down an invitation to visit the
late President Hafez el-Assad of Syria in Damascus to discuss the
Lebanese civil war – the equivalent at that time, of refusing Henry
VIII a divorce.
But now along comes my old friend General Issam Abu Zaki, former
head of the Lebanese judicial police, to spill the beans. For General
Abu Zaki – a man so generous he once gave away his much-loved worry
beads because a female friend of mine was rash enough to admire them –
turns out to have been the cop in charge of the Jumblatt murder case.
In 1977, an American car containing drugs had been discovered at
Beirut port, the general has revealed in the Beirut daily AnNahar
newspaper. But outside the gates of the port, the vehicle was stopped
at a Syrian military checkpoint. The Lebanese judicial police later
confirmed that a Syrian intelligence officer based in the Beirut
suburb of Sin el-Fil – a major in rank – stated in writing that he
was in possession of the car.
“A short time later,” Abu Zaki writes, “the car made an appearance in
the Chouf, lying in wait for Kemal Jumblatt as he headed … to attend
a party political meeting. As Jumblatt’s car passed the American car,
the latter pulled out and tailed the Druze leader’s vehicle. The
pursuing car had four people in it, two in civilian clothes, the
other two in military uniforms. Upon leaving the town of Baaqleen,
the suspect American vehicle intercepted Jumblatt’s car.
“Kemal Jumblatt’s bodyguards were bundled into the American vehicle,
and two of the pursuers replaced them… the two cars had barely
travelled 900 metres when something happened that evidently took the
abductors by surprise, for they braked suddenly, as evidenced by the
tyre skid marks on the road left by Jumblatt’ s car. The sudden stop
led to the American car crashing into the back of Jumblatt’ s car. At
this moment the heinous crime took place.”
Jumblatt was murdered with a shot in the head – his brains splashed
over the morning news-paperhehadbeen reading when he was ambushed –
and the killers made their escape. From the knives found in Jumblatt’s
car, Abu Zaki and his cops suspected the attackers intended to take
the Druze leader to a neighbouring Christian village where they
would have cut his throat and thus provoked further atrocities in
Lebanon’s already two-year-old civil war. But Jumblatt struggled with
the Syrians who were forced to shoot him on the spot.
Or so Abu Zaki surmises. Jumblatt’s son Walid told me this week he
believes this story to be true – just as did a Beirut flower seller
called Abu Talib who reported to Abu Zaki back in 1977 that the Syrian
killers had later stopped at a Hamra Street hotel in the city.
So too, apparently, did the Lebanese judicial investigative judge,
Hassan Qawass, who survived an abduction attempt and a missile attack
on his Beirut home when he refused to drop the case. Alas, a “highly
placed legal authority” in Lebanon was later suborned to close the
Jumblatt file.
But now we know a little more about that 1977 murder and so Abu Zaki
wonders whether we will also know the truth about the assassination
last year of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri whose death
is being investigated, in ever more lacklustre a fashion, it seems,
by the UN. Yet it raises other, bigger questions.
Why, for example, don’t cops and diplomats and statesmen come out
with the facts at the time? Why do they wait till their retirement
to blurt out the truth? Why did we only know the truth from the top
about Vietnam after Robert McNamara had become a Grand Old Man of
Letters? Why did we have to wait for decades to know that General
Sir Douglas Haig lied in 1916? Why do we have to wait until 2006 to
learn that we tortured Germans in 1946?
Well, just look at what has happened to John Evans, the US ambassador
to Armenia who – while in office – told the truth about the Armenian
holocaust, the genocide by the Ottoman Turks which killed one and
a half million Armenian Christians in 1915. Before he was elected
president, George W Bush promised the Armenians of America that he
would acknowledge this genocide. Once in office, however, he caved in,
gutlessly calling it a “tragedy” so that he wouldn’t get his fingers
burned by that wonderful democratic Nato ally – and would-be EU member
– called Turkey.
But there was Ambassador Evans on 19 February this year telling
Armenians in the Bay area of San Francisco that “as someone who has
studied it, there’s no doubt in my mind what happened. I think it is
unbecoming of us, as Americans, to play word games here. I believe
in calling things by their name. I will today call it the Armenian
genocide”.
The luckless but over-truthful ambassador has since been constrained by
the State Department to remark that “although I told my audience that
United States policy on the Armenian tragedy (sic) has not changed,
I used the term ‘genocide’, speaking in what I characterised as my
personal capacity”.
Phew! But I think I get it. If you want to spill the beans while in
office, you have to tell the truth only in “a personal capacity”. The
mass rape and slaughter of tens of thousands of Armenian girls in
1915 can only be acknowledged in a “personal capacity”. The mass
murder of Turkish Armenia’s manhood in 1915 can only be conceded in a
“personal capacity”. And even then you are liable to get fired.
Well, I have a little nudge of the arm to make here. In October,
I shall be lecturing in Turkey on the Armenian genocide. I shall be
doing so as Middle East correspondent of The Independent as well as
author of a book whose Turkish edition will carry a whole chapter on
the Armenian holocaust. I don’t have to talk in a “personal capacity”
although I might like to have General Abu Zaki at my side. For what
the Lebanese ISF would no doubt call my “safety”.
If you want to spill the beans while in office, you have to do it in
‘a personal capacity’.