The scar that will never heal: Why Hariri’s murder still haunts Lebanon

They were handing out white roses where the bomb went off. On 14 February 2005, ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri was killed there and the 20ft bomb crater has remained a scar on the surface of Beirut history ever since. But yesterday, as the Lebanese learnt that there would indeed be a UN tribunal to condemn his killers, the crater – from which vital evidence was removed by Syria’s friends in the security services – was filled in and the road resurfaced and the flowers handed to motorists by young men in T-shirts bearing Hariri's portrait.

He was smiling in the picture. But would he have had much to celebrate yesterday? True, the UN Security Council invoked Chapter VII of the UN Charter to create a special international court to try the suspects in Hariri's murder but the very fact that the Lebanese government could not formally request the court spoke volumes about its own impotence.

With its Shia ministers missing, the Hezbollah opposition to the government is dismissing the whole affair as a charade and accusing the UN of interfering in the sovereign affairs of the Lebanese state. Syria, whose security apparatus remains the principal suspect, roars quietly over the border. Will there be a price to be paid for this tribunal? Probably.

Clearly, George Bush will be pleased because he has long ago lined up President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in his sights. Not long ago, receiving Lebanese visitors in the White House – and this a 100 per cent accurate quotation from the horse's mouth, so to speak – Bush announced that he was “going to hang Bashar by the balls”. The problem, of course, is that Mr Bush is in no position to do that. Indeed, it is the army of Iraqi insurgents who appear to have Washington by the balls and it is Mr Bush who may need President Assad's help to relieve this terrible pressure. For at the end of the day, Syria and Iran are the two countries which the US needs so it can extract itself from Iraq.

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So Lebanon can be betrayed again. Certainly, the government of the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, is of less importance than the lives of US troops in Iraq. And the UN line-up on Wednesday night was equally interesting. Qatar and South Africa abstained from the UN vote, mainly because they have substantial business interests in Syria. The Russians and the Chinese are all too well aware how fragile the political and military situation is in Lebanon; the Chinese have a unit in the UN force in the south of the country, a peacekeeping army that is increasingly dependent on the Hezbollah militia for protection. With the battles continuing around the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian camp in the north, Lebanon is moving ever more dangerously towards the kind of precipice of which its politicians always warn. In reality, the Lebanese nation is now in a parlous state, so delicate that the Hariri tribunal – of such great import in the aftermath of the 2005 murder – now seems almost irrelevant.

Hariri's son, Saad, described the tribunal's creation as “a great victory for all of Lebanon” and visited his father's tomb in the centre of Beirut after the news from New York. Yet we still do not know where the tribunal will sit, how many judges it will have or what powers it will have invested upon it. Firecrackers echoed through Beirut as Hariri's supporters celebrated but someone threw a hand grenade near St Michael's church in Galerie Semaan on Wednesday night. And in the early summer heat of Beirut, roses always wilt.