Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (22 page)

But Hariri never lost ties to Lebanon. During cease-fires in the 1980s, he spent millions to clean up Beirut. He even paid to have new palm trees planted on the long seafront corniche. I remember the big orange trucks that came in to clear away rubble; they were one of the few signs of hope in the midst of anarchy. But it was always for naught, as the fighting soon started again. He also built a new university and a hospital in his hometown of Sidon. And his Hariri Foundation funded more than 20,000 scholarships for Lebanese youth, both in Lebanon and abroad.

In 1989, Hariri was pivotal in organizing and bankrolling a reconciliation conference hosted by Saudi Arabia in Taif, a mountain retreat near Mecca. The meeting brought all the warlords together and finally ended Lebanon’s grisly conflict.

The Lebanese celebrate that turning point in a T-shirt too. It says:
THE GREAT LEBANESE WAR 1975–1990.
GAME OVER!

The Taif Accord radically overhauled Lebanon’s National Covenant. It stipulated an end to politics based on religions. It called for a transition, in phases, to full democracy. Terms were to be worked out in a new commission—with equal representation of Christians and Muslims. It also required all government jobs to be based on capability rather than sect. And it mandated the disarming of all Lebanon’s militias.

During the interim, it changed the ratio of Christians and Muslims in government to parity—fifty-fifty in everything, even though that still did not fairly represent their shares. Muslims by then outnumbered Christians by at least three to two, which effectively meant that a Christian vote counted more than a Muslim vote.

In 1992, after Lebanon held its first elections in two decades, Rafiq Hariri ended up as prime minister. He approached the post-war era with the same swashbuckling ambition he did business. He lacked charisma. He did not come from one of Lebanon’s clans and did not have a militia to enforce his will, so he used the leverage of his wealth as a tool.

“I want to go down in the history books,” he said, “as the man who resurrected Beirut.”
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He boasted that Beirut would become the Singapore of the Middle East.

“Rebuilding the country,” he added, “is the revenge of honest people on war as an idea and the miseries arising from this choice, including all the savagery, destruction, and catastrophes. It is revenge on the idea of resorting to weapons to resolve problems.”
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His big ideas, wealth, plain talk, and political aspirations occasionally led to comparisons with Ross Perot.

Some Lebanese saw Hariri as a savior, others as an exploiter—and many saw him as a bit of both. He ran Lebanon’s reconstruction like a personal business, reaping profit along the way. He was the largest shareholder in the company that rebuilt Beirut. His government borrowed heavily from his banks at steep interest rates, in what even allies admitted was a gross conflict of interest. He reportedly used government contracts and his profits to curry favor with the traditional political elite and the warlords.
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His plan put Lebanon into exorbitant debt for expensive infrastructure—a new international airport and new roads—while the poor felt few immediate benefits.

Yet Rafiq Hariri did have a vision, however controversial. He was particularly devoted to renovating the commercial district of picturesque old French buildings along the notorious Green Line that divided Christian and Muslim militias during the war. The ravaged area reemerged as an architectural jewel in the center of Beirut, bringing in high-end businesses, charming outdoor bistros, classy boutiques, bustling city life, and revenue-generating tourists. If Hariri had not run reconstruction the way he ran his businesses, given Lebanon’s squabbling warlords and tendency to implode, it might not have happened.

“I was afraid that if I did not contribute, confidence in the project would be lost,” he once explained, “and many people would in turn not contribute, which could lead to the failure of the project.” All profits, he claimed, went into the Hariri Foundation for charities.
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In the end, Hariri did what virtually no other Lebanese politician could do—restore confidence that Lebanon was a viable country. Lebanon’s beleaguered currency soared by thirty percent after he took office; the famed black market disappeared.
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Since he had no role in the war, Hariri could also credibly reach out to all of Lebanon’s sects. He eventually won grudging respect even from those who did not like or trust him. He became known as Mr. Lebanon. Political analysts wrote about “Hariri-ism.”
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But to be Lebanon’s prime minister, Hariri also had to make a devil’s bargain with Damascus. More than a half century after they had been separated into two states, Syria was not over losing Lebanon. Damascus still dominated its little neighbor. It intimidated politicians. It harassed newspaper editors. It threatened religious leaders. Its intelligence services were widely linked to assassinations of anyone who dared to defy it.
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After the civil war erupted, Syria was one of a handful of nations that dispatched troops to Lebanon under an Arab League mandate to try and end the war. They failed. In 1979, the other nations left; Syria stayed—and stayed and stayed—in defiance of Arab and United Nations requests to leave. Lebanon once again fell under almost total Syrian control. And every leader had in some way to do its bidding.

Hariri was no different. He acquiesced on appointments, security, foreign policy, and working with Syria’s hand-picked candidates for president of Lebanon.
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Baksheesh
is the Arabic word for bribe; it is an integral part of life in the Middle East. Hariri reportedly paid plenty of
baksheesh
to Syria, including construction of a new presidential palace in Damascus.
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Asked once about the ubiquitous pictures of Syrian President Hafez al Assad in Lebanon’s international airport, Hariri told
The Boston Globe
with unusual candor, “It’s not a problem to put them up. It’s a problem to take them down.”
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Hariri calculated that restoring Beirut’s old splendor and strengthening its economy would, in time, create leverage to counter Syria’s pull.
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In the meantime, however, the relationship was a roller coaster. Hariri resigned once after Assad handpicked an army general and ally, Emile Lahoud, to be Lebanon’s president in 1998. Lebanon’s president is elected by parliament, and Syria then controlled the majority by graft, intimidation, and manipulating the political system of a country its troops had occupied for decades.

Hariri returned to the job after new Lebanese parliamentary elections in 2000—and Assad’s death. But in 2004, relations ruptured permanently when Syria pressured Lebanon to pass a constitutional amendment extending Lahoud’s term for three years. Lebanon’s president is limited to a single term of six years.

Hariri opposed the extension. Behind the scenes, he appealed to French President Jacques Chirac to help stop the erosion of Lebanese sovereignty. Chirac took the appeal to President Bush. In 2004, Paris and Washington were still deeply at odds over Iraq. But Lebanon was one issue on which they could agree—and which they could use to rebuild their own relations. Together, they agreed to go to the United Nations to propose an unusual resolution. It called for presidential elections in Lebanon as scheduled, “without foreign interference or influence.” It also called for all foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon, an even bigger affront to Damascus. Without its heavy military presence, Syria would have limited leverage.

The resolution was a direct slap at Syria. It also had rippling consequences.

A week before Lebanon’s parliament was to vote on August 26, 2004, as momentum was building at the United Nations behind the new resolution, Hariri was summoned to Damascus. The session with Syrian President Bashar al Assad, who had taken over after his father’s death, was stormy. It lasted less than fifteen minutes.

Hariri later told his son that Assad put it bluntly, “This extension is to happen, or else I will break Lebanon over your head.”
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On September 2, the United Nations passed resolution 1559.

On September 3, Lebanon’s parliament went ahead and voted to extend the president’s term. In the end, Hariri also voted with the majority to keep Syria’s man in power, even though he had rallied an international effort to defy Damascus.

Six weeks later, however, he resigned.

Over the next four months, Hariri increasingly struck out on his own with the new Future Movement. It was more of an idea than a party. But it reflected a shift in his focus, from rebuilding Lebanon physically to reshaping the nation politically. Lebanon was due to hold elections for parliament in May 2005. They would serve as the test, pitting Hariri’s new coalition against Syria’s candidates.

Hariri knew he was being closely watched. After Lebanese analysts began predicting his alliance would sweep the vote, he received another warning from Damascus. Syrian security services had him “cornered,” a senior official told him bluntly. Hariri should not “take things lightly.”
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The St. George Hotel has long been a landmark on Beirut’s scenic corniche, a symbol of Lebanon’s riches and its woes. The four-story luxury hotel was named after the Christian martyr who allegedly slew a dragon somewhere nearby in the fourth century. When Beirut became the Middle East’s center for banking, education, culture, and espionage in the 1960s, kings, foreign film stars, and spies stayed at the hotel. Its bar overlooking the Mediterranean was the place deals were brokered, secrets exchanged. The St. George became a victim itself shortly after the civil war erupted in 1975. It was left a haunted shell, its pink facade charred. But the pool and an outdoor bar famed for its Bloody Marys remained open. During the five years I lived in Lebanon in the 1980s, Beirutis flocked there during cease-fires, however brief. Whenever the rat-a-tat-tat of rifles or ka-boom of artillery started again, men packed up their backgammon sets, and women grabbed their towels, and we all scurried home—until the next cease-fire. It became a symbol of Lebanese resilience.

On Valentine’s Day, 2005, Rafiq Hariri held talks about the upcoming election with colleagues in parliament. At lunchtime, he headed back to Qoreitem Palace. Hariri always took precautions. His limousines were armored-plated; they also had jamming equipment to block any remote-control device that might set off a bomb. But it was not enough. Just as his five-car motorcade rounded the corner in front of the St. George, then in the final throes of reconstruction, a bomb with over 1,000 pounds of explosives went off. It tore apart the armored cars and the bodies inside. Hariri was killed instantly. Twenty others also died; more than 100 in the area were wounded. The facades of the St. George and buildings in all directions were ripped off. Windows more than one-quarter mile away were blown out. The sound rippled for miles. A black cloud of smoke rising from the bomb site could be seen beyond the city limits.

The crater left in the road in front of the St. George was more than thirty feet wide and six feet deep.

Hariri’s murder was the most traumatic event in the fifteen years since the civil war ended—and perhaps even longer. The assassination was another of the seminal events in the early twenty-first century—like the Palestinian elections and Egypt’s May 25 crackdown—that provoked people in the Middle East to engage in ways they had never done before. It mobilized Lebanese like no single event since the nation was created.

It also launched a new generation of activists. Saad Hariri inherited his father’s mantle, after consultations within the family. “We decided that what my father wanted to achieve had not been achieved,” he said, “and that we had to continue.”

But the assassination also spurred people well outside clan politics.

Asma-Maria Andraos was one of them. She heard the massive blast on the Christian side of the old Green Line. It blew open the windows of her office, whooshed a sliding glass door down its track, and then blasted open the inside doors—all in the flash of a second.

“Everything moved. It was like an earthquake,” she recalled, when I visited her office in Christian-dominated East Beirut. “You think you’ve forgotten those noises from the war, but it came back instantly. I ran to the balcony and saw the black cloud of smoke. Then we switched on the television and those horrible pictures of burnt corpses and burning cars and people crying and ambulances.”

Andraos, a tall woman with a long face, throaty voice, and brown hair that falls down her back, had been highly critical of Hariri’s policies. “He was a ruthless businessman, and I believed you can’t be both prime minister and the biggest businessman in the country,” she explained.

“But he also had a dream, and I admired that,” she said. “And when I heard it was Hariri who was killed I went quite mad, and I wondered: What was going to happen to us? Who was going to hold us down? Who else was doing to fight for us at the superpower level? As long as he was around, we could stick it out.

“I became scared, physically scared,” she said.

Andraos was born in 1971 and was only four years old when the civil war broke out. She is an event planner for product launches, everything from mobile telephones and sport clothing to hygiene products. She had been typical of the young in Lebanon—disillusioned with or disinterested in politics.

But on the day of Hariri’s funeral, Andraos was one of more than 150,000 who turned out on the streets of Beirut. Maronites, Sunnis, Catholics, Druze, Orthodox, Shiites, Armenians, and others—some bitter rivals during the war—followed the ambulance carrying Hariri’s body to the district he had restored. People threw rice from balconies as the cortege passed. Hariri and his bodyguards were laid to rest near Martyr’s Square, in a special burial site in the former parking lot of the Virgin Megastore that was converted into a tented shrine. Christian church bells rang amid the Islamic incantations and calls to prayer from mosque muezzins.