There is a single measure of progress that should interest us in the case of the February 14, 2005 assassination of the former prime minister, Rafik al-Hariri, and the subsequent murders and attempted murders in Lebanon. It is not the swearing in of judges for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, or excursions through the Middle East by the Italian presiding judge, or the fitting out of a courtroom in what must be the slowest carpentry job in Europe. It is the identification of suspects and the issuing of indictments.

In that respect, the release last week of the four Lebanese generals arrested in August 2005 on suspicion of involvement in the Hariri murder raises a red flag. It tells us that in four years of supposedly intensive investigation we have advanced from having a handful of suspects to having none. Tribunal Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare, who has headed the United Nations assassination inquiry since early 2008 (an inquiry that continues despite Bellemare’s status as prosecutor) cannot expect to recommend the generals’ release, as he did, and then simply disappear back into his black hole without a few questions following him. Ahead of anything else, his persistent silence shows contempt for the victims and their families.

Let's cut the nonsense here. There is no great mystery in the inquiry. Every student of international affairs from Finland to New Zealand knows that a heavy cloud of suspicion hangs over the Syrian regime and its clients for the Hariri murder. They also know that there is no other scenario of responsibility that is not demonstrably ridiculous. So the prosecutor and judges of the Special Tribunal cannot proceed indefinitely as if Rafik al-Hariri – like the others murdered with him or afterward, whose cases the tribunal is investigating – were all killed by ghosts.

In December 2005, the UN advised its first investigator, Detlev Mehlis, that he could no longer work in Beirut because of death threats. Thereafter, under his successor Serge Brammertz, then Bellemare, a long trail of bland and repetitive reports raised growing doubts about the resolution of the inquiry in the face of what was and remains a ferocious apparatus of murder and terrorization. Mehlis himself has publicly expressed his misgivings about Brammertz’s progress. 

These doubts are now carrying over to the work of the tribunal itself. In their inquiry reports, Brammertz and Bellemare added little to the conclusions reached by Mehlis. However, these were significant: that the Hariri assassination was a multi-layered conspiracy, plainly with dozens of participants involved; and that the political motive for the crime was likely a Syrian fear, and that of Syria’s Lebanese allies, that Hariri would perform well in the elections of summer 2005. All this has been nailed down, as have the links between Hariri’s murder and those afterward. Yet three years on there is not one suspect, and apparently no early prospect of indictments.

This is the real mystery. How can we have motives without suspects? What have Brammertz and Bellemare been doing over such a long time to so little effect? Have they been sidetracked into research projects peripheral to essential police work on the main trail? Are they competent? Are they afraid? It is particularly astonishing that the inquiry and tribunal have apparently not been able to find a substantial crack in a complex conspiracy like this one. If such is indeed the situation, it tells us that after Mehlis interrogated Syrian officials in December 2005, there was no decisive investigative pressure exerted on anyone.

That would make the tribunal a toothless wonder that will probably very soon become an international laughing stock. Yet the international community cannot afford to allow the tribunal to end as a fraud or farce. It is an innovative instrument against terrorism, the product of unanimous outrage of the UN Security Council, and a high-profile commitment to the credibility of international justice. Its failure will condemn Lebanon – and other countries –to remaining free-fire zones for political murders into the indefinite future. Failure will also send the message that the international community, by default, acknowledges some people or states as above and beyond justice and hands them free license to do whatever they like, whenever they like, wherever they like with impunity.

Success, on the other hand, would represent a serious deterrent against those terrorists and states inclined to murder around the planet. Lebanese murder affairs are therefore a test for us all, everywhere.

The prosecutor and judges in the Hariri tribunal should understand that they themselves will eventually face the verdict of history. At present there is a crisis of confidence arising from the lack of any visible progress in the UN investigation. The tribunal has a duty, which it is not fulfilling, to remember and render justice to the victims.

William Harris is a professor of politics at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is the author of “The Levant: A Fractured Mosaic” (Markus Wiener, Princeton, 3rd edition 2008), which won a Choice Magazine outstanding academic title award. He is currently working on a history of Lebanon for Oxford University Press.