Robert Fisk: Despite floods of soldiers, assassinations still continue. No one is safe in Lebanon

Published: 13 December 2005

No one is safe. The bits of bodies on the road, the blood - how dark it becomes an hour after it has lain upon the tarmac - and the incinerated cars, the broken railings through which Jibran Tueni's car was hurled into a pine-clustered ravine by the bomb; this is now the nature of Lebanon's war. Tueni was the editor of An Nahar - Lebanon's most prestigious newspaper - and a prominent MP, the son of a former Lebanese ambassador to the UN who received the Legion d'Honneur in Paris only last week. And Tueni, is pulverised, blown - as we used to say at school - to smithereens, only hours before the UN's investigation, headed by Detlev Mehlis, into ex-premier Rafiq Hariri's murder is expected to lay blame at Syria's door. And Tueni is an enemy of Syria. Only days ago, he demanded that Syria be taken to the international court at The Hague for executing Lebanese soldiers 15 years ago.

Ah yes, how many times must we be told that these Lebanese assassinations are not to Syria's benefit? The "moamara", the "plot", means that the Israelis killed Tueni to embarrass the Syrians, that the Americans wanted to get rid of so free-thinking a Lebanese (Greek Orthodox, as every Lebanese - who knows his sectarian dictionary - knows) now that the Syrian army has left. No, perhaps it was not President Bashar Assad of Syria, but what about the Baath party intelligence which most Lebanese suspect murdered Hariri on 14 February this year?

Article Length: 904 words (approx.)