Silent for too long, the witnesses to evil

The Independent – United Kingdom; Apr 08, 2006
ROBERT FISK
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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’

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress