Hizbullah will continue to cooperate with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, but only on its own terms, writes Omayma Abdel-Latif in Beirut Shortly after Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah finished his long-awaited interview with Al-Manar TV on 31 March, the Lebanese resistance movement's website posted a question for voting. "In the light of Nasrallah's remarks about the summoning of members of Hizbullah by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon [STL], do you think that the tribunal has been politicised?" The results were clear, if hardly surprising. Of the 1,833 people voting, 94.1 per cent said yes, while 4.1 per cent said no and 1.8 were don't knows. The results reflect the conviction of a significant constituency in Lebanon that the tribunal set up by a UN Security Council Resolution in 2007 in order to investigate the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri and to bring the perpetrators to trial has become politicised. Nasrallah's interview confirmed press leaks about summons issued by the STL to members of Hizbullah or other figures close to the resistance movement. Nasrallah disclosed that the office of the STL prosecutor had summoned 12 individuals, either members of Hizbullah or figures close to it, to give testimony. Nasrallah stressed that members of Hizbullah had been summoned as "witnesses" rather than as "suspects". "Representatives of the prosecutor's office guaranteed that all those summoned were called as witnesses and not suspects," Nasrallah said, in comments that seek to pre-empt any attempt to implicate Hizbullah in the killing of Al-Hariri. According to Nasrallah, an attempt of this sort had been made in an article published in the French rightwing daily Le Figaro in August 2006, which pointed the finger at members of Hizbullah being involved in Al-Hariri's killing. This accusation, later picked up by the German magazine Der Spiegel and the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Sayessah, caused uproar in Lebanon. When the Der Spiegel article came out in May 2009, Nasrallah warned of a plot to push Lebanon towards sectarian conflict. Hizbullah officials and Lebanese opposition figures including Christian leader Michel Aoun, head of the Free Patriotic Movement, have long expressed doubts about the credibility of the STL. Media leaks, often from STL employees and having a clear political bias, are said to have undermined the work of the tribunal, and some have suggested that in order for the investigation to regain trust it needs to halt all such leaks. Nasrallah said Hizbullah would continue to cooperate with the investigation, but he was critical of its work. "Any investigation should be committed to confidentiality," something which Nasrallah said had not been the case. However, he also criticised the tribunal for what he said had been its "adoption of only one scenario, while dismissing many others, which proves its lack of professionalism. All such matters make us doubt the honesty and credibility of the investigations." Hizbullah's decision to cooperate with the STL investigation was not a recent one, and from statements made by Nasrallah it seems that the organisation decided to cooperate in 2005 following Al-Hariri's assassination. However, the first time that any members of Hizbullah were summoned to give evidence was in late 2008 when political and sectarian polarisation in Lebanon was reaching its peak. Further members of Hizbullah were summoned in 2009, and further summons are expected in April. According to Nasrallah, Hizbullah's cooperation with the tribunal stems not from its trust in the court's work, but rather from a desire to "challenge a misleading investigation". Nasrallah said that Hizbullah would only continue its cooperation if all leaks to the media stopped. He called on STL Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare to take responsibility for stopping media leaks and urged him to be "vigilant" in this regard. While Nasrallah did not disclose the names of the Hizbullah members who have been summoned, Al-Jadid TV, a Lebanese station, disclosed on 27 March in its widely watched evening news programme that prominent media personalities had been summoned to appear. These included Al-Manar TV presenter Emad Marmal, who interviewed Al-Hariri a couple of weeks before his assassination, and Talal Salman, the publisher and editor of the daily newspaper Al-Safir. Nasrallah did not elaborate on the kind of questions Hizbullah members had been asked by the tribunal, saying that he was concerned to honour the confidentiality of the investigation. His appearance on Al-Manar was the first time that Nasrallah has spoken about "meetings held between a Hizbullah delegation and the prosecutor-general's office to address concerns regarding the direction of the investigation." Immediately after Al-Hariri's assassination, the then Lebanese parliamentary majority, headed by Saad Al-Hariri, pointed the finger at Syria, accusing it of plotting the killing. Syria denied any involvement, and the subsequent investigation has not found any evidence to implicate it, though a series of investigative blunders, including testimonies from false witnesses, has inflicted severe damage on the investigation. Hizbullah in particular, and the Lebanese opposition in general, have made no secret of their concerns about the investigation, which according to press leaks is heading in the direction of implicating Hizbullah, or individuals from Hizbullah, in Al-Hariri's assassination. Nasrallah said that any accusation directed against an individual member of the organisation would be considered as an accusation made against Hizbullah as a whole.
