BEIRUT: In an open letter to late former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Future bloc leader MP Fouad Siniora praised the Arab Spring Tuesday and criticized the Syrian crackdown as well as Hezbollah’s weapons in the country.

In a letter written as if it were updating Hariri on the events of last year, Siniora reported: “What we didn’t expect happened,” saying the youth of Arab countries “broke the barrier of fear and the barrier of silence and went down to the squares.”

Criticizing the response of Bashar Assad’s regime to the uprising in Syria, Siniora said Syrian authorities were responding to the situation with only security in mind.

“The solution from the first day [of the uprising] required a mature reading,” he wrote. “Back then it could have been resolved with responsible and brave statements, and practical measures that could have drawn the path of progress toward the future by strengthening participation and through a wise exercise of power.”

Because the regime did not take this path, Siniora continued, Syria was “at the edge of a very dangerous stage. The regime cannot put out the revolution and stop divisions in the army’s ranks, and the Syrian people now have absolute conviction that the regime does not represent.”

Siniora added that Hezbollah’s weapons, which March 14 does not deem legitimate, “have now changed course” from their original direction toward Israel. “They [Hezbollah] have added to their arms a new mission, to secure a parliamentary majority for a Cabinet that Hezbollah suggested, manages and controls – and that answers to Hezbollah.”

Adding that “weapons and the fear of them are what manipulate political equations and change minorities into majorities,” Siniora said weapons were now protecting those accused of Hariri’s killing.

Four Hezbollah members have been indicted over Hariri’s assassination by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Siniora said the STL “is doing well.”

In a veiled criticism of Energy and Water Minister Gibran Bassil, whose energy plan has stalled in the midst of a country-wide electricity crisis, Siniora said energy was “a declining sector that has no clear plan or promising future due to the bitterness and resentment that has been in the state since 1999.”

Siniora said the same was true of the telecommunications sector, but added that “our hands will remain extended for dialogue.”