Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Shi’ite Hizballah, vowed Saturday that members of his organization indicted last week for assassinating a former Lebanese prime minister would never be turned over to an international tribunal.
In a 75-minute televised address in Beirut, Nasrallah attacked the credibility of the Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon, using video footage to back his claims that it is biased against Hizballah and serving the interests of the United States and Israel.
“We know that it is impossible to annul the tribunal because this is an American project anyway,” he said. “It’s goal is to tarnish the image of the Resistance [Hizballah] and even to create civil strife in Lebanon.”
Nasrallah’s comments were the first formal reaction by a Hizballah official to the indictments handed on Thursday to the Lebanese authorities in connection with the assassination in February 2005 of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese premier who died in a massive truck bomb blast.
Nasrallah said that even if the newly formed Lebanese government was led by the opposition, “it will not be able to carry out the warrants and arrest the indicted people. I don’t think that they will be able to arrest [them] in… 60 years.”
The threat posed by the tribunal to Hizballah has little to do with the judicial process of arrest, trial and conviction — the four people named on the indictment are unlikely ever to be caught and transported to The Hague. But the notion that the Shi’ite Hizballah was involved in the assassination of an iconic Sunni statesman risks dealing a severe blow to the party’s carefully-cultivated image in Lebanon and across the Arab and Islamic worlds as a resistance force championing intra-Muslim unity against Israeli occupation and aggression.
His address was peppered with slick video montages, allegedly tying tribunal officials to Western intelligence agencies or demonstrating that they were close to Israel. One of the clips featured Robert Baer, TIME’s intelligence analyst and a former CIA officer who operated in Beirut in the 1980s, who it claimed worked with the tribunal.
