Syria Accuses Former Vice-president of Treason for Hariri Claim

Syria’s ruling Ba’ath party has expelled the former vice-president Abdel-Halim Khaddam and intends to put him on trial for treason, the country’s official news agency, Sana, said yesterday.

The move came only two days after Mr Khaddam said in a television interview that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, had personally threatened the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri a few months before Hariri was assassinated last February. A statement issued yesterday by the Ba’ath party’s national leadership, which is headed by President Assad, denounced Mr Khaddam as a traitor to his party, his homeland and the Arab nation.

Mr Khaddam, who is 73, stepped down from the vice-presidency last June - reportedly to make way for new blood in the Syrian regime - and has since been living in Paris, where he gave his interview to the satellite channel al-Arabiya last week.

A Sunni Muslim in a regime dominated by Syria’s minority Alawite sect, he was a close friend and business associate of Mr Hariri - a fellow Sunni - whose assassination in Beirut on February 14 has been widely blamed on Syria.

In the interview, Mr Khaddam said Mr Hariri had been "subjected to many threats" from Syria. "Dangerous things were said. Once he was summoned to Damascus ... and spoken to in extremely harsh words by President Bashar Assad."

He quoted Mr Assad as telling Mr Hariri, months before he was killed: "You want to bring a [new] president in Lebanon ... I will not allow that. I will crush whoever attempts to overturn our decision."

Syria had dictated an extension of the presidential term of pro-Syrian Lebanese president Emile Lahoud which Mr Hariri opposed.

Mr Khaddam played a key role in Damascus’s relations with Lebanon until 1998, and following the death of MrAssad’s father Hafez Assad in 2000 he was briefly nominal leader of the country.

He could now face the death penalty if he returns to Syria to face the high treason charge, which is reserved for high-ranking officials. In his unprecedented and wide-ranging attack, Mr Khaddam also complained that Syrian officials were getting rich while ordinary citizens were forced to search for food among garbage. A special session of the Syrian parliament on Saturday unanimously demanded that he be prosecuted.

"I ask the Syrian leadership to try him ... for humiliating 10 million Syrians when he said half of the Syrian people are eating from the garbage," one member, Umeima Faddoul, told parliament. "I tell him, those who eat from the garbage are traitors like you ... Treason is the darkest shade of black." Another MP, who did not give his name, said: "You don’t deserve to be a Syrian. You can go to hell because no Syrian will forgive you, who hoped to return to your country one day on an American tank."

The clash with Mr Khaddam is the second major internal upset for the Damascus regime in less than three months. Last October the interior minister, Ghazi Kanaan, was found dead in his office, allegedly having shot himself.