By Alexander Henley
This article was published in The Guardian on 17/11/2010
The British tabloids have been triumphant in the past few days. Justice, they say, has finally caught up with the "Tottenham Ayatollah" who fled the UK in 2005 after praising the 9/11 and 7/7 bombers. Omar Bakri was arrested by security forces in Lebanon on Sunday after being tried in his absence by a Lebanese court and sentenced to life imprisonment for "incitement to murder, theft and the possession of arms and explosives".
He now faces a retrial and the latest news is that a Hezbollah lawyer is going to defend him. It will hardly come as a surprise to many that Hezbollah has taken up Bakri's cause. Are they not natural bedfellows in the Islamist conspiracy?
We have all heard that Middle Eastern governments are under siege, barely keeping the fundamentalists from the door. So, having stirred up trouble in Britain, it seems that Bakri has gone back to Lebanon to hide out with his Islamist friend Hassan Nasrallah.
Bakri and Nasrallah may have a few common features – bushy beard, scary Islamic headdress, nerdy glasses – but they are by no means natural companions. Bakri, an al-Qaida apologist, represents a brand of Sunni radicalism that considers Shia Muslims unbelievers and is responsible for the destruction of some of the holiest Shia mosques in Iraq.
Nasrallah, on the other hand, may be a prominent leader of the opposition in Lebanon, but we should not be too quick to read this as simply "the Islamist opposition".
First, the parliamentary opposition has ministers in government, making up a third of the cabinet.
Second, Hezbollah's coalition includes prominent secularist parties: the Shia Amal movement and the Christian Free Patriotic movement. Third, the Muslim religious divide in Lebanese politics should be seen as Sunni versus Shia rather than moderate versus extremist. Sunni Islamists share electoral lists with Hezbollah, but only in order to stage a more viable opposition to the political dominance of the prime minister, Saad Hariri, in the Sunni community.
Rather than a show of fundamentalist solidarity, Hezbollah's adoption of the Bakri case is part of a political campaign against Hariri's ruling coalition. Nasrallah has been pulling out all the stops.
The visit to Lebanon by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, last month affirmed Hezbollah's international backing.
Nasrallah, in a speech last week, accused Hariri's allies of collaborating with Israel. Nasrallah also said that Hezbollah would "cut off the hands" of officials attempting to arrest its members in connection with the assassination of the former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, in 2005. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon at The Hague is expected to indict Hezbollah members in the coming months.
By championing Omar Bakri's case, Nasrallah can tighten the screws on Hariri's government another notch, and may in the process strengthen his uneasy alliance with Sunni opposition groups.
The Lebanese state's handling of the case shows its own weakness more than any profound commitment to justice. Hariri's government is already nearing crisis over the international tribunal. Having built his political legitimacy on the slogan of "the truth" about his father's death, Saad Hariri is too deeply committed to back down, even though the confrontation with Hezbollah is tearing his government apart.
Bakri's trial was conducted discreetly in his absence, while he sat at home. The court issued neither a summons nor an arrest warrant before handing down a sentence of life imprisonment. As well as the building tension in Lebanon generally, the government's reluctance to confront Bakri in person shows its weakening control of the situation on the ground.
When the internal security forces finally moved to arrest Bakri, they raided his home in Tripoli without a warrant and shot his car tyres, firing further shots in the air to warn him not to try to escape.
Nothing about Bakri's trial suggests the routine execution of justice. Most surprising is that the Lebanese state chose to pick this particular fight at all, if it wanted to avoid a publicised – and inevitably politicised – trial. One possible explanation is that Bakri was prosecuted as a result of pressure from the British government, which accuses him of helping to recruit militants during his 20 years in London.
Hariri made a stop in London two weeks ago in order to shore up support for his government in the face of the looming tribunal crisis. Was the prosecution of Omar Bakri part of the deal when Hariri shook David Cameron's hand on the steps of Downing Street?
Perhaps the Lebanese government was hoping that a sentence in absentia would satisfy its British allies, without ever having to do anything about it. Whatever the reason for the eventual arrest, it hardly represents the unswerving sword of justice. It is just the latest focus of Lebanon's increasingly desperate political wrangling.
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