He said the decision was in Lebanon’s interest and would protect the country from the upheavals shaking the region.

“This morning, I transferred Lebanon’s share of funding to the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL),” Mikati said in a surprise announcement on Wednesday.

“I vow to put the stability and safety of Lebanon above any other interest,” he said.

“This does not constitute a victory for one party over another,” the premier told reporters. “This represents a gain for the Lebanese state and institutions.”

“I don’t want to be head of a government that fails to honour its international obligations and pulls the country out of the Arab and international community,” the premier said.

It was unclear whether his decision to transfer the funds had the blessing of his cabinet.

Mikati last week threatened to resign should his government refuse to fund the STL, and the issue was to be discussed on Wednesday at a cabinet meeting that was postponed.

Hezbollah, one bloc in the cabinet, has said it opposes funding the tribunal which it describes as an Israeli tool aimed at targeting the resistance movement. It has enough votes with its ministerial allies to block any decision by the cabinet.

Michel Aoun, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, the single largest bloc in cabinet, has called the STL a violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty.

Addressing his party members on Tuesday, Aoun said: “Everybody knows the STL is unlawful and we will leave this issue up for cabinet to resolve.”

Collapsed government

Mikati came to power in January after the government of Hariri’s son, Saad, collapsed in a dispute over the STL. The opposition at the time, known as the March 8 coalition, wanted Lebanon to cut all links with it, while the government at the time, known as the March 14 coaltion, refused.

In July 2011, the STL indicted four Hezbollah members over the 2005 bombing that killed Rafik Hariri and 21 other people on the Beirut seafront. Hezbollah strongly denied any role in the killing.

Mikati has always said his government would honour Lebanon’s international commitments. The court has asked Lebanon to pay more than $30m this year, or 49 per cent of its 2011 budget.

Aljazeera

Beirut – “What a joke,” I heard someone snort at a nearby table. “As if Lebanon were truly independent…”

My favorite café is not usually so crowded on a Tuesday morning, but it’s Independence Day in Lebanon, a fact greeted lately with more irony than patriotism. In a country with 18 officially recognized religious sects, Nov. 22 is but one of a slew of other public holidays and religious celebrations that dot the yearly calendar: Orthodox Armenian New Year, the Feast of St. Maron, Eid al-Fitr, Ashura, the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Christmas and Easter — the list goes on.

And then there’s the unofficial catalogue of political observances that recognizes darker dates in Lebanon’s history, like Feb. 14, 2005, which many Lebanese recall with the same vividness that Americans of a certain generation remember the Kennedy assassination.

I was half a world away on that day, interviewing to get into graduate school, when the call came. “They’ve killed Hariri,” I heard my mother say.

The explosion that shook Beirut that afternoon left a swimming pool-sized crater in the ground and a gaping void in Lebanon’s political arena. The assassination of Rafik Hariri, a billionaire and former prime minister, triggered a surge of popular anger and united the country in a sustained moment of shock and disbelief.

A family member who thought little of Hariri and his policies found himself in tears when he heard the news. Relatives who had never paid attention to politics were suddenly consumed by it. In the following weeks, hundreds of thousands would take to the streets, accusing Syria’s government – which had long controlled Lebanese politics – of committing the crime, and demanding the withdrawal of its troops, which had been stationed in Lebanon for decades.

Meanwhile, the United Nations at the behest of America and France started a major investigation, eventually establishing an international court to prosecute Hariri’s killers.

The U.N.’s action struck me at the time as a landmark event, even more extraordinary than the withdrawal of the Syrian Army. It augured a kind of epistemological rupture, not just a break with the recent political past. Suddenly, ordinary citizens had the right to know the names of their assassins and terrorizers, rather than speculating emptily about obscure conspiracies. For many Lebanese with no recollection of the country’s colonial past, these events felt like a renewed independence.

Six years later, after millions of dollars and thousands of man hours, the U.N. Special Tribunal for Lebanon is finally prepared to begin its proceedings.

There’s just one problem: the accused are nowhere to be found.

The four individuals indicted by the tribunal earlier this year are said to be members of Hezbollah, the Shiite political movement that holds a prominent position in the current government of Lebanon and has dismissed the court as an Israeli conspiracy. Since arrest warrants were issued, the Lebanese police have predictably failed to find the men, aware that any attempt to arrest them would lead to a major political crisis and a confrontation with Hezbollah.

It seems increasingly likely, then, that the U.N. prosecutors will resort to trying the men in absentia, the first such case at an international court since Nuremberg. However, even if the phantoms are proven guilty, many Lebanese will be left wondering whether the mountains of investigative work amounted to a molehill of a conviction. As a veteran Lebanese journalist put it to me recently, “The public belief that the tribunal will uncover all or even most aspects of the crime has been lost.”

This pessimistic mood stands in contrast to the high-spirited early days of the investigation, when four Lebanese Army generals were taken into custody and European forensics experts combed the crime scene and interrogated the intelligence chiefs. Witnesses came forward with evidence of collusion by senior figures in the Syrian government. The era of unsolved political crimes seemed to be drawing to a close.

As time passed, however, the picture became cloudier. The generals were released due to lack of evidence. The star witnesses recanted their stories. The investigating commission began leaking like a sieve. Meanwhile, many Lebanese began to regard the tribunal as a gimmick.

Could it have been any different? Was the tribunal doomed from the start to fall victim to the forces of foreign intervention and local demagoguery? And was there ever a true opportunity for Lebanon to emerge stronger from the Hariri debacle, or did the crime simply exemplify the country’s fatal flaws?

Whatever the case may be, there can be no doubt that the tribunal’s significance has been steadily diminished, and that Feb. 14, the date of Hariri’s murder, has become just another partisan commemoration, like most of Lebanon’s other unofficial holidays. As for Nov. 22, who can blame the Lebanese for being cynical on their Independence Day?

Elias Muhanna is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Program on Arab Reform & Democracy. He writes about Lebanese political affairs on the blog Qifa Nabki.

NYT

‘We expect Lebanon to completely implement its international commitments because the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) was established upon Lebanon’s request,’ Feltman told broadcaster Al Arabiya.

By the end of 2011, Lebanon should pay the court an annual share of about 33 million dollars or 49 per cent of the court’s budget. But ministers loyal to the Hezbollah-led coalition in the government have rejecting funding the STL.

Four Hezbollah members have been indicted by the United Nations-backed court in the Hariri assassination. The Shiite movement has denied all charges and said none of its members will appear in a court serving ‘the interests of the US and Israel.’

Hariri was killed in a bomb blast in 2005 with 21 others. The attack, which was widely blamed on Syria and its allies in Lebanon, eventually pushed Damascus to end its 30-year military presence in Lebanon.

STL was created in 2007 by a UN Security Council resolution to find and try the killers of Hariri, who was assassinated in a massive car bombing on the Beirut seafront on February 14, 2005 that also killed 22 other people.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon is reportedly poised to indict Hezbollah members in the Hariri murder.

The Iranian and Syrian backed Hezbollah brought down PM Saad Hariri’s government on January 12 over the STL’s imminent indictment .

There is one, very effective way that the Lebanese government can thwart attempts by Hizbollah, Iran’s favourite Islamic fundamentalist militia, to seize control of the country and that is to publish the findings of the U.N. sponsored tribunal into the murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 2005.

According to the widely-leaked findings of the tribunal’s findings, Lebanese investigators have identified 20 mobile phones used in the planning of the attack and traced them all to senior Hizbollah officials who were working for the militia’s “special operational unit.”

If this is true, then Hizbollah’s claim to be a legitimate political party, rather than the terrorist group it is deemed to be in the West, would be exposed as a sham. This is the reason, of course, that Hizbollah brought down the government of Saad Hariri, the murdered prime minister’s son whose coalition government was on the point of publishing the tribunal’s findings.

But it is very much in the West’s interests to stop Hizbollah’s attempted coup d’etat. Hizbollah, which is armed and funded by Iran, has already provoked one war with Israel when it attacked its northern border in the summer of 2006. And there is every likelihood that Hizbollah will do the same once it has full control of the Lebanese government, only this time it will be able to call upon the thousands of new Iranian rockets and missiles that have been smuggled into southern Lebanon through Syria.

A fresh war between Israel and Lebanon is the last thing we need at a time when the main focus of our efforts it to maintain peace and stability in the Middle East. A good way to avoid another round of hostilities would be to publish the U.N.’s findings and bring all of those responsible for Hariri’s murder to justice.

*Con Coughlin, the Telegraph’s executive foreign editor, is a world-renowned expert on the Middle East and Islamic terrorism. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books. His new book, Khomeini’s Ghost, is published by Macmillan.

telegraph.uk

Source: Reuters
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Update : Prime Minister Saad Hariri arrived in Damascus minutes after 3 PM for official talks with Syrian President Bashar Assad . He was accompanied only by his adviser Nader Hariri only . He will be meeting with president Assad at 4 Pm . President Assad is expected to host a state dinner in Hariri’s honor at 6 pm according to LBC
Update : Two planes carrying the media delegation that will accompany Prime Minister Saad Hariri during his first visit to Syria landed at Damascus airport.