8. The Indictment

In 2009, the United Nations team decided that it couldn’t make any more progress inside Lebanon. It packed all of the evidence, including the burned remains of six vehicles, onto cargo planes and flew it to the Netherlands. The Security Council established the tribunal, and the investigation team was absorbed into the tribunal’s prosecution team.

Hezbollah remained intransigent. On Jan. 12, 2011, Hezbollah demanded that Saad Hariri, Rafik’s son and the prime minister of Lebanon at the time, rebuff the tribunal’s efforts. When he refused to hold an emergency cabinet meeting, Hezbollah’s ministers withdrew from the cabinet and the government collapsed. Lebanon was back on the brink of civil war, and experts were predicting that if indictments were issued, Hezbollah would not hold back. Several Arab leaders flew into Beirut to calm the situation. It helped, at least for the time being.

Later that month, the lead prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, filed an indictment but did not disclose the names of the accused. In June, he released four names. (Merhi would be indicted in 2013.) As the indictments were being finalized, the U.N. team sent arrest warrants to the Lebanese government. Interpol issued “Red Notice” warrants at the same time. It came as no surprise when the Lebanese authorities reported that they could not capture the suspects. Tribunal personnel criticize — sharply in off-­the-­record interviews and diplomatically in official documents — the government’s inability to control Hezbollah. (You can sympathize with the actual politicians charged with bringing such an organization to heel, though. Early this month, I saw the current prime minister of Lebanon, Tammam Salam, at a security conference in Munich. He told me that the work of the Hariri tribunal was “important and serious” and that his government was following it closely, but he also declined to say anything more specific.)

According to information obtained by the tribunal, sometime in 2009, when Hezbollah learned of the mounting evidence against its operatives, Hussein Mahadawi, the chief representative of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, instructed them to lower their profiles and try even harder to vanish. The only one who didn’t comply was Badreddine, who refused to give up his luxurious lifestyle and went on using his Sami Issa identity.

For all the seeming absurdity of a murder trial in absentia, the investigation and trial have succeeded in causing substantial damage to Hezbollah. The identities of some of its leading operatives have been exposed, and those men will need to continue taking extra measures to remain in hiding. Tribunal personnel are convinced that because of their investigation, Hezbollah has already stopped using public cell networks in favor of closed ones, a move that has made their operational functions more unwieldy and complicated.

In the long term, Hezbollah’s standing inside Lebanon has been compromised by the allegations. Since its inception, the group has depicted itself as caring for the welfare of all Lebanese, not just Shiites. But now the tribunal is producing overwhelming, albeit circumstantial, evidence that Hezbollah murdered the most important politician Lebanon had ever produced, and indiscriminately slaughtered many others in the process.

Nasrallah, the group’s leader, seems to have grasped this problem, because after the indictments were issued he immediately began fighting the tribunal with all his might. Since Hezbollah’s war with Israel in 2006, Nasrallah almost never leaves his bunker in South Beirut, for fear of Israeli assassins and drones, and he makes no public appearances. On July 2, a few days after the first four suspects’ names were released, Nasrallah emerged to deliver a long speech, broadcast by his TV station, Al Manar. “The four men have been unjustly accused,” Nasrallah said. He confirmed that the defendants were indeed members of his organization, men “who have an honorable history in resisting the Israeli occupation,” and he threatened to “cut off the hand” of anyone trying to capture them. The whole tribunal, he said, was an “American-Israeli conspiracy” and full of “financial and moral corruption.” It was invalid, he said: “We reject it, and reject the invalid accusations and invalid rulings to be issued by it, and consider them an aggression against us and against our resistance fighters, and an injustice against the honor of this nation.” A Hezbollah delegate to Parliament demanded an end to Lebanon’s contribution to the cost of the tribunal in a no less menacing tone: “Otherwise the matter will be very dangerous.”