Robert Fisk: War-weary Beirut marks Hariri death with peaceful rally

So the Lebanese survived. The civil war did not begin. The second anniversary of the murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri was more a festival than a vow of revenge.

Even the coffee stall and crisps concessions were cheerful. Villagers from what journalists like to call the "hardy warrior race" of the Druze - mountain men from the Chouf - and their families stood shoulder to shoulder with Christian Maronite women in the centre of Beirut to honour the man whose murder provoked a UN Security Council revolution that demanded the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon (dutifully adhered to) and the disarming of the Hizbollah militia (dutifully un-adhered to).

Despite the three deaths in Tuesday's bus bombing in the Metn hills, there were no calls for revenge, no ill will, none of the viciousness that those murders were presumably intended to provoke. Many of the young men quite literally danced in the streets to their own music and families sat in Martyrs' Square - site of the hanging of Lebanese patriots by the Turks in 1915 and 1916 - with picnics.

But the speeches made it clear that the battle between Lebanon's elected government and the largely Shia opposition - the Shia are the largest but not the majority community in Lebanon - continues. A UN international tribunal is supposed to be held into the murder of Hariri. The government has asked the UN to proceed but the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, a creature of Syria, says that Prime Minister Faoud Sinioura cannot sign on to it on the grounds that five Shia ministers resigned from his administration last year.

"We are today in the hour of truth and the last leg for the setting up of the international tribunal, which will happen soon, very soon," Hariri's son Saad told up to a million Lebanese in the square.

But the brutality of the conflict between Lebanon and Syria - and needless to say, the Christians are holding Syrian agents responsible for Tuesday's bombs - was all too evident in a speech made by Lebanon's Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt. He described the Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad as "a monkey, a snake and a butcher" (comparing humans to animals is a particularly cruel insult in the Arab world) and added "we will not surrender to terrorism, to explosive charges, to totalitarian parties, Syrian and non-Syrian. This year the tribunal will come and with it retribution and the death sentence".

Samir Geagea, the Phalangist - a convicted murderer whose party now supports the elected government - was self-assured enough to tell his audience that "we will pursue the criminals across the world and to the end of time".

Perhaps. The reality, however, is that Lebanon continues to live on borrowed time. Its economy - more than $30bn in public debt - is bankrupt. "There is not a businessman, not an architect, not an investor who wants to put money into this country," a young American-trained urban planner said among the crowd yesterday. "Sure, we won't have a civil war. But what is our country worth in financial terms?"