The Syrian Snake
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
If you lie down with snakes, eventually you are going to be bitten. That is the lesson that can be drawn from the assassination yesterday of a former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, in a car bombing that our sources tell us was executed with Syrian involvement or, at the very least, acquiescence.
News of the assassination brought us back to a press conference held at the National Press Club in Washington on December 17, 1996, where Hariri, then the prime minister of Lebanon, complained about what he called the “very big problem” of Israel’s “occupation” of southern Lebanon. “How much of a problem are the Syrian troops in your country? And would you call for them to withdraw?” a reporter, who has since become managing editor of The New York Sun, asked Hariri. He replied, “the Syrians – they are since long time in Lebanon, over 20 years now. And in the last four years since I came, I can say that they have played a positive role in assuring the security. … The priority for us now is to ask the Israelis to withdraw.”
Pressed further by other reporters, Hariri went on, according to a transcript published by the Federal News Service, “The priority now is for the Israelis to withdraw from the South because there is – you cannot compare the Israeli occupation with the Syrians existing in Lebanon. One is acting as any occupier army. … And the other one, they are friendly, they are helping, they are cooperating, they are more or less a tool in the Lebanese government’s hand to assure the security where they are.”
Cooperating with a country like the Baathist Syrian dictatorship is like cooperating with organized crime. Once a person gets into it, it is very hard to get out of it alive. As Hariri began to exhibit public doubts more recently about Syrian domination of Lebanon – sketched on page 6 in a dispatch by our Pranay Gupte, who was business editor of the Daily Star in Beirut – he seems to have won himself a death sentence from Damascus. If, in the end, Syria is found to have been behind this assassination, it will only underscore just how wrong the prime minister was when he claimed publicly back in 1996, under questioning in Washington, that the Syrians were “friendly” and “have played a positive role.”
