Anjar Mayor Garo Pamboukian recalls Syrian operations in his Town
Elise Knutsen/The Daily Star/June 13, 2015
ANJAR, Lebanon: It’s quiet in the bucolic Bekaa Valley village of Anjar. With tidy houses and handsome young palm trees growing in the median strip of the main street, there is little to suggest that until just 10 years ago this small town housed the operational headquarters of Syria’s military intelligence operations in Lebanon. In recent months, the town’s dark history has been discussed by lawyers and witnesses at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the U.N.-backed court investigating the Feb. 14, 2005, murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Although Anjar, an exclusively Armenian town of 3,000, sees little bustle today, convoys with tinted windows used to pass through regularly. For years, Lebanese politicians traveled to Anjar to woo Syrian intelligence officials stationed there, witnesses have told the court.
“All the politicians, they know Anjar better than me,” Mayor Garo Pamboukian agreed. “All the politicians, they were obliged to come here. All the important decisions that were made in Lebanon were made from Anjar,” he added, not without pride.
From the mid-1980s until 2002, Ghazi Kanaan was the chief Syrian intelligence officer in Lebanon and was based in Anjar. Kanaan and his successor, Rustom Ghazaleh, oversaw all Lebanese political and security affairs, effectively running the country as a governorate of Syria for decades.
“When they [the Syrians] came in 1976, the first step was in Anjar and when they left [in 2005], the last step was in Anjar,” Pamboukian said.
The Syrian army entered Lebanon a year after the outbreak of the 1975 Civil War. Syria maintained total control over the country from 1990 until April 2005, when the last Syrian soldier withdrew from Lebanon. Pamboukian, a jeweler by trade, recalled appraising extravagant jewelry Kanaan had been gifted, likely by those courting favors and goodwill. “Diamonds, emeralds, everything [worth] … $10,000, $50,000, sometimes $100,000,” he recalled.
Townspeople and the Lebanese political establishment at large enjoyed a generally affable relationship with Kanaan. “He was a civil man,” Pamboukian said of Kanaan. “He was my neighbor, I used to play football with him,” recalled Marc, a shop owner in Anjar. Still, under Kanaan’s rule, the Syrian intelligence ran a brutal detention center in the town. “It was the last stop in Lebanon [before the prisoners] were sent to Syrian jails” recalled Nadim, a Syrian refugee living in Anjar who once served with the Syrian army in Lebanon.
The jail was an old horse stable, recalled Kamil Boutros Rami, a Lebanese man who was held in the Anjar jail for three months in 1987 before being transferred to a Syrian jail. During his detention in Anjar, he was housed in a 25-square-meter room with more than 40 other men.
Among the macabre cast of characters who manned the detention center was a man known as Prophet Youssef. “He decided if you lived or if you died,” Pamboukian said. “He could give you heaven or hell.” “After Nabi [Prophet] Youssef did his morning sports, he would line all the prisoners up and beat us,” Rami recalled. Rami was subjected to torture in the Anjar prison, including electric shocks. Sometimes, the Syrian guards would tell Rami they had kidnapped his wife while an unknown woman screamed in an adjoining room.
Today, the detention center is abandoned, sitting behind a decrepit factory in an onion field guarded by the Lebanese Army. “There is no one there now, only the ghosts,” Pamboukian shrugged. After the Syrians withdrew from Lebanon in 2005, a mass grave was found near the prison. Remains of at least 30 bodies were discovered. Ghazaleh replaced Kanaan in 2002 and employed harsher, more brutal tactics than his predecessor. Marc, the shop owner, spat on the ground when asked about Ghazaleh. “He was hard. He had no pity,” Marc said.
“He had a very bad temper. Not a temper, a very bad temper,” said Hajj Hasan Hammoud, the deputy mayor of neighboring Majdal Anjar.
Unlike Anjar, Majdal Anjar is predominantly Sunni and when the townspeople heard that Ghazaleh, also a Sunni, would be stationed at the nearby base a rumor spread that he would “protect the Sunnis of the Bekaa,” Hammoud recalled. Upon hearing the rumor, the newly instated Ghazaleh summoned a delegation from Majdal Anjar to his house at midnight. “He threatened to pull out the beard [of the man accused of spreading the rumor] hair by hair,” Hammoud said. Soon after the incident, a mosque situated between Anjar and Majdal Anjar was destroyed.
Ghazaleh and the intelligence operations he oversaw from Anjar, have come under intense scrutiny at the STL. While never charged in relation to Hariri’s assassination, Ghazaleh has emerged as a central figure in the prosecution’s case, and his dealings in Anjar have been mentioned by multiple witnesses. Abu Tareq, Hariri’s trusted body-guard, delivered Ghazaleh a cash payment in Anjar the day before he died in the massive explosion alongside Hariri.
According to documents released by WikiLeaks, United Nations investigators probing the truck bomb which killed Hariri and 21 others asked the United States to provide them with surveillance footage of Anjar. The investigators were “interested in signs of “vehicles stored for operations,” according to one leaked document.
Despite the debauched corruption, torture and conspiracy that took place in Anjar during the Syrian presence, many residents of the village describe the epoch as “normal.”Left with little choice but to submit to the Syrian presence, residents say they carried on with their daily routines.
“We did what we had to so that our mothers wouldn’t have to wear black” and mourn us, Marc said.
Asked whether he thought Lebanese had been killed by the Syrians in Anjar, Marc shrugged. “I didn’t see it,” he said circumspectly. “It’s really none of my business.”Kanaan died in 2005 under suspicious circumstances, with the Syrians claiming he committed suicide.
Ghazaleh’s death was announced in April after he was reportedly beaten for insubordination. While the architects of Syria’s policy in Lebanon have been buried, it seems that Anjar is still haunted by their presence. – Additional reporting by Philip Issa and Jude Massaad
