Syrian treachery

Syrian treachery - The Boston Globe: "DICTATORSHIPS CAN'T HAVE whistleblowers, they can only have traitors. So it is fitting that Syria's Ba'ath Party has denounced as treasonous former Syrian vice president Abdel-Halim Khaddam for giving an interview Friday on Arab television in which he confirmed that Syrian President Bashar Assad harshly threatened former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri months before Hariri was blown up by a powerful car bomb. Expelling Khaddam the day after the interview, his former Ba'ath Party colleagues excoriated him as a ''traitor to the party, the homeland, and the Arab nation."

If ever there was a Syrian insider positioned to know who bears ultimate responsibility for Hariri's murder, it is Khaddam. For more than two decades, he was the number two man in Damascus, a chief adviser to Bashar's father, Hafez Assad, and an architect of Syria's unacknowledged, lucrative, and strategically shrewd colonization of Lebanon.

Khaddam said he heard about Bashar's threatening Hariri from Bashar himself and from other top Syrian bosses.

The exiled Ba'athist grandee, who left Syria with a great fortune, also made it plain that Syrian security services could not have taken the decision to kill Hariri without the knowledge and approval of Bashar, since the Syrian president rules as ''an absolute authoritarian."

Commendably, the United Nations commission investigating the Hariri assassination followed up the Khaddam disclosures by asking to interview Bashar and his foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, whom UN investigators accused of lying to them in a preliminary report issued last month.
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Syrian spokesmen indicated that the president would not make himself available to the UN. But the investigators also want to speak to Khaddam, who tantalizingly told the Arab TV channel Al-Arabiya: ''I have many things to say, serious things, when the time is right."

Khaddam's public remarks -- which have so angered the current beneficiaries of the regime in Damascus -- appear to be aimed not merely at incriminating the masterminds of the Hariri killing but at undermining Bashar and a gangster-like inner circle that includes the president's brother, Maher, and a brother-in-law who heads Syrian military intelligence. Khaddam was openly accusing Bashar and his inner circle of something that he seems to regard as worse than political assassination, corruption, or the looting of Lebanon: a skein of repeated blunders that has imperiled the regime's survival.

This is Khaddam's real treason. His former collaborators understand that he has launched a move to replace Bashar and his family with another set of Ba'athist rulers."
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.