REPORTER: Robert Fisk
This is Robert Fisk, one of the best-known Middle East correspondents in the business. He's in Lebanon's Beka'a Valley and he's witnessing history. After 30 years, the Syrian army is finally pulling out of the country and Fisk is describing the scene live on radio.
RADIO PRESENTER: And watching in the Beka'a Valley now is Robert Fisk, the London 'Independent's Middle East correspondent as the last Syrians leave the country. Robert, good morning to you.
ROBERT FISK, JOURNALIST: Good morning, Amen, how are you?
RADIO PRESENTER: I can hear the soldiers in the background. This is a very important day in Lebanese history, isn't it?
ROBERT FISK: It is. I don't know if you can hear, but the last Syrian special forces are about 20 feet from me and are actually parading on the air base at Rhyak in the Beka'a Valley in their red berets.
Each of them, all of them having a badge showing the President of Syria on their chest along with his late father. You can probably hear, in the background, the soldiers. These are all Syrian troops, the last 300 Syrian soldiers in Lebanon and they're indeed going to leave.
This Syrian army came into Lebanon 29 years ago, just one day before I arrived here as a correspondent. So I've been kind of keen to come here and watch this with my own eyes and there they are. They've all got bright red berets, smart uniform, rather new, I suspect, and they've been provided with them for the photo opportunity but they're all going to leave within about two hours.
Fisk has made Lebanon his home for the last 30 years and is the only Western journalist to have stayed right through the civil war.
ROBERT FISK: The civil war, which lasted for 15 years and killed 150,000 people, has been, if you want to talk privately, it's been a central point in my life. I've spent 15 years watching the poor Lebanese murder and assassinate and massacre each other. The Syrians sometimes damp down the fires of civil war and sometimes they promoted them, according to their own highly cynical political point of view. But when you see a military force leaving, you have to hope that the Lebanese, who are over here and over here, have the power to control their own country and will not let it slide back into anarchy.
360 Syrian special forces troops are rehearsing here for the official send off. It's a rare opportunity for Fisk to quiz their officers who are normally extremely camera shy.
ROBERT FISK: I think I can say hello to him, of course. Mish mishco means no problem. That's what you should keep saying to Syrians especially when they're leaving Lebanon.
But for at least one Syrian officer, old habits diehard.
REPORTER: Is there a problem?
SYRIAN SOLDIER, (Translation): No filming at all.
And the ever present Syrian intelligent officers are watching us closely.
ROBERT FISK: They're just saying they're all from Syria, I'm wondering what towns they come from. Not terribly informative but they're being friendly. Always nice to see Syrian intelligence people being friendly, and so they are.
Incredible scene, when you see an historic day in journalism, it's always with you, you were there, you were the witness, you were the independent witness and there it is, and it's all real, incredible. This is why I'm in the newspaper business, this is why I'm in journalism. If you really want to know, that's it, that's the answer.
And I'm going to follow them out today and so are you. We're going to see them go across the boarder. It's the end of the Syrian presence in Lebanon but what comes afterwards, this I don't know, this I don't know.
The withdrawal ceremony itself is a massive media event. The entire Middle East press corps has shown up and both CNN and BBC World are going out live from the site. The Syrians are complying with the UN Security Council resolution that demands they pull out of the country.
SYRIAN OFFICER, (Translation): Syria today completes the withdrawal of its military and security forces to inside the borders of Syria, thus fulfilling all its commitments to Resolution 1559.
29 years ago, the Syrians came to save Lebanon from civil war, but they ended up causing much of the misery here. Under their control, thousands of Lebanese disappeared without trace and hundreds still rot in Syrian jails with no prospect of release. The Lebanon they leave behind faces an uncertain future.
ROBERT FISK: Do you realise that by tomorrow I will be here one day longer than their 29 years.
Fisk is heading back down to Beirut to send his story and pictures to the 'Independent' in London.
ROBERT FISK: Look at this monument here. This is a monument to Halfa Zalasa the President of Syria. I'm waiting for this to be taken down before someone blows it up. I think they'll take it down, won't they? The obelisk above the road here.
Unlike most journalists, Fisk refuses the use a digital camera which means a trip to the local photo lab to process his film.
ROBERT FISK: It's hard saying what this is, actually. It's very odd, what the hell is this. It's the Syrians alright, I can see them. OK, here we are. This is good, isn't it? That's a good one here.
To file his story, he pays a visit to the back office of his local grocery store where he hands it over on a floppy disk.
Despite being thousands of kilometres and several time zones away from London, Fisk remains cheerfully ignorant of the Internet and also refuses to use email.
This bomb crater is one of the main reasons the Syrians have been forced out of Lebanon so quickly. On February 14, Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister and billionaire construction magnate was passing through here in his 6-car motorcade. A massive blast of 1,000kg of TNT killed him and 21 other people and injured a further 220. Hariri's last footsteps through downtown Beirut have been immortalised in this cobbled roadway. Fisk is retracing those steps as he investigates who was responsible for the assassination. He was only a few hundred metres away from the blast when it happened.
ROBERT FISK: When I reached that spot there, I found about 22 cars all over here, including Rafiq Hariri's motorcade, all burning. I didn't know it was Hariri's. I saw him on the ground on fire and didn't realise it was him. I knew him, I knew Hariri very well. But the problem was that the cars - you can see some of them in background there - the petrol tanks were exploding and fire across the road and it was so bright you couldn't even look at them and in one of the cars there were three people who were burning alive. There was a woman's hand on the road.
Almost from the moment of the bomb going off, Fisk saw signs that a cover up had begun.
ROBERT FISK: Plain clothes police turned up and started collecting bits of metal and taking them from the crater. And that was the first sign. I thought "Oh, they're doing their job very fast, aren't they," and it took me a while before I realised that they were removing things from the scene of the crime and, of course, before midnight on that same day, the crucial evidence of Hariri's own motorcade cars were taken away and put in an army barracks, they were taken away. And as we now know from the Fitzgerald UN Report, later on, evidence was planted in the crater of a car that obviously wasn't there at the time.
There was so little faith in Syrian-controlled Lebanese security services that a United Nations team was despatched to investigate the bombing.
Their report stated: Parts of a pick up truck were brought to the scene by member of security services, some time after the incident and were placed in the crater and subsequently photographed and labelled as evidence.
It was just one of a number of damning findings that exposed the local investigation as a complete farce.
ROBERT FISK: So from the start, the investigation on the Lebanese side was seriously compromised and by that stage, of course, many, many people here were saying it was the Syrians. This made me angry because I knew Hariri. He was a very ruthless businessman, he wasn't a saint, but he wasn't a militia man, he didn't have blood on his hands like a lot of people in the government.
A lot of blood has been spilled in Lebanon's violent recent history and almost all of these assassinations remain unsolved. But there's a feeling that this time things will be different.
ROBERT FISK: I think in these circumstances, this loosening up of information and the anger of people, people are coming up to me as a journalist and telling me things that they would never dare to do before because they were frightened. I had members of the security forces asking me to print the truth, which they knew some about, and I did. I've named people who have moved evidence from the scene of the crime. I've named them in the paper - Ali Haj is the name of one of them. As a result of which my phone Beirut 370615 is tapped on the orders of a General Tefale, that's the name of the man who tapped it. Why is he tapping my phone, I wonder?
As a result of his probing, Fisk has been under intense pressure from the Syrian-backed Lebanese security services. And the for the last few years, it's been this man General Rostum Ghazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence, who's applied much of that pressure.
Widespread belief that Syria was involved in Hariri's murder boiled over in late February. A million angry Lebanese turned out at Martyr's Square in Beirut and the entire pro-Syrian government was forced to resign. As a result, almost everything in Lebanese politics is now up for grabs and the great fear is that the country could descend into the chaos of another civil war. We're heading down to the most volatile part of the country, Southern Lebanon.
ROBERT FISK: We're going to about the furthest part of South Lebanon you can go. Ibosaqi is a Shi'ite village in the far south of Lebanon which was for many years occupied by the Israeli army and it is in the United Nations army's, peacekeeping army's, area of control and it falls under the Indian battalion. Whenever, for example, there's an overflight by an Israeli aircraft, Hezbollah fire at the aircraft from this region. So the Hezbollah are effectively here. You don't see them on the roads, you won't have the checkpoints but if, for example, you - we pull up next to Israeli border and you start filming, the Hezbollah will be with us within two minutes, without obvious show of weapons but they'll be with us.
Perched on the hills above the road is a reminder of how long this area has been fought over. Beaufort Castle was used by the Crusaders 1,000 years ago.
ROBERT FISK: The Palestinians were in the castle in '76. This is Fatah. And they were using it as a position to fire artillery across the Israeli border. I first went in there in the summer of '76 and the Israelis were actually shelling the castle. There were bits of Crusader castle crashing down around us. And you were quite safe inside because no shell can go through these acres and acres of stone.
As we enter the UN position, there's a rather unusual reception waiting.
ROBERT FISK: Thom, you're now going to see something extraordinary in the history of the United Nations because I've just seen it. Keep walking with me. Keep walking with me, you're not going to believe what you're going to see in a moment.
The Assam Regiment of the Indian army has laid on a traditional welcome for the UN commander. As the UN officers file in, Fisk begins to work the crowd looking for information.
This UN position overlooks the disputed Sheba'a Farms area, the source of the greatest tension between Israel and Hezbollah. In January, a roadside bomb went off near here as an Israeli patrol went past, killing one of the Israeli soldiers. They retaliated with tank and heavy machine gun fire, killing a French UN observer and badly injuring a Swedish officer. As we leave the UN position, Fisk reveals he's been given some disturbing information about his own safety.
ROBERT FISK: One thing I learned was that the Lebanese security officer, working for the Syrians, asked Hezbollah to interrogate me, presumably about my source of information on Hariri's murder and the Hezbollah declined to do so and they were wise. It shows there's too much interest taken in what I'm writing at the moment but you have to live with that.
Learned a few other things while I was there. Rumours that the Hezbollah are thinking of trying to kidnap an Israeli soldier in Sheba'a Farms.
REPORTER: For what purpose?
ROBERT FISK: Around the time of elections. To raise the temperature. It's just the rumour that's going around the mill here in South Lebanon.
On the drive back into Beirut, Fisk has received an unexpected call on his mobile. He's been tipped off that the chiefs of the security services have been forced out, and is heading into the local Associated Press office to confirm it. Fisk rings the foreign editor of the 'Independent' to let him know what's happening.
ROBERT FISK: Hi, Leonard, I've got a story for you to do from Beirut. I don't know if you've picked this up but the two top - Syria's two top security men here, including the man who moved the evidence of Hariri's murder, have both stepped out, they've gone. They won't be coming back. Officially they've stepped aside until the UN investigation takes place but what it means is that Syria's grip on the whole security, including the head of general security, has gone. OK, because basically what we're really going to say but we can't say in so many words is that Hariri's potential murderers, or the people people involved in it, have gone before the UN, you see.
The loosening of Syria's grip on Lebanon, both covert and overt, has prompted an outburst of all kinds of public demonstrations. For Lebanon's younger generation, it's an opportunity to show their unity, regardless of their religion.
ROBERT FISK: Perhaps the only good thing that came out of the war is that many tens of thousands of Lebanese sent their children abroad to be educated during the war for their safety. And now there are hundreds of thousands of young people who've come back from abroad, uncontaminated by sectarianism, who say we will not tolerate another civil war. Our parents were wrong. And our uncles were wrong and our older brothers were wrong. And they're not interested in a war and they go nightclubbing together, Muslims and Christian, they don't care.
AMIRA SOHL: It felt actually really good to realise we're not that stupid. No, that's right. We're not that excited about our leaders any more. We will not carry guns No, no, we don't want them.
ROBERT FISK: And you don't want guns any more. Because I can remember how young people were obsessed with weapons and weaponry and what they were doing, I remember it. And it was the young who wanted war.
Fisk is having lunch with 27-year-old Amira Sohl. She's a masters graduate from Cornell University and returned to Beirut from New York three years ago. It's by talking to people like Amira that Fisk is given a sense of optimism for Lebanon's future. But perhaps ironically, the restaurant they're eating in is right next to site of Hariri's assassination and was badly damaged by the blast.
AMIRA SOHL: I read in the 'Economist', I think it was about two weeks ago, immediately the bombs and sectarian violence, of course in Beirut everything is possible, nobody thought this bomb was possible so to tell you it's impossible, no, I will not say that. But I think what we have seen over the past two months is a Lebanese population that is willing to stand side-by-side, even if there are different reasons for you standing there. But you want a free Lebanon, a free and democratic Lebanon.
One of the most important players in this process is probably Hezbollah, the party of God. But no-one's exactly quite sure how willing they are to participate in a democratic Lebanon.
Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah General Secretary, met with the Syrian army and intelligence chiefs on the eve of their departure. Nasrallah has been playing a cautious and patient game. He's gone to great lengths to position Hezbollah as an independent Lebanese resistance party, but he's also been careful to avoid alienating the Syrians. As a parting gift, Nasrallah presented the Syrian military chiefs with this captured Israeli assault rifle. General Rurgstom Ghazale makes it clear that while Syria is withdrawing, they won't be far away.
GENERAL RURGSTOM GHAZALE, (Translation): We have come to affirm to this great warrior that Syria was, still is and will always be with the resistance. As we leave Lebanon today, we affirm that we may be outside its borders but Lebanon is in our hearts and so is in the resistance.
In anticipation of a new post-Syrian regime, local politicians are now jockeying for power. Former militia leaders are again reinventing themselves as democrats and prominent among them is Druze leader Walid Jumblat.
ROBERT FISK: Jumblat is a very far-sighted man as well as being the Middle East's greatest nihilist and cynic. A very intelligent man, a very well read and learned man as well and a very ruthless man at war. He lives in his palace at Muqtara and just down the road at Beita Din where there is a magnificent 18th century palace, and a lovely restaurant above the mountains. In Beita Din was the Druze torture centre which Jumblat knew all about and some of his bodyguards were torturers and he knew that. So he has blood on his hands. He once said to me "I'm a war criminal."
But I think what happens, you see, and what happened here, is that when people admitted that they were war criminals, they may not be forgiven but they're accepted back into society.
To try to understand how this happens, we pay a visit to the former PLO ambassador to Lebanon, Shafiq al-Hut. He is now retired and living in this Beirut apartment.
ROBERT FISK: How come when so many people have blood on their hands, I know people, I talk to every day who were torturers, how come they got away with it. How come the Lebanese can live with all this, all this weight of blood?
SHAFIQ AL-HUT, FORMER PLO AMBASSADOR: You know something, Robert, I don't know if you agree with me, sometimes I think we can't understand things if we don't shift a little bit to the realm of psychology. Take our great friend Rassan... of course one of the intellectuals. He keeps repeating, describing the last 30 years of war in Lebanon, the war of others in Lebanon.
ROBERT FISK: Oh yes, I know, yes, always somebody's fault. All the hawadis, the events.
SHAFIQ AL-HUT: This is why they never learn the lesson. Because always, the Palestinians, the Syrians. The Americans. The Israelis, everybody. Whatever, whatever. But not them. They are pure, honest, humble, modest, beautiful people. I mean this is self-deception.
ROBERT FISK: What's the worst thing that you remember in the war? The worst thing you saw in the war? What was the worst thing, the bloodiest most terrible thing you saw?
SHAFIQ AL-HUT: Sabra and Chatila, the massacre in the refugee camps, it was really - you were here.
ROBERT FISK: I was in the camps, yes.
SHAFIQ AL-HUT: It was really a cold-blooded crime. I mean, nothing, nothing in the whole world justifies it.
ROBERT FISK: They used butchers knives, didn't they?
SHAFIQ AL-HUT: They did the undoable.
In September 1982, over 1,000 unarmed Palestinian refugees were massacred in their homes in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. Many were women and young children. Fisk was an eyewitness to the slaughter.
ROBERT FISK: My coverage of the Sabra and Chatila massacre when I was in the camp even before the murderers left, I think it changed the way I wrote and changed the way I felt about the Middle East and in that degree it probably changed the way in which I write things and the way in which I believe the passion and anger of a reporter should be in the report. We're human beings, we should be there, otherwise what are we doing?
REPORTER: Have you been radicalised by that, do you think?
ROBERT FISK: No, not radicalised. It's not about radicalisation. I think it was the first time I'd been confronted by the massacre of hundreds and hundreds of innocent people and I felt a great sense of outrage, which you should feel, and which governments express all the time, newspaper editorials express it, why shouldn't I and feeling that the guilty would get away with it, which they did, of course.
Robert Fisk's coverage of events like Sabra and Chatila has provoked enormous controversy but this hasn't stopped him from winning more awards than probably any other British foreign correspondent.
Even some of his critics have resorted to extreme measures. Several years ago, during a debate at the Cambridge University student union, the actor John Malkovich threatened to shoot Fisk over his perceived anti-American and anti-Israeli views.
ROBERT FISK: Look, anyone who's going to write about the Middle East has got to take the sticks and stones, sometimes literally. If you want to avoid that, you've got to do soft reporting, and you've got to make sure you don't offend anyone, which in this part of the world is pretty impossible, but you're certainly not going to be able to tell the story of the Middle East if you do that.
You know I've been attacked in - I've been attacked in America, I've been attacked in Israel, not very much in Israel oddly enough. I've been attacked by Israel's supporters abroad, I've been attacked by the Egyptians, they called me a dead crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt because I investigated torture by the secret police in Egypt. I'd been depicted in a cartoon in Bahrain has as a rabid dog who has to be exterminated because I criticised torture in Bahrain's secret police headquarters.
If you look at, you know, what I've been writing over the years I've pretty much pissed off the Arabs and the Israelis and the Americans and Blair and just about everyone else. And I think it's the job of a journalist and here I quote that very fine Israeli journalist, Zameera Hass, who I much admire, you must monitor the centres of power, challenge authority, especially when they go to war. That's what our job, I think, should be.
If you're then going to go to war and tell the truth, if you're going to say these people massacred by an Israeli artillery piece, you will have people say you're anti-Semitic for saying the Israelis did it, but they did. I've had people tell me I'm anti-Arab because I constantly condemned Arafat as a corrupt and venal old man, but he was. I'm sorry, you know. I wish he wasn't. I wish the Israelis hadn't killed those people.
You have to respect Lebanon otherwise you die and I've always reminded myself don't take Lebanon for granted. Don't assume you have the right to live here just because you're here and Lebanon smiles at you because one day you'll look at it and it won't smile any more. Be careful. Be careful.
They're going. They're going.
This is Robert Fisk, one of the best-known Middle East correspondents in the business. He's in Lebanon's Beka'a Valley and he's witnessing history. After 30 years, the Syrian army is finally pulling out of the country and Fisk is describing the scene live on radio.
RADIO PRESENTER: And watching in the Beka'a Valley now is Robert Fisk, the London 'Independent's Middle East correspondent as the last Syrians leave the country. Robert, good morning to you.
ROBERT FISK, JOURNALIST: Good morning, Amen, how are you?
RADIO PRESENTER: I can hear the soldiers in the background. This is a very important day in Lebanese history, isn't it?
ROBERT FISK: It is. I don't know if you can hear, but the last Syrian special forces are about 20 feet from me and are actually parading on the air base at Rhyak in the Beka'a Valley in their red berets.
Each of them, all of them having a badge showing the President of Syria on their chest along with his late father. You can probably hear, in the background, the soldiers. These are all Syrian troops, the last 300 Syrian soldiers in Lebanon and they're indeed going to leave.
This Syrian army came into Lebanon 29 years ago, just one day before I arrived here as a correspondent. So I've been kind of keen to come here and watch this with my own eyes and there they are. They've all got bright red berets, smart uniform, rather new, I suspect, and they've been provided with them for the photo opportunity but they're all going to leave within about two hours.
Fisk has made Lebanon his home for the last 30 years and is the only Western journalist to have stayed right through the civil war.
ROBERT FISK: The civil war, which lasted for 15 years and killed 150,000 people, has been, if you want to talk privately, it's been a central point in my life. I've spent 15 years watching the poor Lebanese murder and assassinate and massacre each other. The Syrians sometimes damp down the fires of civil war and sometimes they promoted them, according to their own highly cynical political point of view. But when you see a military force leaving, you have to hope that the Lebanese, who are over here and over here, have the power to control their own country and will not let it slide back into anarchy.
360 Syrian special forces troops are rehearsing here for the official send off. It's a rare opportunity for Fisk to quiz their officers who are normally extremely camera shy.
ROBERT FISK: I think I can say hello to him, of course. Mish mishco means no problem. That's what you should keep saying to Syrians especially when they're leaving Lebanon.
But for at least one Syrian officer, old habits diehard.
REPORTER: Is there a problem?
SYRIAN SOLDIER, (Translation): No filming at all.
And the ever present Syrian intelligent officers are watching us closely.
ROBERT FISK: They're just saying they're all from Syria, I'm wondering what towns they come from. Not terribly informative but they're being friendly. Always nice to see Syrian intelligence people being friendly, and so they are.
Incredible scene, when you see an historic day in journalism, it's always with you, you were there, you were the witness, you were the independent witness and there it is, and it's all real, incredible. This is why I'm in the newspaper business, this is why I'm in journalism. If you really want to know, that's it, that's the answer.
And I'm going to follow them out today and so are you. We're going to see them go across the boarder. It's the end of the Syrian presence in Lebanon but what comes afterwards, this I don't know, this I don't know.
The withdrawal ceremony itself is a massive media event. The entire Middle East press corps has shown up and both CNN and BBC World are going out live from the site. The Syrians are complying with the UN Security Council resolution that demands they pull out of the country.
SYRIAN OFFICER, (Translation): Syria today completes the withdrawal of its military and security forces to inside the borders of Syria, thus fulfilling all its commitments to Resolution 1559.
29 years ago, the Syrians came to save Lebanon from civil war, but they ended up causing much of the misery here. Under their control, thousands of Lebanese disappeared without trace and hundreds still rot in Syrian jails with no prospect of release. The Lebanon they leave behind faces an uncertain future.
ROBERT FISK: Do you realise that by tomorrow I will be here one day longer than their 29 years.
Fisk is heading back down to Beirut to send his story and pictures to the 'Independent' in London.
ROBERT FISK: Look at this monument here. This is a monument to Halfa Zalasa the President of Syria. I'm waiting for this to be taken down before someone blows it up. I think they'll take it down, won't they? The obelisk above the road here.
Unlike most journalists, Fisk refuses the use a digital camera which means a trip to the local photo lab to process his film.
ROBERT FISK: It's hard saying what this is, actually. It's very odd, what the hell is this. It's the Syrians alright, I can see them. OK, here we are. This is good, isn't it? That's a good one here.
To file his story, he pays a visit to the back office of his local grocery store where he hands it over on a floppy disk.
Despite being thousands of kilometres and several time zones away from London, Fisk remains cheerfully ignorant of the Internet and also refuses to use email.
This bomb crater is one of the main reasons the Syrians have been forced out of Lebanon so quickly. On February 14, Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister and billionaire construction magnate was passing through here in his 6-car motorcade. A massive blast of 1,000kg of TNT killed him and 21 other people and injured a further 220. Hariri's last footsteps through downtown Beirut have been immortalised in this cobbled roadway. Fisk is retracing those steps as he investigates who was responsible for the assassination. He was only a few hundred metres away from the blast when it happened.
ROBERT FISK: When I reached that spot there, I found about 22 cars all over here, including Rafiq Hariri's motorcade, all burning. I didn't know it was Hariri's. I saw him on the ground on fire and didn't realise it was him. I knew him, I knew Hariri very well. But the problem was that the cars - you can see some of them in background there - the petrol tanks were exploding and fire across the road and it was so bright you couldn't even look at them and in one of the cars there were three people who were burning alive. There was a woman's hand on the road.
Almost from the moment of the bomb going off, Fisk saw signs that a cover up had begun.
ROBERT FISK: Plain clothes police turned up and started collecting bits of metal and taking them from the crater. And that was the first sign. I thought "Oh, they're doing their job very fast, aren't they," and it took me a while before I realised that they were removing things from the scene of the crime and, of course, before midnight on that same day, the crucial evidence of Hariri's own motorcade cars were taken away and put in an army barracks, they were taken away. And as we now know from the Fitzgerald UN Report, later on, evidence was planted in the crater of a car that obviously wasn't there at the time.
There was so little faith in Syrian-controlled Lebanese security services that a United Nations team was despatched to investigate the bombing.
Their report stated: Parts of a pick up truck were brought to the scene by member of security services, some time after the incident and were placed in the crater and subsequently photographed and labelled as evidence.
It was just one of a number of damning findings that exposed the local investigation as a complete farce.
ROBERT FISK: So from the start, the investigation on the Lebanese side was seriously compromised and by that stage, of course, many, many people here were saying it was the Syrians. This made me angry because I knew Hariri. He was a very ruthless businessman, he wasn't a saint, but he wasn't a militia man, he didn't have blood on his hands like a lot of people in the government.
A lot of blood has been spilled in Lebanon's violent recent history and almost all of these assassinations remain unsolved. But there's a feeling that this time things will be different.
ROBERT FISK: I think in these circumstances, this loosening up of information and the anger of people, people are coming up to me as a journalist and telling me things that they would never dare to do before because they were frightened. I had members of the security forces asking me to print the truth, which they knew some about, and I did. I've named people who have moved evidence from the scene of the crime. I've named them in the paper - Ali Haj is the name of one of them. As a result of which my phone Beirut 370615 is tapped on the orders of a General Tefale, that's the name of the man who tapped it. Why is he tapping my phone, I wonder?
As a result of his probing, Fisk has been under intense pressure from the Syrian-backed Lebanese security services. And the for the last few years, it's been this man General Rostum Ghazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence, who's applied much of that pressure.
Widespread belief that Syria was involved in Hariri's murder boiled over in late February. A million angry Lebanese turned out at Martyr's Square in Beirut and the entire pro-Syrian government was forced to resign. As a result, almost everything in Lebanese politics is now up for grabs and the great fear is that the country could descend into the chaos of another civil war. We're heading down to the most volatile part of the country, Southern Lebanon.
ROBERT FISK: We're going to about the furthest part of South Lebanon you can go. Ibosaqi is a Shi'ite village in the far south of Lebanon which was for many years occupied by the Israeli army and it is in the United Nations army's, peacekeeping army's, area of control and it falls under the Indian battalion. Whenever, for example, there's an overflight by an Israeli aircraft, Hezbollah fire at the aircraft from this region. So the Hezbollah are effectively here. You don't see them on the roads, you won't have the checkpoints but if, for example, you - we pull up next to Israeli border and you start filming, the Hezbollah will be with us within two minutes, without obvious show of weapons but they'll be with us.
Perched on the hills above the road is a reminder of how long this area has been fought over. Beaufort Castle was used by the Crusaders 1,000 years ago.
ROBERT FISK: The Palestinians were in the castle in '76. This is Fatah. And they were using it as a position to fire artillery across the Israeli border. I first went in there in the summer of '76 and the Israelis were actually shelling the castle. There were bits of Crusader castle crashing down around us. And you were quite safe inside because no shell can go through these acres and acres of stone.
As we enter the UN position, there's a rather unusual reception waiting.
ROBERT FISK: Thom, you're now going to see something extraordinary in the history of the United Nations because I've just seen it. Keep walking with me. Keep walking with me, you're not going to believe what you're going to see in a moment.
The Assam Regiment of the Indian army has laid on a traditional welcome for the UN commander. As the UN officers file in, Fisk begins to work the crowd looking for information.
This UN position overlooks the disputed Sheba'a Farms area, the source of the greatest tension between Israel and Hezbollah. In January, a roadside bomb went off near here as an Israeli patrol went past, killing one of the Israeli soldiers. They retaliated with tank and heavy machine gun fire, killing a French UN observer and badly injuring a Swedish officer. As we leave the UN position, Fisk reveals he's been given some disturbing information about his own safety.
ROBERT FISK: One thing I learned was that the Lebanese security officer, working for the Syrians, asked Hezbollah to interrogate me, presumably about my source of information on Hariri's murder and the Hezbollah declined to do so and they were wise. It shows there's too much interest taken in what I'm writing at the moment but you have to live with that.
Learned a few other things while I was there. Rumours that the Hezbollah are thinking of trying to kidnap an Israeli soldier in Sheba'a Farms.
REPORTER: For what purpose?
ROBERT FISK: Around the time of elections. To raise the temperature. It's just the rumour that's going around the mill here in South Lebanon.
On the drive back into Beirut, Fisk has received an unexpected call on his mobile. He's been tipped off that the chiefs of the security services have been forced out, and is heading into the local Associated Press office to confirm it. Fisk rings the foreign editor of the 'Independent' to let him know what's happening.
ROBERT FISK: Hi, Leonard, I've got a story for you to do from Beirut. I don't know if you've picked this up but the two top - Syria's two top security men here, including the man who moved the evidence of Hariri's murder, have both stepped out, they've gone. They won't be coming back. Officially they've stepped aside until the UN investigation takes place but what it means is that Syria's grip on the whole security, including the head of general security, has gone. OK, because basically what we're really going to say but we can't say in so many words is that Hariri's potential murderers, or the people people involved in it, have gone before the UN, you see.
The loosening of Syria's grip on Lebanon, both covert and overt, has prompted an outburst of all kinds of public demonstrations. For Lebanon's younger generation, it's an opportunity to show their unity, regardless of their religion.
ROBERT FISK: Perhaps the only good thing that came out of the war is that many tens of thousands of Lebanese sent their children abroad to be educated during the war for their safety. And now there are hundreds of thousands of young people who've come back from abroad, uncontaminated by sectarianism, who say we will not tolerate another civil war. Our parents were wrong. And our uncles were wrong and our older brothers were wrong. And they're not interested in a war and they go nightclubbing together, Muslims and Christian, they don't care.
AMIRA SOHL: It felt actually really good to realise we're not that stupid. No, that's right. We're not that excited about our leaders any more. We will not carry guns No, no, we don't want them.
ROBERT FISK: And you don't want guns any more. Because I can remember how young people were obsessed with weapons and weaponry and what they were doing, I remember it. And it was the young who wanted war.
Fisk is having lunch with 27-year-old Amira Sohl. She's a masters graduate from Cornell University and returned to Beirut from New York three years ago. It's by talking to people like Amira that Fisk is given a sense of optimism for Lebanon's future. But perhaps ironically, the restaurant they're eating in is right next to site of Hariri's assassination and was badly damaged by the blast.
AMIRA SOHL: I read in the 'Economist', I think it was about two weeks ago, immediately the bombs and sectarian violence, of course in Beirut everything is possible, nobody thought this bomb was possible so to tell you it's impossible, no, I will not say that. But I think what we have seen over the past two months is a Lebanese population that is willing to stand side-by-side, even if there are different reasons for you standing there. But you want a free Lebanon, a free and democratic Lebanon.
One of the most important players in this process is probably Hezbollah, the party of God. But no-one's exactly quite sure how willing they are to participate in a democratic Lebanon.
Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah General Secretary, met with the Syrian army and intelligence chiefs on the eve of their departure. Nasrallah has been playing a cautious and patient game. He's gone to great lengths to position Hezbollah as an independent Lebanese resistance party, but he's also been careful to avoid alienating the Syrians. As a parting gift, Nasrallah presented the Syrian military chiefs with this captured Israeli assault rifle. General Rurgstom Ghazale makes it clear that while Syria is withdrawing, they won't be far away.
GENERAL RURGSTOM GHAZALE, (Translation): We have come to affirm to this great warrior that Syria was, still is and will always be with the resistance. As we leave Lebanon today, we affirm that we may be outside its borders but Lebanon is in our hearts and so is in the resistance.
In anticipation of a new post-Syrian regime, local politicians are now jockeying for power. Former militia leaders are again reinventing themselves as democrats and prominent among them is Druze leader Walid Jumblat.
ROBERT FISK: Jumblat is a very far-sighted man as well as being the Middle East's greatest nihilist and cynic. A very intelligent man, a very well read and learned man as well and a very ruthless man at war. He lives in his palace at Muqtara and just down the road at Beita Din where there is a magnificent 18th century palace, and a lovely restaurant above the mountains. In Beita Din was the Druze torture centre which Jumblat knew all about and some of his bodyguards were torturers and he knew that. So he has blood on his hands. He once said to me "I'm a war criminal."
But I think what happens, you see, and what happened here, is that when people admitted that they were war criminals, they may not be forgiven but they're accepted back into society.
To try to understand how this happens, we pay a visit to the former PLO ambassador to Lebanon, Shafiq al-Hut. He is now retired and living in this Beirut apartment.
ROBERT FISK: How come when so many people have blood on their hands, I know people, I talk to every day who were torturers, how come they got away with it. How come the Lebanese can live with all this, all this weight of blood?
SHAFIQ AL-HUT, FORMER PLO AMBASSADOR: You know something, Robert, I don't know if you agree with me, sometimes I think we can't understand things if we don't shift a little bit to the realm of psychology. Take our great friend Rassan... of course one of the intellectuals. He keeps repeating, describing the last 30 years of war in Lebanon, the war of others in Lebanon.
ROBERT FISK: Oh yes, I know, yes, always somebody's fault. All the hawadis, the events.
SHAFIQ AL-HUT: This is why they never learn the lesson. Because always, the Palestinians, the Syrians. The Americans. The Israelis, everybody. Whatever, whatever. But not them. They are pure, honest, humble, modest, beautiful people. I mean this is self-deception.
ROBERT FISK: What's the worst thing that you remember in the war? The worst thing you saw in the war? What was the worst thing, the bloodiest most terrible thing you saw?
SHAFIQ AL-HUT: Sabra and Chatila, the massacre in the refugee camps, it was really - you were here.
ROBERT FISK: I was in the camps, yes.
SHAFIQ AL-HUT: It was really a cold-blooded crime. I mean, nothing, nothing in the whole world justifies it.
ROBERT FISK: They used butchers knives, didn't they?
SHAFIQ AL-HUT: They did the undoable.
In September 1982, over 1,000 unarmed Palestinian refugees were massacred in their homes in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. Many were women and young children. Fisk was an eyewitness to the slaughter.
ROBERT FISK: My coverage of the Sabra and Chatila massacre when I was in the camp even before the murderers left, I think it changed the way I wrote and changed the way I felt about the Middle East and in that degree it probably changed the way in which I write things and the way in which I believe the passion and anger of a reporter should be in the report. We're human beings, we should be there, otherwise what are we doing?
REPORTER: Have you been radicalised by that, do you think?
ROBERT FISK: No, not radicalised. It's not about radicalisation. I think it was the first time I'd been confronted by the massacre of hundreds and hundreds of innocent people and I felt a great sense of outrage, which you should feel, and which governments express all the time, newspaper editorials express it, why shouldn't I and feeling that the guilty would get away with it, which they did, of course.
Robert Fisk's coverage of events like Sabra and Chatila has provoked enormous controversy but this hasn't stopped him from winning more awards than probably any other British foreign correspondent.
Even some of his critics have resorted to extreme measures. Several years ago, during a debate at the Cambridge University student union, the actor John Malkovich threatened to shoot Fisk over his perceived anti-American and anti-Israeli views.
ROBERT FISK: Look, anyone who's going to write about the Middle East has got to take the sticks and stones, sometimes literally. If you want to avoid that, you've got to do soft reporting, and you've got to make sure you don't offend anyone, which in this part of the world is pretty impossible, but you're certainly not going to be able to tell the story of the Middle East if you do that.
You know I've been attacked in - I've been attacked in America, I've been attacked in Israel, not very much in Israel oddly enough. I've been attacked by Israel's supporters abroad, I've been attacked by the Egyptians, they called me a dead crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt because I investigated torture by the secret police in Egypt. I'd been depicted in a cartoon in Bahrain has as a rabid dog who has to be exterminated because I criticised torture in Bahrain's secret police headquarters.
If you look at, you know, what I've been writing over the years I've pretty much pissed off the Arabs and the Israelis and the Americans and Blair and just about everyone else. And I think it's the job of a journalist and here I quote that very fine Israeli journalist, Zameera Hass, who I much admire, you must monitor the centres of power, challenge authority, especially when they go to war. That's what our job, I think, should be.
If you're then going to go to war and tell the truth, if you're going to say these people massacred by an Israeli artillery piece, you will have people say you're anti-Semitic for saying the Israelis did it, but they did. I've had people tell me I'm anti-Arab because I constantly condemned Arafat as a corrupt and venal old man, but he was. I'm sorry, you know. I wish he wasn't. I wish the Israelis hadn't killed those people.
You have to respect Lebanon otherwise you die and I've always reminded myself don't take Lebanon for granted. Don't assume you have the right to live here just because you're here and Lebanon smiles at you because one day you'll look at it and it won't smile any more. Be careful. Be careful.
They're going. They're going.