In Lebanon, an Accidental Experiment in Rule of Law

Michel Samaha’s legal troubles leave the political class scratching its head

Everyone was shocked that they did their job

Could it be? Could we be actually witnessing a criminal case involving a hitherto influential Lebanese politician waiting for a judge to decide his fate? How did this happen? How did most Lebanese parties end up accepting that a legal process should decide what happens next in such a politically consequential case?

“Pure luck” and “good timing” are the best answers, because in Lebanon everything usually revolves around politics. For this singular situation to take place, four unlikely things had to happen at the same time:

• A really serious charge with solid underpinnings
• Some people were comparing the arrest of Michel Samaha to the arrest of Shadi al Mawlawi, in the sense that both were cases where a security body belonging to one political side arrested a person who sympathises with the other side. What undermines this equivalence is the seriousness of the charges against Samaha. For while Shadi al Mawlawi was arrested on a vague, unsubstantiated charge of being a terrorist, Samaha was caught red-handed preparing for a wave of crimes that would have shaken the entire country. Hezbollah wants to get to the bottom of this because it does not condone such destabilizing acts. So it will ignore the political urge to defend him.
• A swift police operation
• In an act of planning not often seen in Lebanon, the ISF took everyone by surprise and swiftly executed their raid on Samaha after midnight. By the time everyone woke up, the press already had some of the important details about the case (see next point). Had the ISF taken their time, the popular chatter next morning would have been about politics and the ISF would not have been able to convince the public of the seriousness of the charges.
• A timely leak from a well placed source to the media
• With all due respect to the minister of justice, the leak to the media was a very important part of making people aware of how important this was and allowing the politics to get out of it. If people learned only that Samaha was arrested, the media would have been blazing with speculation, political claims and counterclaims that would be difficult to scale back. The ISF’s proactive measure helped save the case.
• A political patron on the decline
• If Syria’s president Bashar el Assad still yielded the kind of influence he had in Lebanon, there’s no way anyone would have dared touch his pal Michel. The fact is that the dictator in Damascus is too busy swatting his own people to care about the neighbours.

An opportunity

The Lebanese people should hold on to this opportunity handed to them by fate. I’ve heard many people say that not since 2005 have they felt that much wind of change. The political class is uneasy about how powerless this case has rendered it, and the people have an interest in strengthening the rule of law and the independent work of the police. So we should resist the temptation — on both sides — to race ahead of this unfolding legal process. This is why a wait-and-see attitude would be better for everyone than a rush to rhetorical arms to capitalize on a political perception of guilt or lack thereof.