Killing Mr Lebanon. The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East

247 Pages·2006·0.911 MB·English

by  Nicholas Blanford

Killing Mr Lebanon

Killing Mr Lebanon
The assassination of Rafik Hariri and its
impact on the Middle East
Nicholas Blanford
Published in 2006 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and Canada distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Nicholas Blanford, 2006
The right of Nicholas Blanford to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 10: 1 84511 202 4 HB
ISBN 13: 978 1 84511 202 8 HB
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Typeset in Palatino by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
C o n t e n t s
Preface vii
CHAPTER ONE
Countdown 1
CHAPTER TWO
The Fixer 13
CHAPTER THREE
Pax Syriana 40
CHAPTER FOUR
The Breach 71
CHAPTER FIVE
Showdown 100
CHAPTER SIX
The Beirut Spring 128
CHAPTER SEVEN
A New Lebanon? 174
CHAPTER EIGHT
Epilogue: The Return of War 212
Notes 220
Index 231

P r e f a c e
I was working at home when the explosion that killed Rafik Hariri blasted
through my quiet neighbourhood two kilometres from the St George
Hotel, rattling windows and sending a few loose panes of glass smashing
onto the street outside. I telephoned my United Nations peacekeeping
contacts in south Lebanon, assuming that the thunderclap was produced
by an Israeli Air Force jet flying a low-level supersonic run over Beirut, a
muscle-flexing gesture that often meant trouble along Lebanon’s southern
border with Israel. But all was quiet in the south, they said, although they
were hearing from their colleagues in Beirut that there was smoke rising
from the hotel district on the downtown seafront.
Minutes later I was waving my Lebanese press card and pushing
through the cordon of soldiers who were trying to seal off the site of the
explosion. I had driven past the St George Hotel just an hour earlier with
my wife and two children, a routine Monday morning trip to the Hamra
shopping district in the western half of the city. But the carnage and chaos
on the street outside the St George was anything but routine. For many in
the West, the name Beirut may still conjure images of Hobbesian violence,
but not for me. Beirut had been my home for over a decade. The 16-year
civil war had ended in 1990, four years before I moved to Lebanon.
Although blood continued to be shed throughout the 1990s in the stony
hills and wadis of the south where Hizbullah’s resistance fighters battled
Israeli occupation forces, Beirut was a city at peace. Watching the firemen
gently pry loose blackened, rubbery corpses from the smoking shell of a
car and trying not to trip over the chunks of asphalt and clods of earth
littering the road while blinking away the tears brought on by the acrid
smoke, I was reminded not of Beirut but of Baghdad, or one of the bloodier
days in south Lebanon in the 1990s.
There were only two people who could warrant a bomb assassination
of this magnitude, so I thought – Walid Jumblatt, the head of the most
viii Preface
prominent Druze dynasty and outspoken critic of Syria’s long hegemony
over Lebanon, or Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hiz-
bullah. But Nasrallah rarely left his stronghold in the southern suburbs of
Beirut, and the Beirut hotel district was an unlikely location to dispatch
the leader of Hizbullah.
It was Mohammed Azakir, a veteran photographer for Reuters news
agency, who told me. With an anguished look on his face, he said ‘They
got Hariri.’
Hariri? Gone? Impossible.
When I arrived in Lebanon, Rafik Hariri had been prime minister for
two years, and his larger-than-life presence dominated the country. His
national reconstruction programme was moving into action and Solidere,
the private company reconstructing the city centre, had just begun dyna-
miting the war-scarred ruins of the old downtown. His energy and
enthusiasm were obvious. When he opened the brand new Beirut Inter-
national Airport terminal in 1998, I was one of a pack of reporters hurry-
ing after Hariri as he marched around the empty gleaming halls and
corridors, his entourage struggling to match his pace. Every now and
then, he would stop to examine a new luggage conveyor belt, snip a
ribbon, smile for the photographers and then march on. One could almost
sense him mentally ticking off the airport from his list of ‘things to do’.
In interviews, Hariri would give stock answers to political questions
such as the Lebanon–Syria relationship or the resistance war in south
Lebanon. But switch the conversation to reconstruction, and his eyes
would light up. In 1996, in one of my interviews with Hariri, I asked him
how he saw Lebanon at the turn of the century. This was the sort of
question Hariri loved.
‘The country’s infrastructure will be finished,’ he said with a broad,
satisfied smile. ‘I see lots of light industry in the free zones. I see the roads
and hotels finished and the marinas functioning. I see Beirut as a jewel lit
up at night.’
But the realisation of his vision was to be thwarted by the grinding
political realities of Lebanon. From 2000 onwards, Hariri was locked into
an increasingly fraught and bitter struggle for control of Lebanon, one
pitting him against his nemesis, Emile Lahoud, the Lebanese president
and former army commander, and the Syrian regime of President Bashar
al-Assad.
The battle for Lebanon intensified with the onset of the Bush adminis-
tration’s ‘war on terrorism’ and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. With pressure
mounting on Syria, Bashar adopted President Bush’s maxim of ‘either you
are with us or against us’, in his dealings with the Lebanese. Stoked by a
Preface ix
pernicious whispering campaign by pro-Syrian Lebanese, the regime in
Damascus increasingly came to regard Hariri as a threat, a powerful
Sunni who was plotting with the Americans and French against Syria. But
Hariri was a compromiser, an appeaser, who only sought to place rela-
tions between Beirut and Damascus on a more equitable footing and away
from one dominated by the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence agencies. He
cut a deal with Hizbullah over its weapons and was willing to use his
international contacts to ease the pressure on Damascus. Hariri simply
wanted to deal with fellow politicians in Damascus, not a general in the
Syrian military intelligence headquarters in the Lebanese town of Anjar.
Hariri wanted to be Syria’s friend, but the Syrians believed he was their
enemy.
The drama that unfolded was, at its heart, a Shakespearean tragedy of
misunderstanding.
When I.B.Tauris and I first discussed the idea of a book on the Hariri
assassination and its impact on Lebanon and beyond, Syrian troops were
still on Lebanese soil and Lebanon’s parliamentary elections were more
than a month away. I would be writing the book as the story unfolded,
but it was a compelling tale to relate, one which, although rooted in the
tangled complexities of Levantine politics, contained universal themes of
greed, power, fear, rivalry, suspicion and murder, fundamentals of the
human condition which transcend region, language and culture.
I interviewed over 70 people for the book, many of them close to Hariri
either professionally or personally. What became evident early on in my
research was the remarkable effect Hariri had on those who knew him.
Several interviewees wept when recalling their memories of Hariri; one
broke down in tears in a café and sobbed quietly for several minutes; a
serving cabinet minister choked up and called a halt to the interview.
Even Hariri’s staunch enemies would interject their criticisms of his eco-
nomic and political policies with brief eulogies and assertions that they
had always liked him on a personal level.
I would like to express my heart-felt thanks to all those who gave of
their time to be interviewed for this book, both on and off the record, some
of them over several sessions. The dates of the interviews appear in the
notes to the text. I have not included the dates of my interviews with
sources who requested anonymity to avoid identification.
Additionally, I would like to thank Shahir Idriss of Future Television
who was enormously helpful and generous in unloading her impressive
directory of contacts and helping facilitate interviews; I am also indebted
to Amal Mudallali for helping arrange key interviews with the Hariri
family and staff; enormous thanks go to Joshua Landis, professor of