BEIRUT, 15 February 2005 — I saw the blast wave coming down the Corniche. My home was only a few hundred meters from the detonation and my first instinct was to look up, to search for the high-altitude Israeli planes that regularly break the sound barrier over Beirut. Then I saw customers coming bloodied from their broken-windowed restaurants and the great cancerous stain of smoke rising from the road outside the St. George Hotel.
Beirut is my home-from-home, home from the dangers of Baghdad, and now here was Baghdad in Lebanon, a Saint Valentine’s Day massacre in the streets of one of the Middle East’s safest cities. I ran down the Corniche, everyone else fleeing in the opposite direction, until I simply walked into a mass of rubble and flaming cars.
There was a man, a big plump man lying on the pavement opposite the still derelict war-damaged hotel. I thought he was a sack until I saw the top of his skull. And there was a woman’s hand in the road, still in a glove. There were bodies burning in a car, flaming away, a terrible hand hanging outside a motorist’s window. There were still no policemen, no ambulances, no fire brigade. The petrol tanks of the cars were starting to explode, spraying fire across the street and I couldn’t take in the extent of the damage because of the heat and the smoke. Then I saw a man I knew, one of Rafik Hariri’s bodyguards, standing in terror.
“The big man has gone,” he said.
The Big Man? Hariri? I’d met an AP reporter who’d heard the same thing. And at first I thought that Lebanon’s ex-prime minister, “Mr. Lebanon”, the man who more than anyone else rebuilt this city from the ashes of civil war, must have left, ‘gone’ away, escaped.
But how could he have escaped this funeral pyre? A group of cops ran into the devastation, and a man — another bodyguard, I thought — ran shrieking towards a set of burning Mercedes limousines crying “Ya-allah,” calling upon God to be his witness. Hariri only traveled in a convoy of heavily armored Mercedes. No wonder the explosion was so massive. It would have to be to rip open the armored doors. I followed a plainclothes detective past a still burning car — there was another body inside, cowled in flames — to the edge of a pit. It was at least fifteen feet deep. This was the crater. I slowly clambered down the edge. All that was left of the car bomb were a few pieces of metal an inch in length.
The blast had sent another car — perhaps one of Hariri’s — soaring through the air into the third floor of the empty hotel’s annex where it was still burning fiercely.
Hariri, I kept saying to myself. I had sat with him many times, for interviews, at press conferences, at lunches and dinners. He once spoke most movingly to me about the son he lost in a driving accident in America.
He had told me he believed in the afterlife. He had many enemies. Political enemies in Lebanon, Syrians who suspected — correctly — that he wanted them out of Lebanon, real estate enemies — for he had personally purchased large areas of Beirut — and media enemies because he owned both a newspaper and a television station.
But he could be a good and kind man even if he was a ruthless businessman; I once compared him to the cat which eats the canary and then cheerfully admits that it tasted good. He sent the quotation off to his friends. His hand was one of the mightiest I had ever shaken.
I could not see his body. But as I looked through the smoke and fire and clambered over the fire brigade hoses, I looked beyond to the new Beirut ‘center ville’, the reconstructed center of this fine city which Hariri’s own company — he owned 10 percent of the shares in Solidere — was building from its Dresden-like ruins. He had died within meters of his own creation. Huge chunks of concrete lay across the road and pools of blood and small, terrifying things: A shoe, a man’s expensive coat, a woman’s glove — with a hand still inside.
This was a bomb that took a long time to construct, a long time to plan. Parked outside the wall of an empty hotel, few would have looked at the car or noticed that it was weighed down on its axles by the weight of explosives, as it must have been. The perpetrators were ruthless men. A small explosion last November, an attempt — ironically the same distance from my home — to assassinate a prominent Druze figure, Marwan Hamade, was so small it killed only his driver. But yesterday’s murderers were heedless of the innocent. They wanted to kill Rafik Hariri. Nothing else mattered.
In all the surrounding streets, men and women were emerging with blood all over their clothes. Thousands of windows had smashed into them and they stood there, dribbling blood onto their shoes and trousers and skirts as the first ambulance-men screamed at the firemen to clear their hoses from the pavements. The length of the street was slippery with water and blood. In all I counted 22 cars exploding and burning. The billionaire who had dined with kings and princes — whose personal friendship with Jacques Chirac helped Lebanon ride its $41 billion public debt — had ended his life in this inferno.
In private, he did not hide his animosity towards the Hezbollah, whose attacks on Israeli occupation troops before their 2000 retreat would set back his plans for Lebanon’s economic recovery. And while he tolerated the Syrians, he had his own plans for their military departure. Was it true, as they said in Beirut these past few weeks, that Hariri was the secret leader of the political opposition to the Syrian presence? Or were his enemies even more sinister people?
Lebanon is built on institutions that enshrine sectarianism as a creed, in which the president must always be a Christian Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim — like Hariri — and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. Anyone setting out to murder Hariri would know how this could re-open all the fissures of the 1975-1990 civil war.
Thousands of weeping followers of Hariri gathered outside his palace at Koreitem last night, demanding to know who had killed their leader. Hariri men toured the streets, ordering shopkeepers to pull down their shutters. Were the ghosts of the civil war to be re-awoken from their fifteen years of slumber? I do not know the answer. But that black cloud that drifted for more than an hour over Beirut yesterday afternoon darkened the people beneath with more than its shadow.
We knew something was coming. I had met with an old journalist colleague for coffee on Saturday and we both said we felt there was a new, menacing atmosphere about Beirut. We didn’t mean the sky-high prices and the usual corruption stories, but the incendiary language in which Lebanese politics was now being conducted. “Walid Jumblatt better watch out,” my colleague remarked, and I agreed. Just last month, Jumblatt, the Druze leader in Lebanon, announced that “elements” of the Syrian Baath party had murdered his father Kemal Jumblatt in 1975. This was explosive stuff — and he said all this to a Christian Maronite audience at St. Joseph University.
The response last week was even more dangerous. The Baath party demanded that the Lebanese state should prosecute Jumblatt for slander and treachery. Then Omar Karami, the colorless and very pro-Syrian prime minister — Hariri’s replacement — claimed that those members of the political opposition demanding a Syrian retreat from Lebanon were “working with the Israelis.” Others used the word ‘Mossad’ instead of Israel. In Lebanon, this kind of language leads to a detonation.
Forthcoming elections — and an attempt to change electoral boundaries that might have deprived anti-Syrian factions of parliamentary seats — contrived to heat up the controversy already begun by UN Security Council 1559, principally supported by the Americans and French, which demands the withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon. They came here, of course, in 1976, under an Arab League agreement to end the civil war — they failed — and the accord was at the time approved by President Carter and, partially, by Israel. But the post-war Taif agreement called for a Syrian withdrawal to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon which Syria did not honor. Its proteges in Lebanon loudly announced that they did not want the Syrians to leave.
Chirac insisted that they should go. Hariri was one of Chirac’s best friends. They even had a beer together in the new city center when the French president was last in Beirut. No bodyguards then. No security. But things have changed.
A few weeks ago, the United States stepped in, warning that it would not tolerate any violence before the Lebanese elections — yesterday showed what America’s enemies thought of the threat — and repeating its demand for a Syrian withdrawal. Not until all other UN resolutions have been obeyed, announced Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, constantly antagonistic towards Hariri and constantly faithful to Syria. The Israelis have to leave the West Bank before Syria leaves Lebanon. The Lebanese Christians opposed to Syria insisted that Damascus had broken the Taif agreement — which is true.
The Lebanese have no more appetite for war. The conflict which ended in 1990 destroyed their families and their homes and drained their lives of meaning. A new generation of Lebanese have returned from overseas educations, ambitious, irritated by the continuing sectarianism of official life as much as Syria’s much reduced military presence. But the Syrian intelligence service remains in Lebanon — its headquarters are in the eastern town of Aanjar — and its pursuit of Israeli spies and treachery has become an obsession.
Into this darkening scenario, Hariri cast a wistful eye, seeing no evil and claiming to hear no evil. So what was his real role in the opposition?
Was he merely a disinterested onlooker, gazing down from his palace walls at the small men of Lebanese politics as they bickered about gerrymandered political boundaries? Or did he have other ambitions? Yesterday proved that someone believed he did.
