Middle East: Marwan Hamadé and Bassel Fleihan are known as Lebanon's "living martyrs". He has undergone two operations on his skull, skin grafts and surgery on his ribs, leg, eardrum and eye since surviving an assassination attempt last October 1st - an attack he believes was planned in Damascus.
Fleihan, like Hamadé a former finance minister, was sitting beside the former prime minister Rafik Hariri when Hariri's motorcade was blown up on February 14th. Fleihan was burned over 90 per cent of his body and, three weeks after the explosion, is still between life and death at the Percy military hospital outside Paris.
"When it was me, I felt I had plunged into death, but I was coming out of it. Now I see the others, who are my dearest friends. Rafik was like a brother, and Bassel too." More than a "living martyr", Hamadé wants to be a living witness.
"The other victims cannot speak, but I can make accusations. I have not hesitated to say it in interviews, in parliament and to [ the deputy head of the Garda Síochána, Peter] Fitzgerald . . . I know who is the victim and I know who is the murderer. For me, there is no doubt."
Fitzgerald, who is heading the UN team investigating Hariri's murder, "will amass a huge file about the motives of the crime", Hamadé predicts, "but he will probably have difficulty finding material evidence."
In targeting Hamadé, the bombers attacked the link between the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and the billionaire former prime minister, who represented the Sunni community. Jumblatt and Hariri were very different, but Hamadé combined Hariri's easygoing charm with Jumblatt's intellectual intensity. "I was their messenger. The Syrians especially loathed this Druze-Sunni understanding," he explains. "The attempt on my life was a warning to them both" when the anti-Syrian opposition was gaining momentum.
Fine weather saved Marwan Hamadé's life that morning. The bomb exploded under his car, 50 metres from the high-rise apartment building where he lives. Hamadé usually sat in the back, "but I wanted to see the sea".
So he swapped seats with his bodyguard of four years, Ghazi Abu Karroum. Karroum died instantly. "If I had lost consciousness, I would have burned to death too," Hamadé says.
Hamadé, a Druze, has been inseparable from Jumblatt for 40 years and was a close friend of Hariri for nearly 35 years. "When I heard the bomb, I knew instantly it was Walid or Rafik," he says.
Hamadé will leave for Brussels, Paris and possibly London this morning with several leading members of the anti-Syrian opposition to meet Javier Solana, the EU's representative for foreign affairs, and high-ranking officials.
"European support is less awkward than that of the US, because Europe does not have such close relations with Israel," he says.
Hours before the Syrian and Lebanese presidents announced their plan yesterday for a partial withdrawal to the Bekaa Valley, Hamadé outlined the opposition's objectives. "We want them to withdraw to the Bekaa by the end of March, and to Syria by the end of April, so we can have free elections with no foreign presence, in May." He is wary of Syrian "trickiness" and particularly fears that Syrian loyalists will demand that the pullout stop in the Bekaa, or that "negotiations" between the Lebanese and Syrian governments drag on for years.
Five months after his near miss with death, Hamadé walks and speaks slowly, deliberately. More than anger or sadness, he emanates serenity. "I am like a man condemned to death, and the rope that is supposed to hang him breaks. I am determined that this country choose the modernity for which we are so gifted; not a medieval political and social system."
