Damascus welcomes new report on Hariri killing

The Syrian government welcomed an initial report by UN investigator Serge Brammertz, which found that Damascus had cooperated over the last three months with the inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad noted that the report contained "nothing that is against Syria". The Brammertz report, released on Wednesday, also said the investigation had identified "a significant number of new lines of inquiry" since January. It went on to reveal that agreement had been reached for the commission to meet the Syrian president and vice president "during the upcoming month" – a request that had been denied the commissioner's predecessor, Detlev Mehlis. The new report referred to "a common understanding" that has been reached between Syria and the commission "on operational modalities in such areas such as access to individuals, sites, and information, witness/ suspect interviews, the applicable legal framework, and communications with the Government." According to Mekdad, two earlier reports by Mehlis in 2005 gave "the mass media material to launch a pre-sentence on Syria." Those reports famously concluded that the decision to kill Hariri in February 2005 "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials". "The new report,” said Mekdad in a statement to the state press, “will not give the media the same opportunity." Explaining the relative lack of detail compared with Mehlis' two previous reports, Brammertz wrote: "The Commission, however, does not deem it appropriate, at this stage, to disclose further details of its work as this may unnecessarily threaten the security of witnesses, compromise the collection of further evidence and undermine the outcome of the investigation as a whole." Damascus-based analysts suggested that the agreement allowing the commission to meet President Bashar al-Assad demonstrated a new trust between the government and Brammertz. Since the January appointment of Brammertz to the commission, he has met Syrian foreign ministry officials twice, in both Damascus and Beirut. "It’s a more pragmatic approach. Mehlis acted as if he had the authority to sideline Syria's sovereignty,” said Samir al-Taqi, a political analyst at Damascus' Strategic Studies Centre. "Brammertz assured that he wouldn’t sideline Syria's sovereignty or its judicial system, so the confidence of the regime has grown according to how it perceives the professionalism of the commissioner and his guarantee not to use sensitive information for political aims." Marwan Kabbalan, a professor of international relations at Damascus University, opined that Syria had also drawn confidence from assurances given by other countries – such as Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and France – that "the UN was seeking to uncover the truth behind Hariri's killing, and not just to destabilise Syria”. On 14 March, Foreign Minister Waleed Mualem met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The visit followed an assurance from the Russian Foreign Ministry a day earlier that it did "not see any reason for possible sanctions in the future" against Syria. UN resolution 1636 of October last year threatened Damascus with "further action", which was widely taken to mean international sanctions, unless it complied unconditionally with the commission. In Lebanon, official reactions to the report on Wednesday were muted, with no response from government ministers in the official press. Officials at the Ministry of Interior, meanwhile, were not available for comment. In the first week of March, Lebanese judges met with UN legal officials in New York in order to establish an international tribunal to try those charged with the killing, in line with UN resolution 1644 of last December. Sami Baroudi, a professor of political science at Beirut's Lebanese American University suggested that Brammertz's report constituted a blow to the confidence of the anti-Syrian parliamentary coalition known as the 14 March forces. "There’s still no smoking gun,” said Baroudi. “I don't think the anti-Syrian bloc was counting on this report. People are starting to realise just how difficult it is to tie these sorts of things together."