As heartbreaking recollections of the port blast make their way back into the minds of Lebanese, the question of justice for the victims of the crime has forcefully returned to the fore. And justice inevitably comes with demands for the truth: Why did what happened happen? Who did it? Who made the order?
However, justice returns as an impossible, unattainable object. Judge Tarek Bitar having his hands tied, after the dismissal of Judge Fadi Sawan, merely encapsulated this state of affairs, besides serving as an early omen for what was to come.
This same justice was not achieved after the murder of the writer and activist Lokman Slim either, nor that of army photographer Joseph Bejjani.
Justice has also not been served, or has been suspended, in relation to the crime of the banks’ looting of their depositors, nor the economic and monetary collapse that preceded and accompanied it.
Before these crimes, backbreaking efforts were needed to allow for the International Tribunal into the assassination of Rafic Hariri and those who accompanied him on his convoy. As for the modest outcome of its investigations, they were brushed aside. In turn, the victims of the crimes that followed between 2005 and 2006 did not get any investigation to speak of, neither domestic nor international. They died, and that’s it. This is how things go!
All of these crimes remain without perpetrators. Hezbollah’s secretary general called the calamity at the port a “painful accident.” Public Works Minister and Transport Ali Hamieh posted a picture of a rehabilitated and thriving port, as if to say that nothing had happened.
These are facts that all the Lebanese have become familiar with, so they do not surprise anyone, though they enraged, and continue to enrage, many of them. What has not been given the significance it deserves, however, is the comparison between this image of Lebanon as a country that repels justice with that of a country of resistance, and thus, neither have the implications that can be derived from this comparison.
The fact is that the coexistence of these two images, which has been in place for a while now, is entirely normal. More than that, these are two sides of a single truth. Those insisting on demands for justice, be it domestic or international, and rising up against a regime that represses it, are foreign agents and traitors in the eyes of the resistance’s supporters. As for the latter, who want to go on dismissing justice and maintain the status quo in order to avoid jeopardizing the resistance, they are complicit in everything that reinforces the crime.
Indeed, the erosion of justice and its courts, and the inflation of the resistance and its missiles, are the two prominent features and excesses of contemporary Lebanese life. And each of these features is a requisite for the other: More resistance means less justice, and less justice means more resistance.
This is predicated on a revolutionary philosophy, so to speak. Revolutionary and ideological experiences, in all their variety, concur on replacing the courts with “revolutionary courts” and “people’s courts,” when courts are not abolished outright, that is. As for the furthest reason for this behavior, it is that those with an ideological makeup identify the perpetrator and who is the victim beforehand. It is not actions that underlie this knowledge. Rather, it is dictated by the intellectual and political positions of the perpetrator and victim, the backgrounds they come from, or the social groups they belong to. In this sense, the courts (reactionary, bourgeois, or heathen...) may reveal a truth, but they obscure a right which is deeper than the truth. What then, are we to expect when the proponents of this theory are the same people with the weapons that enforce it or the authorities that govern on its basis?
Indeed, it would be ridiculous to speak about a brilliant Soviet lawyer, or a distinguished judge in Nazi Germany or Khomeinist Iran. These things do not happen where “right” (which is inherently contentious of course) takes precedence over the concrete and well-established facts of murder.
Some Arab countries seized by armies and ideologies did not escape caricatures of “revolutionary courts.” And we thus saw the emergence of Fadel al-Mahdawi’s court in Iraq in the 1950s and Salah al-Dilli’s in Syria in the 1960s, while the “masses” were tasked with trying defendants in Gaddafi’s Libya.
Going back to Lebanon, it is more evident than ever that the choice, in the end, is between resistance and justice: either we have resistance amid an absence of justice - the status quo today that is probably going to become increasingly entrenched - or we have justice amid an absence of resistance, which is not likely in the foreseeable future.
Because the balance of power between these two formulas is skewed in this way, it could be said that those seeking justice are now without a homeland, or that their homeland is no longer worthy of the name.
Homelands of a resistance rappelling justice are jungles more than they are homelands. Today, increasing numbers of Lebanese are saying that they do not want to live in a jungle; that is, they do not want a homeland in which there is resistance and no justice. This is the point made by the poignant speeches delivered last Friday, when thousands of citizens gathered to commemorate the third anniversary of the port blast.
