 Embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad was dealt more bad news Friday night after former Syrian Vice President Abed al-Halim Khadem said that Assad "could have prevented the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri." Khadem also acknowledged that Hariri was threatened by Syria months before he was assassinated. He quoted the Syrian president as telling Hariri, months before he was killed: "You want to bring a (new) president in Lebanon. ... I will not allow that. I will crush whoever attempts to overturn our decision."
| Worked well, didn't it Pencilneck? |
After the warning from Assad, Hariri left with "high blood pressure and his nose bleeding," Khadem said.
Khadem, however, said he was not accusing Syria of complicity in Hariri's Feb. 14 assassination in a massive truck bombing that killed 20 others on a Beirut street. He said uncovering the guilty parties was a matter for the UN commission investigating the murder.
| "I done stuck my neck out all I can!" |
Khadem made the claim as he declared a formal break with President Bashar Assad in a television interview from Paris, citing corruption within the regime and its failure to reform. "Hariri was subjected to many threats from Syria. ... Dangerous things were said. Once he was summoned to Damascus ... and spoken to in extremely harsh words by President Bashar Assad," Khadem said in the rare interview with Al-Arabiya, the pan-Arab satellite broadcaster.
| Makes sense; try to scare him off first, then whack him when he doesn't scare. |
Khadem became a Syrian vice president in 1984 and resigned in June. He was the nominal leader in Syria for a short period after Assad's father, Hafez Assad, died in June 2000.
A little more about Khadem:
In the Al-Arabiyah interview, Khaddam, 73, widely regarded as the architect of his government's Lebanon policy before its troop pullout, also announced the reasons for his resignation in June. He said he was "convinced that the process of development and reforms, be they political, economic or administrative, will not succeed" and preferred to choose "the motherland" over "the regime". | The eye doc oughta be able to read that chart from quite aways back. |
"I have many things to say, serious things, when the time is right," he said, adding however that his relationship with Assad remained "amicable". | "Well, *I'm* feeling amicable, at least... say, it's pretty nice here in Paris, dontcha think?" |
The vice president first asked to resign at a congress of Syria's ruling Baath party in June, but there had been no word since on whether Assad had accepted the resignation. At the time, he criticised Syrian foreign policy leading up to the withdrawal from Lebanon after a 29-year deployment under international pressure over the Hariri assassination. Khaddam, who long served Bashar's father Hafez before his death in 2000, was also close to former interior minister Ghazi Kanaan, for 20 years Syria's intelligence chief in Lebanon, who committed suicide in October. Lebanese media speculated at the time that Kanaan, who held the post before being replaced by Ghazaleh, had been killed because he was about to reveal the authors of Hariri's killing. Khaddam now lives in Paris, where he said he was writing a book, and, like Kanaan, was also close to the pro-Western Hariri. Kanaan and Khaddam were reportedly stripped of responsibility for the Lebanon file by Assad, in keeping with an agreement with pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud who accused the two men of being in Hariri's pay. |