Ten years after Hariri's assassination, Lebanon badly needs his moderation
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Version 0 of 1. When a truck bomb killed Rafik Hariri 10 years ago on Saturday, both Lebanon’s postwar recovery and a Bush-era plan for a phoenix-like resurgence in the Levant all but ground to a halt. A decade later, the ramifications of the attack are still crippling the fragile state – and they have not stopped there. The fallout from the death of the so-called Mr Lebanon has spilled well beyond the country’s borders into the fast-disintegrating Middle East, where it is hailed as one of three events spanning a decade that have estranged the region’s Sunnis. Many Lebanese hoped that fateful day on the Beirut waterfront would become little more than a forgotten blip in a country where assassinations, warlords and thuggish regimes have long been essential to the political fabric. Instead, though, the death of Hariri continues to resonate, through an international tribunal in The Hague that is doggedly hearing evidence, and throughout the savage conflicts that are tearing apart Syria and Iraq and edging nearer to its borders. More than at any time since before the civil war, Lebanon’s travails are being reflected in the region’s woes. From Mosul to Aleppo, roughly the east-west arc of the control of the jihadi group, Islamic State (Isis), Sunni communities offer up the death of Hariri as one of three events over the past 12 years that have diminished their status and bolstered the second major Islamic sect, the Shias. A chronology regularly cited among Sunni communities is that the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which ousted Saddam Hussein, was the first move in the power shift, followed by Hariri’s death two years later, and then the 2011 Syrian insurgency, which has been almost entirely led by Sunnis and has received at best lukewarm western backing. All three events, meanwhile, have seen Shia-led regimes prosper. “He gave us all hope for a while there,” Shayma Hallak, an insurance worker from northern Lebanon, said of Hariri. “But then came the rise of Iran, and the fightback from Hezbollah and Syria. It started within a year of his death and it is now a regional war.” By 2007, the popular uprising in Lebanon that immediately followed Hariri’s death and forced the end of Syria’s three-decade tutelage over the country had run out of steam. At least nine MPs and journalists, all linked to Hariri’s parliamentary bloc, had been killed, and Hezbollah – buoyed by the popular support it enjoyed during the war with Israel a year earlier – was besieging parliament and Beirut’s downtown area, demanding a greater say in the affairs of state. In 2008, it won after briefly taking over west Beirut and doing well at a regional summit that reapportioned power. The late statesman’s son, Saad Hariri, was made prime minister, but soon realised he could not wield as much power as Hezbollah and its allies. In early 2011, several months before the insurrections then rumbling through the Arab world had made their way to Syria, Hezbollah walked away from the brittle arrangement that had kept Hariri as leader, in effect asserting itself as the dominant force in Lebanon’s political life. At around the same time, though, the arduous investigation into his father’s death had begun to bear fruit. When indictments were handed down later that year, they named four members of Hezbollah as Hariri’s killers. A fifth member was added two years later. The event stunned the former prime minister’s constituents, well beyond Lebanon, and led to months of vehement denials from Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who knew full well how much damage such claims – if proven – could do to his cause and to the country. As the hearing enters its second year, with political allies of the late leader detailing the subservient role he had been forced to adopt under his Syrian overlords, Lebanon remains polarised and tense. The trial is also being monitored in opposition-held parts of northern Syria, and in western Iraq, where Sunni communities view developments in The Hague as proof that Hezbollah, Syria and Iran have made strategic gains in the region at their expense. In the runup to Saturday’s anniversary, Hariri’s legacy has been much debated. The billionaire politician made his fortune in construction as a developer with powerful links, but he made his name building a nation, one of the few regional figures to convince a broad spectrum of society that national interests could trump sect and clan, even in a place as complex as Lebanon. While Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, enjoyed the patronage of the Sunni world’s powerhouse, Saudi Arabia, he was avowedly secular and his appeal transcended sectarian boundaries that had remained implacable for many compatriots throughout the 15-year civil war. His links to the Bush White House were used against him, particularly by Damascus, which saw his moves to assert Lebanese sovereignty as threatening Syria. “The politicians will eventually make up, but the people are the ones who lost, because Omar ended up hating Ali,” said Taha, a former supporter of Hariri in the majority Sunni Beirut area of Tariq al-Jdeideh, referring to two common Sunni and Shia names. “We want a leader, like Rafik Hariri, who says, ‘Throw away the gun and take up the pen.’ We are not extremists – we miss his moderation.” |