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

June 2007: Two years after ex-prime minister Hariri was killed, Robert Fisk explains why it’s still important

Lebanese turn out in their thousands in 2006 on the first anniversary of the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri in Beirut (Getty)

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.