I WAS BUYING a Valentine’s present on February 14 when a friend called me up and blurted, “A huge explosion has rocked Beirut! We haven’s seen anything like it since the Civil War!”

No details were available except that either the St. George Hotel or the Phoenicia had been severely damaged. Having lived many wonderful years in Lebanon, I immediately dialed the number of a friend who lives in Ras Beirut and is a hard-line Hariri supporter to check if she was okay.

She answered, sobbing quietly, “They’ve killed Hariri! I can’t believe it. They’ve killed Hariri!”

I nearly left the shop without paying, unable to believe that the “unsinkable” Hariri, the most well-protected man in Lebanon, had been blown apart by 350 kg of plastic explosives.

Photographs released the next day in the daily Al-Safir caused mayhem in Beirut as Hariri’s supporters saw him lying dead, half-naked, with parts of his body still aflame. Disbelief, horror and anger took over the Lebanese capital, and I wept as I watched the news that afternoon. I had lived in Hariri’s Beirut and knew what a great man he had been and how much respect he commanded from both Muslims and Christians.

Rafiq Al-Hariri was born in Sidon on November 1, 1944, to a middle-class, if low-income, Sunni Muslim family, his father a farmer and greengrocer. In 1964, he left shabby Sidon for the glamorous life of Beirut, which was then boiling with extravagance, money and politics. He studied commerce at the Beirut Arab University and joined the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), a forerunner of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Influenced by then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hariri got involved in student politics, took part in pro-Nasser demonstrations, and distributed manifestos praising the Egyptian leader. He even worked as a bouncer for the ANM’s fundraising activities. But the seeds of the man’s political involvement had been sown years earlier when, still a teenager, Hariri was swept up by Nasser’s charisma and vision of Arab nationalism. He was mesmerized, at the age of 14, by the Syrian-Egyptian Union of 1958 and lamented its dissolution in 1961.

Hariri cut short his studies during his sophomore year in 1965, unable to afford tuition. Instead, he borrowed some money from a friend and emigrated to Saudi Arabia in search of a better life. There, Hariri started off as a mathematics teacher in Jeddah, then became an auditor for an engineering firm before setting up his own subcontracting company, CICONEST, in 1969.

CICONEST made good money during the Saudi construction bubble that accompanied the oil boom of the 1970s, building hospitals, hotels and residential palaces for the Saudi royal family. Hariri was able to build and deliver the Massara Hotel in Taif in a record-breaking six months, which endeared him to the Saudi royals, who granted him citizenship in 1978.

In the late 1970s, with an increase in his cashflow, he purchased Oger, the famed French construction company, and went on to become a favorite companion of King Fahd, who had assumed the Saudi throne in 1982.

While in the Arab Gulf, Hariri watched in dismay as his country fell into civil war after April 1975. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) of Yasser Arafat had set up a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, legitimized by the Arab League and backed by Sunni Muslims on the pretext that they were waging a war against Israel. The Maronites went to Syria, requesting the assistance of President Hafez Al-Assad, who sent his army into Lebanon in 1976 to crack down on Arafat and expel him from Beirut. Maronite militias clashed with Arafat’s PLO, resulting in destruction of major parts of the country and leading to thousands of deaths on the streets of Beirut.

By 1983, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd had been dragged into the Lebanese crisis, sending the trusted Hariri to mediate between warring factions through coordination with President Assad, a good friend of the House of Saud.

Hariri befriended Assad, Syrian Vice-President Abd Al-Halim Khaddam, and Chief-of-Staff Hikmat Shihabi, working with the three to bring all of Lebanon’s warring factions to “National Dialogue Conferences” in Geneva in 1983 and Lausanne in 1984.

As his construction company began to operate in Lebanon, rebuilding what the militias were destroying, Hariri started pouring his personal funds into rebuilding the country’s people. In 1979, he founded the Islamic Institute of Higher Education in Sidon and set up the Hariri Foundation for Culture and Higher Education, granting scholarships to underprivileged Lebanese students. While the former focused on the nation’s Muslim students, the Hariri Foundation funded the studies of all students regardless of their creed. When he was murdered last month, the Hariri Foundation had educated at least 34,000 young Lebanese students at leading universities in Lebanon, Britain, the United States and Canada. Virtually all of them returned to Lebanon and became staunch Hariri loyalists, doing wonders for his parliamentary campaigns in 1996 and 2000.

After the Israeli invasion of 1982, Hariri had his Oger Liban clear the rubble and repair roads damaged by the Israeli Army free of charge. Years later, while he was prime minister, one of his critics accused Hariri of having funded warring militias during the civil war, encouraging them to destroy downtown Beirut so he could profiteer from rebuilding.

Others argued, just as unfairly, that Hariri occupied himself with extravagant construction projects, especially in the posh districts of Beirut, and forgot about the poorer neighborhoods. This critique was repeated loudly in 2002 when he tried to divert one of the entrances to the Lebanese capital so that people driving into Beirut would not have to pass through poor Shi’a neighborhoods. In point of fact, he had offered the area’s leaders the chance to engage in a Solidere-style reconstruction projects, but was sharply refused.

Hariri always politely shrugged off the accusations, pointing to the Hariri Foundation and how it catered to the needs of the Lebanese, having educated over 30,000 people at his own personal expense.

During the 1980s, Hariri laid the groundwork for a relationship with Syria that became key in his political career. He became a frequent visitor at the Presidential Palace in Damascus and a good personal friend of Hafez Al-Assad. Hariri bought a home for himself in the posh Abu Rummaneh district of Damascus and presented Assad with a gift constructed by Saudi Oger: the elaborate Omayad Conference Hall near Damascus Airport, which was originally intended as a new palace for Assad.

He backed Assad’s 1985 Tripartite Agreement, orchestrated by Khaddam, bringing the warring factions of Shi’a warlord Nabih Berri, Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt and Maronite warlord Elie Hobeika, to a cease-fire in Damascus. They collectively worked to wreck the May 17 Agreement between President Amin Gemayel and Israel. Hariri tried in vain to serve as an intermediary between Assad and Gemayel, who hated each another.

In 1989, Hariri once again played the mediator by bringing all warring factions to Saudi Arabia, where they signed the Taif Accord, formally declaring an end to the Lebanese Civil War and demanding a full Syrian troop withdrawal. One year later, in October 1989, the Syrian Army stormed the Presidential Palace in Beirut and ousted General Michel Aoun, who had been appointed prime minister by Gemayel in 1988 and was waging a “war of liberation” against Syria.

Order and calm was restored to the Lebanese capital when Elias Hraoui, a seasoned Maronite leader who was pro-Syrian, was brought in as president by Hafez Al-Assad. A free hand in Lebanon was Syria’s reward for joining the US-led coalition in Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in January 1991.

Hariri and Hraoui got along well from day one, understanding that coexistence and cooperation between Sunnis and Maronites was essential to a lasting peace. Together, they created a perfect political partnership unseen since the days of Lebanon’s first post-independence president, Bechara Al-Khouri, and his prime minister, Riyad Al-Sulh.

Hariri promised the Lebanese president that he would use his international influence to guarantee long-term loans for the reconstruction of Lebanon. Hraoui responded by appointing Fadil Shalak, one of Hariri’s trusted aids, now editor-in-chief of Hariri’s Al-Mustaqbal newspaper, as head of the government’s Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR).

As soon as re-construction began in 1992, however, Israel launched a series of military attacks on Lebanon in response to operations by Hezbollah, greatly undermining investor confidence in the new Lebanese Republic, discrediting President Hraoui and forcing the devaluation of the Lebanese pound. In February 1992, Israel killed Hezbollah Secretary-General Abbas Al-Musawi, almost crippling Hariri’s efforts to rebuild his country.

The Lebanese Central Bank spent one- third of its foreign exchange reserves to support the pound, but was unable to contain the crisis. By May 1, 1992, the exchange rate had fallen to 2,000 pounds to the US dollar, prompting the weak Prime Minister Omar Karameh to resign from office in the face of widespread labor syndicate strikes that crippled Beirut.

The veteran Rashid Al-Sulh was brought in to replace him, but when he too failed to resolve the economic crisis, Hraoui called on Rafiq Al-Hariri to become prime minister.

Hariri formed his first Cabinet on October 22nd 1992, in the midst of public optimism that he would be the man to end 17 years of suffering for the Lebanese people. Within days, the value of the Lebanese pound soared by 15 percent as confidence was restored in Lebanon, largely as a result of Hariri’s immense reputation in the international business community.

In short order, he created a reconstruction and economic restructuring program no other leader had been able to envision. Among the first steps was to float a Eurobond offering, the first in the Arab world. By 1994, economic growth was at 8 percent and inflation had dipped from a staggering 131 percent to a more reasonable 29 percent. In December 1996, he held the first international donors’ conference for Lebanon at the US State Department in Washington, DC. It was chaired US President Bill Clinton and co-chaired by Hariri, who promised he would make Lebanon “the Singapore of the Middle East.”

At the heart of his proposal was a plan to rebuild destroyed downtown Beirut, which had been the core of tourism and financial, political and social activity of the Middle East in the 1960s. Hariri’s vehicle was Solidere, whose name today is used interchangeably with that of downtown Beirut. His reconstruction plan was called Horizon 2000; downtown Beirut re-opened to the public on schedule in the summer of 2000. The company, in which Hariri was a shareholder, grouped the interests of the state, downtown landowners and tenants and a share floated on the stock exchange to finance the development of the wartorn heart of the capital.

To attract expatriate capital, Hariri reduced income tax to 10 percent and, in macroeconomic policy, gave priority to the financial sector over the agricultural one, claiming that once Beirut was resurrected, the tourism sector would flourish and enrich all of Lebanon.

On February 27, 2001, Hariri held his second international donors’ conference for Lebanon at the Elysée Palace in France, hosted by his good friend Jacque Chirac. The conference, dubbed PARIS I, was a huge success for Hariri, who used his personal influence to attract foreign investment and came out with 500 million from the World Bank and European Investment Bank.

On November 23, 2002, he held PARIS II, getting $10.1 million in grants along with $2.4 billion from lending countries, $3.6 billion from commercial banks operating in Lebanon, and $4.1 billion from the Central Bank of Lebanon.

Hariri’s reconstruction campaign was multifaceted. In addition to the removal of rubble and the erection of buildings, he tried to give Beirut a cultural face-lift, encouraging concerts, operas, festivals and bringing world famous performers, such as the tenor Luciano Pavarotti, to Beirut’s stages. (Pavarotti flew in on Hariri’s personal jet.) In 1998, he opened the rebuilt and expanded Beirut International Airport, having convinced the United States to lift travel restrictions on its citizens to Lebanon, and presided over the first municipality elections in Lebanon in 35 years.

Hariri was accused of corruption and nepotism by his opponents, however, because he had packed the government with loyalists. Fouad Al-Siniora, a personal friend from his childhood who had been his corporate chief financial officer, became minister of finance. Bahij Tabboreh, one of his company’s lawyers, became minister of justice, while Riyad Salameh, who handled Hariri’s account at Merrill Lynch, became governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon.

Farid Makari, vice-president of Saudi Oger, became minister of information, and Suhayl Yammut, Hariri’s business manager in Brazil, became the new governor of Mount Lebanon. Walid Jumblatt, the pro-Syrian Druze leader who had worked closely with Hariri since the early 1980s, becoming a personal friend, was appointed minister of the displaced, a new post created by Hariri in April 1993 to compensate and resettle the thousands of Lebanese uprooted during the war.

The fact was simple: Hariri formed his Cabinet like an executive board of directors and treated Lebanon’s reconstruction as a company would treat restructuring and in the process made the nation what it is today.

Throughout his first term in office from 1992-1999, Hariri also proved an artful manager of relations with Syria, which had tens of thousands of troops in Lebanon and controlled key border and police services. Hariri established a good working relationship with General Ghazi Kenaan, the commander of Syrian troops in Lebanon, and flew quickly to Damascus whenever frequent arguments erupted between Kenaan and Hraoui to have them peacefully settled by President Assad. Often, he was forced to spread oil on troubled waters to quiet anti-Syrian demonstrations throughout the country.

In 1995, Hariri lobbied to amend the Lebanese constitution to allow Hraoui another three-year term as president, as Damascus seriously wanted to avoid an abrupt transition of power.

But his decency toward Syria went far beyond that: Using his excellent relations with Chirac, Hariri facilitated a trip to Paris by Dr. Bashar Al-Assad prior to his assumption of power in 1999, giving him his first international exposure while the son of Hafez was being groomed for the presidency. Chirac received the young man with presidential honors.

When Hafez Al-Assad died in 2000, Hariri eulogized him like no other Arab leader, marketing Bashar as the new president of Syria in a manner matched only by state-run Syrian TV. His relationship with the Assad family had started to become complicated in 1998, however, when Syria brought in Army Commander Emile Lahoud to replace President Elias Hraoui.

Hariri did not like Lahoud, considering him a walking, talking public relations disaster, and he warned that military men cannot lead democratic nations. When the Syrians insisted, Hariri resigned from the premiership and moved into the opposition, criticizing Lahoud and his new pro-Syrian Prime Minister Salim Al-Hoss.

While out of office, Hariri established Al-Mustaqbal as a mouthpiece for his opposition to the Lahoud regime, promising his supporters a smashing comeback during the parliamentary elections of 2000. Although out of office, his great influence was felt all over Lebanon, because most services in the Lebanese capital were owned, co-owned, or managed by Hariri, Inc.: from Solidere, which had become the heart of Beirut commerce, politics, high society and finance, to leading newspapers like Al-Mustaqbal, Al-Nahhar (where he was a major shareholder), Future Television, bus companies, Bank Mediteranee, MedGulf Insurance and Sukleen, the massive garbage-collecting company in Lebanon. Most of them provided vital services that the Lebanese government was itself unable to provide.

Many critics accused him of leaving office in 1998 to avoid blame for the huge debt he had imposed on Lebanon, which rose from $2.5 billion in 1992 to $18.3 billion in 1998, and a decline in economic growth from 8 percent in 1994 to under 2 percent in 1998. The figures were accurate, but reconstruction is impossible without taking on debt.

While post-war Europe had the Marshal Plan, Lebanon had Hariri.

Hariri fought hard in the parliamentary elections of 2000 and stormed back into the prime minister’s office with 106 of 128 seats in Parliament. The breadth and depth of his victory were unmatched by any other leader in Lebanon’s modern history.

It was a great victory for a man of humble origins to defeat politicians who had been born into some of the oldest and most highly respected political families in Beirut.

Hariri’s public popularity was at an all-time high, and the old team was back in power. The prime minister immediately started spending his political capital with a reform program that reduced the size of the bureaucracy, privatized many public sector industries and sharply slashed government spending.

Syria was not pleased with his return to power, fearing Hariri would use his towering influence, which had only grown during his two years in opposition, to further undermine the Lahoud regime. Having just lost Hafez Al-Assad, however, and busy with domestic issues, the Syrians had not interfered in the parliamentary elections of 2000. As a result, many of their traditional allies, including Prime Minister Salim Al-Hoss and Maronite warlord Elie Hobeika, were defeated at the polls.

The Syrians, for their part, watched from a distance at first as Lahoud and Hariri bickered from day one over the separation of power, security issues and government policy. Damascus intervened in 2001, authorizing Lahoud to crack down on a series of anti-Syrian activists, accusing them, with manufactured evidence, of plotting with Israel to undermine Syria’s influence in Lebanon.

Rafiq Al-Hariri was not informed of the move, sending off a clear message: economic affairs were his domain, but political and security issues were the responsibility of Lahoud .

Hariri responded in January 2002 by saying that Syria’s archenemy Michel Aoun, in exile in Paris since 1988, could return to Lebanon and would not be arrested. This time, the Syrians were not informed. This infuriated the old guard in Damascus, which summoned him for consultations and ordered him to remain silent on such sensitive issues.

The pro-Syrian Public Prosecutor Adnan Addoum snapped back: “Premier Hariri was talking politics. Its up to the judiciary to make the decision.” Justice Minister Samir Al-Jisr echoed him saying that Hariri had no jurisdiction to discuss issues that were not part of his job description as prime minister.

In February 2002, while Hariri was at PARIS II promising investors that no hostilities would take place on the Lebanese-Israeli border, the Syrian-backed Hezbollah launched a missile attack on Israel, killing one soldier, prompting an angry and discredited Hariri to reply, through his Al-Mustaqbal newspaper, that the operation had been carried out with the “wrong timing.”

An angry President Assad canceled a scheduled meeting with Hariri in Damascus.

Yet Hariri had remained fair toward Syria. After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, he lobbied President George W. Bush not to include Syria or Hezbollah on the first White House list of “terrorism-sponsoring countries.” Bush responded affirmatively. When, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, the US began to step up its rhetoric against the Baathist regime in Syria, Hariri again swiftly responded. Under pressure, he dissolved his Cabinet and replaced it with one that included pro-Syrian moderates, including the Maronite leaders Sulayman Franjiyyieh, Karim Pakradoni, and Assem Qanso, leader of the Lebanese Baath Party.

But Damascus seemed unimpressed by the move. Relations between the two sides hit rock bottom when Syria decided to renew the tenure of President Emile Lahoud by amending article 49 of the Lebanese constitution. The move infuriated Hariri, who curtly refused and called on his allies, notably Walid Jumblatt, to do the same.

He went to Syria, met with Assad and, according to Al-Nahhar, stormed out red-faced at Syria’s insistence on Lahoud.

Hariri resigned from the premiership when Lahoud was re-elected and moved into opposition once again, promising a smashing comeback in the parliamentary elections of May 2005, as he had done in 2000.

Always maintaining his fall-back position, Hariri did not make a single provocative statement against Syria, but rather played the puppet master, pulling strings through Jumblatt by having him call for a full Syrian troop withdrawal from Lebanon, along with an end to Lahoud’s regime. It is widely believed that Hariri used his great influence with Washington and Chirac to push for UN Resolution 1559 calling for the evacuation of the Syrian Army’s 15,000 from Lebanon.

Hariri was murdered on February 14, 2005, as he was leaving the Lebanese Parliament with former Economy Minister Basel Fulayhan. Almost immediately, the opposition pointed fingers at Syria, while Damascus and its allies pointed toward Israel, claiming that only Tel Aviv benefited from the assassination.


Hariri’s home was immediately turned into a new focal point of national unity on the day of his killing. Opposition members gathered there issued a statement holding Syria and Lebanon collectively responsible for having failed to protect the former prime minister and demanded Syrian troops leave the country immediately.

Those issuing the statement from Hariri’s Beirut home were a motley collection of leaders, many of them previously archenemies. Men like Amin Gemayel met, embraced and worked with one-time pro-Syrian leaders like Walid Jumblatt, Basem Al-Sabe and Marwan Hamadeh (himself the target of a failed assassination attempt late last year). Ex-Army Commander Michel Aoun visited Hariri’s home in France, paying condolences to his wife Naziq, and appeared on satellite TV saying that he would, “remain loyal to the legacy of the martyr Rafiq Al-Hariri.”

A hurried condemnation by President Bashar Al-Assad was not enough to defuse the rising tension in Beirut. Demonstrators took to the streets chanting “Syria Out!”

Syria’s reply was feeble, with Information Minister Mehdi Dakhlallah saying: “Syria regards this as an act of terrorism, a crime that seeks to de-stabilize Lebanon,” adding, “Syria expressed its support and backing for Lebanon,” and that it was a “black day” for Syria, Lebanon and all Arabs.

Adding insult to injury, the Syrians, afraid of public reaction in Lebanon, ran a normal news report on his assassination the following morning, whereas the Beirut press devoted whole editions to the slain leader. Syria did not declare a three-day mourning period for Hariri, although Hariri had declared mourning in Lebanon both in 1994, during the death of President Assad’s son Basil, and in 2000, when Assad himself died.

Syrian officials did not go to pay condolences at Hariri’s residence, and Assad, expected to make a visit of his own to Beirut to pay his respects, did not make the journey. The outpouring of anger at Syria was repeated during Hariri’s massive funeral, in which his family insisted that neither Lahoud, nor any member of the Lebanese government, attend the service.

Within a week diplomatic recriminations were flying, and anti-Syrian protests continued throughout Lebanon. The United States recalled its ambassador to Damascus, met with Maronite Patriarch Mar Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir and invited him to the White House, and is demanding Syria withdraw its troops immediately.

The United Nations went into special secession hours after the assassination took place, demanding the immediate implementation of UN Resolution 1559. Secretary-General Kofi Anan got on the phone with Walid Jumblatt, rather than members of the Lebanese government, offering his condolences and asking Jumblatt to watch out for himself. The UN will be sending a commission to investigate Hariri’s death, headed by Irish Deputy Police Commissioner Peter Fitzgerald.

Chirac, who went to Beirut to weep at Hariri’s grave, has called for an international commission to investigate the assassination.

At press time, downtown Beirut witnessed the largest spontaneous demonstration in the Arab world in recent memory as hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from all religions, political parties and walks of life marched from the site of Hariri’s assassination through Solidere. Their demands: That the international community intervene and that Syria withdraw now.

If nothing else, that kind of inter-faith and inter-party unity is a fitting legacy the man who proudly restored Beirut to regional power as he dominated his nation’s political and economic life for two decades would have been proud to have left behind.

Damascus, Syria.
March, 2005.

Dr Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst
Source: Egypt Today Online