LEBANON: The leader of the anti-Syrian opposition in Lebanon lives on his nerves and a constant flow of coffee, a virtual recluse in his castle fortress. Lara Marlowe met him yesterday.
Walid Jumblatt has seen his own death.
"Somewhere, on the road to Beirut, or I don't know where, there will be unknown individuals, men of the shadows, waiting in ambush to spray you with bullets or detonate an explosive charge," the leader of the anti-Syrian opposition predicted in an interview yesterday. "No more, no less. That is what is going to happen."
To him personally? "Yes, I think so," he says calmly.
"People say they will plant car bombs in Beirut, to spread panic," he continues. "There are many rumours. We live in total uncertainty. On the one hand, there is hope. On the other, there is still a regime of assassins in Lebanon."
His greatest fear, Jumblatt says, "is for the survival of this peaceful 'cedar revolution', for this hope." He is referring to two weeks of demonstrations demanding a complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.
"I think [ the protests] will continue, but taking account of the mentality of... I don't want to say of [ President] Bashar [ al-Assad of Syria]... let's say of some of his entourage, so as not to go too far... I don't know if they can accept the fact they must change."
Jumblatt was only 27 on that spring day in 1977 when he raced down the mountainside from the ancestral castle at Mukhtara to find his father, Kamal, slumped over in his car, machine-gunned to death by two men wearing Syrian special forces uniforms.
Witnesses saw the killers go to Syrian headquarters in Beirut's Sinn el-Fil district. His father's "crime" was having opposed the arrival of Syrian troops in Lebanon in 1976. "Be careful," Kamal Jumblatt warned the Christian leaders who invited them. "They will come, but you will never get rid of them."
Violent death follows Jumblatt like a curse. His paternal aunt was murdered before his father was killed. In 1983, during the civil war, a car bomber nearly killed Walid as he left a Beirut restaurant. Seven years later, his childhood friend, Dany Chamoun, was massacred by a Christian militia, along with his wife and children.
Last October Jumblatt's alter-ego, Marwan Hamadé, was seriously wounded and his bodyguard killed in another car bombing. On February 14th, Jumblatt's ally, the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, was blown to pieces with 18 other people on the Beirut seafront.
After attending Hariri's funeral, Jumblatt withdrew to Mukhtara. Two weeks earlier, Hariri had told him: "They're going to kill one of us; you or me."
"We saw each other every Sunday, in his home, at 6 or 7pm," Jumblatt recalls. "He expected it. He had a premonition. But he was calm; he wasn't anxious."
Jumblatt, now 55, has aged dramatically. "These two weeks have been like a century," he says. His face is ashen and he calls out constantly to a servant, "Jib ahweh" (bring coffee). The tiny porcelain cups are replaced before they are empty.
A tall, thin, bald man with bulging blue eyes, dressed in black in mourning for his dead friend, Jumblatt lives on nerves and the determination to keep going. Because he dares not make the 1¼-hour drive down the mountain to Beirut, other members of the opposition travelled to Mukhtara to meet with him yesterday afternoon.
Despite Jumblatt's exhaustion and pessimism, he has risen to his moment in history. For 23 years, the feudal leader of the Druze sect was one of Syria's most reliable allies in Lebanon. Supported by his glamorous, Syrian-born wife, Nora, five years ago Jumblatt began to press for enforcement of the 1989 Taif peace accords, which foresaw the Syrians' departure from the country. Every day, Nora Jumblatt delivers food and water to anti-Syrian protesters camped out on Martyrs' Square.
It was as if, after a dissolute youth and a Faustian pact with his father's killers, Jumblatt arrived at a kind of redemption. In middle age, he salvaged his honour from Lebanon's blood-soaked earth. He became a patriot.
It is an unequal fight. "Russian roulette played by one side only," he calls it. "They hold a pistol to your head and say, 'Do what I tell you'."
The three-week "orange revolution" in Ukraine was different. [ Russian president Vladimir] "Putin backed down. There was a compromise," Jumblatt says. "Here, if you say no, they send a car bomb to kill you. And all in the name of 'the Arab cause'."
Jumblatt withdrew to his mountain fortress after Hariri's murder. "In Beirut, they can blow up my house. Here it's more difficult, though they could try aerial bombardment... Their only argument is assassination."
Bashar al-Assad summoned Hariri to Damascus late last summer to tell him he'd decided to reappoint Émile Lahoud as president of Lebanon. On his return to Beirut, Hariri, who was still prime minister, met with Jumblatt, Hamadé and two other deputies.
"He was frightened," Jumblatt recalls. "Bashar told him: 'Lahoud is mine. If [ President Jacques] Chirac wants us to leave Lebanon, I'll break Lebanon. Jumblatt has his Druze in the mountains. But I, too, have Druze, and I'll destroy the mountains'."
Using terms from the Nazi occupation of much of Europe, Jumblatt has referred to Gen Rustom Ghazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, as "the Gauleiter" and his agents as "the Gestapo".
Syrians "control everything", he says: "Who gets promoted in the Lebanese army, intelligence services, police, universities, the administration ... Everything goes through their headquarters at Anjar in the Bekaa Valley."
Yesterday Jumblatt attempted unsuccessfully to persuade other opposition members to demand Lahoud's resignation before negotiations to appoint a caretaker government to organise elections that are due by May 31st. "If we enter into Lahoud's and the Syrians' game, it is going to drag on," he said. "It would be better if Syrian trucks leaving Lebanon took Monsieur Lahoud with them."
While the opposition debated strategy, Jumblatt dispatched a Druze member of parliament to see Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Shia Muslim Hizbullah. If Jumblatt can win the Iranian and Syrian-backed militia over to the opposition, his position will be much strengthened.
Jumblatt says Syria "has held Lebanon hostage since 1976" in the hope of using it as a bargaining chip for the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights. He has come to resent Syria's exploitation of Lebanon as a proxy battlefield. "Okay, let's have an 'armed struggle'," he says sarcastically. "We spent our lives fighting. But why is Syria's Golan border always safe and quiet? Why don't they send Hizbullah to fight on Golan?"
As our conversation draws to a close, a servant walks in with a brown envelope. "I asked for a copy of the inquiry into my father's death," he explains. "It was closed in 1977. All the assassination files are closed here: my father's, Bashir Gemayel's, [ president] René Moawad's, the mufti Khaled's, Marwan Hamadé's...
"Hariri is different," Jumblatt swears. He and the Lebanese opposition intend to pursue Hariri's killers as the perpetrators of a terrorist crime under UN Security Council Resolution 1566. As part of the UN inquiry, the deputy head of the Garda Síochána, Peter Fitzgerald, interviewed Marwan Hamadé on Tuesday evening. "Thank God Fitzgerald is here," Jumblatt says. But he deplores the fact Fitzgerald's UN mandate does not enable him to question Lebanese or Syrian intelligence and security officials.