In 1992, Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad needed to replace Lebanon’s incompetent Prime Minister Omar Karami with someone who better understood economics and finance. Why bother conquering Lebanon if it was nothing but a money pit and a headache? He didn’t trust Hariri, exactly, but the man from Sidon seemed the best fit for the job as long as he could be kept in his place.
“Hariri would have the freedom to manage Lebanon’s reconstruction and finances,” historian William Harris wrote8 in The New Face of Lebanon, “keeping both Lebanon and Syria afloat, as long as he left security and foreign relations to Damascus, accepted Syrian vetting of official appointments, and tolerated a financial rake-off for Syrian personalities and their Lebanese associates.”
Hariri didn’t seem to mind the Syrian occupation as much as he might have, at least not initially. If subservience to Damascus meant he could rebuild the country, so be it. Lebanon would be ruled from Damascus whether he took the job or not. And he was just what Lebanon needed after the long years of localized rule by militias. “While warfare was all around him,” journalist Samir Atallah wrote,9 “he came to his country loaded with rice, sugar, and light bulbs. It pained him to see how dark both city and mind were. Wherever he went, he called for reconciliation and reconstruction.”
His Lebanese company Solidere did most of the reconstruction work in the city center, restoring most of the French Mandate buildings shattered by exploding rockets and mortars and gutted by fires and bombs. The rebuilt downtown was a bit antiseptic and fake looking, but it was a pleasant place all the same. Streets were closed to vehicle traffic so pedestrians could enjoy the restaurants, shops, cafés, and bars as they would in the gentrified old quarters of Europe.
“I see Beirut as a jewel lit up at night,” he said to correspondent Nicholas Blanford10 in the 1990s when asked what he expected Lebanon to look like by the year 2000. That’s what he wanted. That’s what he aimed for. While he couldn’t say it out loud, Syria’s smothering occupation and graft stifled the country’s recovery and potential.
The Israeli occupation of a narrow strip of land in the south didn’t help either. Jerusalem didn’t suck hundreds of millions of dollars out of the economy every year like Damascus did, but the Israel Defense Forces waged a slow-motion counterinsurgency against Hezbollah in the border area, and much of the world still thought of Lebanon as shady, unstable, and dangerous. The civil war may have been over, but lasting peace hadn’t arrived everywhere in the country just yet. Without real stability, Lebanon couldn’t fully rejoin the modern global economy.
Hezbollah was the one Lebanese militia that Hafez al-Assad hadn’t disarmed in 1991. It was primarily an Iranian project, but Iran was Syria’s closest ally, and al-Assad found Hezbollah useful.
“For Syria,” William Harris wrote,11 “Hezbollah could persist as both a check on the Lebanese regime and as a means to bother Israel when convenient.” Because Hezbollah “bothered” Israel, so to speak, Israel kept occupation troops in its South Lebanon “security zone” to keep the Iranian-backed militia off its northern border.
As a Lebanese Sunni leader, it would never occur to Hariri to team up with Israel as some Lebanese Christians did during the war, but he also wasn’t thrilled with the fact that the last armed non-state group in the country was a warmongering Iranian-backed Shia militia. His long-term vision depended on no war in Lebanon against anyone for any reason.
Only the Syrian army could disarm Hezbollah, just as it had disarmed the other militias, but al-Assad would have none of it. Hariri wouldn’t have done it himself in any case. He wasn’t a military man, and he never had been. He was a builder, a diplomat, and a compromiser. He hoped to resolve the problem with Israel and Hezbollah through patient negotiation.
The best chance came when Israel and Syria held peace talks in 2000. If al-Assad made a deal with Jerusalem, disarming Hezbollah would have to be part of the package. Lebanon might even be able to start its own peace track with Israel once Syria and Hezbollah weren’t in the way.
Al-Assad, though, refused to close the deal when Israel wouldn’t cede control of the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Hariri was shocked and appalled—and not at Israel, but at al-Assad, who was jeopardizing his vision of a prosperous Lebanon at peace with itself and its neighbors. Henry Kissinger’s old maxim “No war without Egypt, no peace without Syria” still applied.
The government was divided, with President Emile Lahoud and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri on one side and with Hariri and Druze chief Walid Jumblatt on the other.
Lahoud was a former Lebanese army commander handpicked by al-Assad for the presidency. He followed his orders, and he ran the Syrian-Lebanese security state regime like the perfect yes-man. Hariri was a well-respected Sunni leader, but Lahoud’s support in his own Christian community had declined over the years almost to zero. The Christians had always felt the least affection for Syrian rule, and Lahoud was a mere instrument in the hands of al-Assad, in no way a leader of the community he supposedly led.
Berri, who was also the leader of the secular Shia Amal movement, likewise was loyal to Damascus. Unlike Lahoud, though, he did sort of represent the wishes of his community, which had always been more at ease than the others with Greater Syria.
Hariri’s political party Tayyar Mustaqbal, or Future Movement in English, promoted an ideology of liberalism and capitalism, the opposite of that enforced by Syria’s fascist-like Arab Socialist Baath Party regime. Hariri fell out of favor with al-Assad in the late 1990s, as one might expect under these circumstances, and Lahoud dutifully accused him of embezzlement, corruption, and conspiring with Israel against Hezbollah—the latter a serious, though spurious, charge.
No Lebanese leader felt more hostility toward Damascus than Walid Jumblatt, whose own father, Kamal Jumblatt, was assassinated by the regime in 1977. He had no more choice than to go along with the new order than anyone else, but there was never much doubt in his community or in Syria about how he felt.
He began receiving death threats in 2000 when he grumbled about Syria’s refusal to redeploy troops from Beirut to the Bekaa Valley as stipulated by the Taif Agreement. It seemed like a good time to ask for a pullback, if not a withdrawal. Israel had finally withdrawn its own armed forces from the south earlier that year. Hafez al-Assad had died and was replaced by his son Bashar, who many thought might be a reformer. Jumblatt, though, was effectively declared a nonperson by the Syrian authorities, and any hope that Bashar al-Assad might liberalize his father’s regime didn’t last long.
Hariri and Jumblatt did well in the 2000 election, though, and the younger al-Assad had to deal with them. It wasn’t long, however, before the U.S. and France grew tired of dealing with him.
In 1991, the U.S. signed off on Syria’s occupation of Lebanon in return for Hafez al-Assad’s “help” in ousting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The U.S. had enough of Syrian foreign policy, though, by the time the second Iraq war rolled around. The younger al-Assad helped terrorists and insurgents from all over the Arab world transit through Syria into Iraq to fight American soldiers and car bomb civilians. In 2003, a fed-up U.S. Congress retaliated with the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act.12
France became disgruntled with al-Assad for its own reasons. Lebanon was like a little brother to many in the French establishment whose predecessors helped the country achieve independence in 1943. Hariri had a close, personal friendship with French President Jacques Chirac, and al-Assad knew he’d be in serious trouble if the French and Americans joined forces against him.
If he didn’t want to be pushed out of Lebanon, he’d need to shore up his position. What he needed more than anything were pliable Lebanese officials who requested he stay.
Lahoud had been doing that all along and would happily keep at it, but his term in Baabda Palace was set to expire in 2004, and the law only allowed him one term. So al-Assad summoned Hariri to Damascus and ordered him to tell parliament to extend Lahoud’s term b
y three years.
Hariri balked.
“Lahoud is me,” al-Assad said.13 “If you and Chirac want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon on your head and Jumblatt’s.”
Hariri returned to Beirut, frightened and shaken. In his book Killing Mr. Lebanon, Nicholas Blanford relates a pivotal conversation between Hariri and an assistant. The two men assumed Syria could easily dispatch 100,000 Hezbollah supporters into the streets of Beirut to demonstrate in favor of Lahoud’s extension.
“What,” Hariri said,14 “do you think would happen if someone fires into that crowd?”
“Hezbollah would burn the city.”
Hariri did what he was told and announced to Lebanon’s parliament that Lahoud’s presidential term should be extended.
Despite a falling-out between the U.S. and France over the war in Iraq, the two countries did exactly what al-Assad feared most when they jointly sponsored United Nations Security Council Resolution 155915 ordering the withdrawal of all foreign military personnel from Lebanon, meaning but not naming the Syrians, and the disarmament of all militias, meaning but not naming Hezbollah. The resolution passed on September 2, 2004, just five days after the cabinet approved Lahoud’s extension.
The following month, Lahoud’s ministers threatened to quit the cabinet and bring down the government if Hariri didn’t resign. So Hariri resigned and was replaced by the less competent but loyal Omar Karami.
Al-Assad, though, was still sweating. Opposition to his rule in Lebanon was becoming more brazen, and so were his actions. Member of Parliament Marwan Hamadeh, who resigned his cabinet position to protest the extension, barely survived an assassination attempt when his car exploded in front of his house.
Hamadeh survived, though, and Hariri didn’t take the incident as seriously as he otherwise might have. He decided to run for office again in 2005 and figured he’d win big. Most in his Sunni community were with him, of course. Many Christians were, too. They were sick of Lahoud and his Syrian-sponsored security state. Jumblatt and his Druze community would also most likely back him, since he and they were more politically opposed to Damascus than anyone else.
Jumblatt and a number of Christian MPs mounted a public opposition movement called the Bristol Gathering, named after the plush Bristol Hotel in Beirut’s Verdun district where they met to plot strategy. They hoped to overturn Lahoud and al-Assad’s regime in the May 2005 election, which they wanted to be certified by international monitors.
Al-Assad and the pro-Syrian Lebanese were enraged, and they were becoming increasingly dangerous. “You will be crucified above the garbage dump of history,” Assem Qanso, head of the minuscule Lebanese Baath Party, said to Jumblatt.16
Hariri kept a bit of artificial distance between himself and the Bristol Gathering. He didn’t meet with them at the hotel, nor did he publicly attach his name to their movement. Even so, everyone knew that he was quietly with them.
With Hariri set to sweep the election, with the opposition demanding implementation of the Taif Agreement and Resolution 1559, and with increased French and American pressure, al-Assad must have felt desperate. Twelve days after the Bristol Gathering demanded the withdrawal of the Syrian military, somebody who had it in for Hariri blew him and twenty others away with a bomb so large it literally weighed tons. “They threatened him, they charged him with treason, and then they murdered him,” Jumblatt said.17
It was the worst act of terrorism in Lebanon since the end of the civil war, and a historical hinge event that marked the end of an era.
“It was often said that the Syrians could only enter Lebanon with the support of the Christians,” Nicholas Blanford noted,18 “and would only leave if they lost the support of the Muslims.”
They certainly lost the support of the Muslims, or at least the support of the Sunnis.
“The assassination instantly cemented the mass of Sunni Muslims . . . in the opposition alignment,” William Harris wrote.19 “When added to the vast majority of Christians and Druze, together at least 40% of Lebanese, simple arithmetic indicated that something close to two-thirds of Lebanon was stirring against Damascus.”
Al-Assad’s overlordship in Lebanon survived many things, but it would not survive this.
The Syrians and their Lebanese allies had a much easier time managing the opposition when it was small.
“There were only 200 of us at first,” Nabil Abou-Charaf said when I met him downtown for coffee. He was only twenty-four years old but belonged to the original core of anti-occupation activists and became a leader of the larger youth movement almost by default.
“We held demonstrations and were arrested, beaten, and tortured,” he said. “But we kept going anyway. Now we number one million. The Syrians, their Lebanese puppets, and Hezbollah can’t stop us now. We are too strong and too many.”
He and I sat at an outdoor table in Nejmeh Square, an area rebuilt by Hariri’s Solidere company. Hariri himself drank his last coffee there just minutes before he was assassinated. I could see his table from mine covered in bouquets of flowers.
“The movement is totally led by young people,” Nabil said. “Both Christians and Muslims. We stay up all night strategizing and getting to know each other. It’s amazing, but it’s also sad. We never really knew each other until now. Hariri’s assassination broke down that wall. We are talking together—really talking and getting to know each other—for the first time.”
They were children of the elite mostly, and of the middle class. The children of street sweepers and maids weren’t wiling away their evening hours in bull sessions with the sons and daughters of their former enemies. Political attitudes in Lebanon, though, were often determined by the elite. They trickled down. “Lebanese people are always ready for anything,” one rather parochial Christian said when he picked me up hitchhiking in the mountains. “If you lead us to peace, we are ready for peace. If you lead us to war, we are ready for war.”
“It is so important,” Nabil continued, “that we heal the old wounds. We cannot go back to the past, to the civil war. We want to rebuild our country.” He tapped the side of his head. “And that includes rebuilding our minds. Lebanon has been so divided. We stand not only for freedom and independence, but also national unity and a new, modern, common, tolerant Lebanese identity.”
Rustom Ghazaleh ran Syria’s mukhabarat intelligence network in Lebanon from his headquarters in the ethnic Armenian town of Anjar near the Syrian border. He supposedly had 6,000 Lebanese working for him as informants in Beirut alone. They may have been useful when only Nabil and a few hundred others stood up to al-Assad and his rule, but what use were they now? Most of the country was against them.
“Every waiter,” Nabil said, “every taxi driver, every shopkeeper, and every person who works in hotels is a potential informer.” Just then our waiter came to the table and asked if we wanted more coffee. “We assume we are being watched constantly,” Nabil continued, not caring who overheard, “because we are. We are not free, but we are no longer afraid to express ourselves. The climate of fear still exists, but it is breaking. Next time you visit Lebanon, it will be a free country.”
Lebanon already looked and felt like a free country to me and would, in fact, become an actually free country before I left. Events were moving too quickly and intensely for al-Assad and his people to control the outcome or even keep up.
Tens of thousands had turned out for Hariri’s funeral on February 16, 2005. Everyone but the government was invited. Strict political sectarians may have dismissed him as the leader of the Sunnis, which he was, but he was also prime minister of the whole country, and he rebuilt it for everyone. Christians, Druze, and even a smaller number of Shias made their way downtown to show their respect, cry, and even scream. They buried him between the Mohammad al-Amin mosque and Martyrs Square, where the heart of downtown used to be before it was pulverized.
A three-day strike began the following day. Demonstrations that started outside Hariri’s house in West Beirut rapidly spread
throughout the country. Portraits of Bashar al-Assad were ripped from the walls as though he were a dictator who had already been toppled. By the time I arrived in late March, not a single one of his posters remained outside the Hezbollah-occupied areas.
An-Nahar newspaper publisher Ghassan Tueni fulminated against Lebanon’s servile government headed by Emile Lahoud and Omar Karami as well as their masters in Syria. “We warn the government of the Caliph Omar,” he said,20 “of even thinking that it can benefit from this disaster to postpone the elections to avoid there being a referendum on its incrimination.”
Karami didn’t have the stomach for this. He had dutifully taken Hariri’s place as prime minister with Syrian backing, and now his own country hated him. His own community seemed to hate him the most. He was a Sunni, and the Sunnis were furious. He didn’t have many real friends, only cynical allies in a corrupt and expiring system.
“May God preserve Lebanon,” he said.21 Then he quit.
Hezbollah was alarmed by all this. The only reason it still even existed as a militia instead of a neutered political party was because al-Assad found it useful and helped Iran supply it with weapons over the Syrian border. If Syria was to be thrown out of Lebanon and the pro-Syrian government replaced by a pro-Western regime, Hezbollah was in serious trouble.
On March 8, 2005, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah bused 500,000 Hezbollah officials and supporters into downtown Beirut for a massive show of solidarity with al-Assad and his government.22 They carried Hezbollah flags and portraits of the Syrian tyrant. Some were photographed brandishing pistols and knives.
Lebanon, all of a sudden, didn’t look so anti-Syrian after all.
If there was any serious doubt, though, the question was settled once and for all six days later on March 14, when the opposition brought more than a fourth of the entire country downtown for the biggest demonstration in Lebanon’s history. More than twice as many people went down there to demand free elections and an end to occupation than came out with Hezbollah to say thanks to al-Assad.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 2
