by Robin Wright
The resolution was a direct slap at Syria. It also had rippling consequences.
A week before Lebanon’s parliament was to vote on August 26, 2004, as momentum was building at the United Nations behind the new resolution, Hariri was summoned to Damascus. The session with Syrian President Bashar al Assad, who had taken over after his father’s death, was stormy. It lasted less than fifteen minutes.
Hariri later told his son that Assad put it bluntly, “This extension is to happen, or else I will break Lebanon over your head.”16
On September 2, the United Nations passed resolution 1559.
On September 3, Lebanon’s parliament went ahead and voted to extend the president’s term. In the end, Hariri also voted with the majority to keep Syria’s man in power, even though he had rallied an international effort to defy Damascus.
Six weeks later, however, he resigned.
Over the next four months, Hariri increasingly struck out on his own with the new Future Movement. It was more of an idea than a party. But it reflected a shift in his focus, from rebuilding Lebanon physically to reshaping the nation politically. Lebanon was due to hold elections for parliament in May 2005. They would serve as the test, pitting Hariri’s new coalition against Syria’s candidates.
Hariri knew he was being closely watched. After Lebanese analysts began predicting his alliance would sweep the vote, he received another warning from Damascus. Syrian security services had him “cornered,” a senior official told him bluntly. Hariri should not “take things lightly.”17
The St. George Hotel has long been a landmark on Beirut’s scenic corniche, a symbol of Lebanon’s riches and its woes. The four-story luxury hotel was named after the Christian martyr who allegedly slew a dragon somewhere nearby in the fourth century. When Beirut became the Middle East’s center for banking, education, culture, and espionage in the 1960s, kings, foreign film stars, and spies stayed at the hotel. Its bar overlooking the Mediterranean was the place deals were brokered, secrets exchanged. The St. George became a victim itself shortly after the civil war erupted in 1975. It was left a haunted shell, its pink facade charred. But the pool and an outdoor bar famed for its Bloody Marys remained open. During the five years I lived in Lebanon in the 1980s, Beirutis flocked there during cease-fires, however brief. Whenever the rat-a-tat-tat of rifles or ka-boom of artillery started again, men packed up their backgammon sets, and women grabbed their towels, and we all scurried home—until the next cease-fire. It became a symbol of Lebanese resilience.
On Valentine’s Day, 2005, Rafiq Hariri held talks about the upcoming election with colleagues in parliament. At lunchtime, he headed back to Qoreitem Palace. Hariri always took precautions. His limousines were armored-plated; they also had jamming equipment to block any remote-control device that might set off a bomb. But it was not enough. Just as his five-car motorcade rounded the corner in front of the St. George, then in the final throes of reconstruction, a bomb with over 1,000 pounds of explosives went off. It tore apart the armored cars and the bodies inside. Hariri was killed instantly. Twenty others also died; more than 100 in the area were wounded. The facades of the St. George and buildings in all directions were ripped off. Windows more than one-quarter mile away were blown out. The sound rippled for miles. A black cloud of smoke rising from the bomb site could be seen beyond the city limits.
The crater left in the road in front of the St. George was more than thirty feet wide and six feet deep.
Hariri’s murder was the most traumatic event in the fifteen years since the civil war ended—and perhaps even longer. The assassination was another of the seminal events in the early twenty-first century—like the Palestinian elections and Egypt’s May 25 crackdown—that provoked people in the Middle East to engage in ways they had never done before. It mobilized Lebanese like no single event since the nation was created.
It also launched a new generation of activists. Saad Hariri inherited his father’s mantle, after consultations within the family. “We decided that what my father wanted to achieve had not been achieved,” he said, “and that we had to continue.”
But the assassination also spurred people well outside clan politics.
Asma-Maria Andraos was one of them. She heard the massive blast on the Christian side of the old Green Line. It blew open the windows of her office, whooshed a sliding glass door down its track, and then blasted open the inside doors—all in the flash of a second.
“Everything moved. It was like an earthquake,” she recalled, when I visited her office in Christian-dominated East Beirut. “You think you’ve forgotten those noises from the war, but it came back instantly. I ran to the balcony and saw the black cloud of smoke. Then we switched on the television and those horrible pictures of burnt corpses and burning cars and people crying and ambulances.”
Andraos, a tall woman with a long face, throaty voice, and brown hair that falls down her back, had been highly critical of Hariri’s policies. “He was a ruthless businessman, and I believed you can’t be both prime minister and the biggest businessman in the country,” she explained.
“But he also had a dream, and I admired that,” she said. “And when I heard it was Hariri who was killed I went quite mad, and I wondered: What was going to happen to us? Who was going to hold us down? Who else was doing to fight for us at the superpower level? As long as he was around, we could stick it out.
“I became scared, physically scared,” she said.
Andraos was born in 1971 and was only four years old when the civil war broke out. She is an event planner for product launches, everything from mobile telephones and sport clothing to hygiene products. She had been typical of the young in Lebanon—disillusioned with or disinterested in politics.
But on the day of Hariri’s funeral, Andraos was one of more than 150,000 who turned out on the streets of Beirut. Maronites, Sunnis, Catholics, Druze, Orthodox, Shiites, Armenians, and others—some bitter rivals during the war—followed the ambulance carrying Hariri’s body to the district he had restored. People threw rice from balconies as the cortege passed. Hariri and his bodyguards were laid to rest near Martyr’s Square, in a special burial site in the former parking lot of the Virgin Megastore that was converted into a tented shrine. Christian church bells rang amid the Islamic incantations and calls to prayer from mosque muezzins.
“Brothers, we must all grieve together,” a Muslim imam told mourners.18
Beirut’s Maronite Bishop, Boulos Matar, declaimed, “This was a man of moderation and unity.”19
Many in Lebanon assumed Syria was ultimately responsible for Hariri’s murder, but no one dared to say it. Saad Hariri came the closest. Asked by a British television correspondent who assassinated his father, he had responded simply, “It’s obvious, no?”
So Andraos and a group of friends brought two banners to the funeral. In big letters, they had written, IT’S OBVIOUS, NO?
“We didn’t know how free we were to say what we wanted to say,” she told me. “The Syrians were still running the show. They were everywhere in Lebanon. We could not have had this conversation back then without them knowing about it. The Syrians killed him, and it had to be said in some way for everyone to see.”
A threshold was crossed the day of Hariri’s funeral. As the mourners marched, they began to shout: “Syria out! Syria out!”
And that was only the beginning.
The next morning, Andraos went back to Hariri’s grave site and began calling friends and asking them to join her—and to call their friends and neighbors too. “A lot of people said it was back to business as usual,” she recalled. “But I said, ‘No way.’ This was way too big.”
On an impulse, Andraos also organized a petition to generate a sense of doing something besides mourning the past. She had no pen, so she used lipstick. She wrote only one word on a piece of cloth: “Resignation.” The focus was broadening—now to the Lebanese government, too.
“I realized we had to kick the bastards out,” she said.
As word spread about a sit-in, people poured into the area. They signed the petition too. Within three days, the petition was 1,200 feet long with thousands of signatures.
“It was that spontaneous,” Andraos said, looking back. “We didn’t really fully realize what we were doing.”
The sit-in vigil grew into a full-time protest, and the call for the Lebanese government to quit became its rallying cry. Most of the protesters were students. Two young men set up individual tents and vowed to stay until the government stepped down. Hundreds of other youths soon joined them. Most were students who had never been involved in politics. They came from all sects. Most had never met before; they just showed up.
“Suddenly, I was leader of a group that had no existence a few days earlier,” Andraos said. “We realized the opposition was confused. We assumed they had a plan but they didn’t. They were lost. So ten of us met—we were from multiple confessions and none belonged to any party—and came up with a piece of paper in which we said simple things, all around ‘Let’s unify.’”
Andraos became the mother superior of the protest—mobilizing a task force of about 100 people, both Christians and Muslims, to assemble supplies, food, literally tons of water, portable toilets, hundreds of mattresses and blankets, gas lamps, and a big tent for the 500 young people who by then had pledged to sleep near Hariri’s grave site until their demands were met. She raised $200,000—in a country with a per capita income of only $6,000 dollars—through word-of-mouth requests, refusing all funding from political parties or foreign donors. In the evenings, when thousands more came down to Martyr’s Square after school or work to join the protest, she organized a dialogue among the students.
“This is the first time in Lebanon that the politicians followed the people,” Andraos said. “The heartbeat was the youth. They dropped out of jobs or didn’t go to university to carry the message through to the end. Young people in this country have not been active like that before. They had always deferred to the politicians. The other part of the movement was civil society, which some had thought was dead.”
The crowds became so large that a giant screen was set up around Martyr’s Square to let everyone see and hear speakers at the evening rallies.
Exactly two weeks after the assassination, on February 28, the prime minister who had replaced Hariri stepped down. His government collapsed. Tens of thousands watched it happen live on the screen set up at Martyr’s Square.
The protest had won the first round.
Encouraged, the demonstrators pressed on. They pledged nationwide strikes until four demands were met: Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon. The resignation of Lebanon’s security chiefs. Elections on schedule, with no delays or outside interference. And a thorough international investigation into Hariri’s death.
President Lahoud, Syria’s ally and Hariri’s old nemesis, tried to ban the protests, to no avail. Every Monday—the day of the week when Hariri had died—the nation all but closed down as tens of thousands of workers, businessmen, and teachers either did not go to work or showed up to join the running demonstration. En masse, lawyers dressed in their black robes and doctors in their white coats appeared at Martyr’s Square.
A big banner scrawled on the wall next to Hariri’s grave summed up the public mood: ENOUGH.
Syria was stubborn. On March 8, its allies, led by Hezbollah, staged a counter-rally to support Damascus. Hundreds of thousands turned out. But, for a change, there were no pictures of the Syrian leader, no Syrian flags, not even Hezbollah banners. There were new limits that even Syria’s allies would not cross.
Infuriated by Syria’s attempt to hold on to Lebanon, Saad Hariri and Andraos were among dozens who called on the Lebanese to turn out on March 14, the one-month anniversary of Hariri’s death, to support a rival protest. And they did. More than one million Lebanese—about one quarter of the entire population, the proportionate equivalent of seventy-five million Americans—poured into Beirut from all over the country. Despite the cold, windswept day, the throngs were so thick that many had to abandon their cars on the outskirts and walk all the way to the seafront grave site. In a pointed jab at Syria, they waved tens of thousands of red-and-white Lebanese flags emblazoned with the cedar, a symbol of the fragrant trees on Mount Lebanon. Some of the young painted their faces with both a crescent and a cross—the symbols of Islam and Christianity.
It was the largest protest ever assembled in a modern Arab country. Mass outpourings in the Middle East tend to be rent-a-crowds mobilized and transported by the government. The Lebanese surprised even themselves.
“It was shocking in a positive way—the students and the children, the people in wheelchairs, the turbans, the old hags, they all came in to say, ‘We want our country,’” said Jamil Mrowe, a Lebanese Shiite and publisher of The Daily Star, the largest English-language paper in the Middle East. “The Syrians made the mistake of killing someone who would not have been an icon, but in their killing he became an icon who represented the entire Lebanese ethos. The shrapnel that killed him hit every Lebanese. I can’t take it from my mind—that cold, dry anger you saw after he was killed.”
In stark contrast to Lebanon’s tense civil war, when people shot at each other just to break up traffic jams, the people-power confrontation with government unfolded peacefully. Demonstrators passed around flowers and sweets to security forces and police deployed around the capital.
The March 14 Movement, as it came to be known, achieved all four of its goals: By the end of April, only seventy-two days after Hariri’s death and the protest began, Syria pulled out its last troops. Its twenty-nine-year occupation was over.
Lebanon’s top security officials were sacked; some were later arrested for complicity in Hariri’s murder.
In an unusual step, the United Nations then voted on a second resolution to conduct an investigation into Hariri’s murder. It also warned Syria to cooperate—or face punitive action.
And finally, elections were held on time, in May and June 2005. A coalition led by Saad Hariri, who had taken over his father’s Future Movement, won seventy-two of the 128 seats in parliament.
“Today, Lebanon is united in you,” the younger Hariri told supporters who massed outside Qoreitem Palace after the vote.20
The State Department dubbed the mass protest the Cedar Revolution, after the country’s famed tree. The name was picked up around the world—except in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s outpouring was never a revolution, like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Georgia’s Rose Revolution, or Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. It was instead a cry for sovereignty, for a formal divorce from Damascus, for a Lebanese identity, and for justice. And it made stunning progress. In the Arab world, it was the first broad popular movement to demand sweeping change and get it.
But it was only the opening round of a much longer political battle. When Lebanon settled down, as it did quickly after the election, it was stuck with the same sectarian system. None of the reforms to eliminate the sectarian quotas, as mandated in the 1989 Taif Accord, had been implemented—or seemed imminent. And President Lahoud was still the head of state.
When I visited Lebanon the next year, the specter of unfinished business hung over Beirut. Massive posters of Rafiq Hariri were still plastered throughout the capital fourteen months later. The most striking was a giant black billboard at the entrance to Hamra Street, the city’s main drag. At the top was a red electronic ticker counting the days that had passed between the assassination and the ongoing investigation to determine, officially, who was responsible. THE TRUTH FOR THE SAKE OF LEBANON, the billboard said.
After the election, many Lebanese had expected Saad Hariri to become prime minister, in part to signal Lebanon’s commitment to his father’s agenda. “I don’t have a magic wand,” he had warned, acknowledging his total lack of experience. “I would have to grow pretty fast. A month ago, I was a businessman.”21
But President Lahoud refused to step down. Syria still had one powerful ally in plac
e. Hariri would get no traction on reforms as long as Lahoud was still there. Syria’s motive was to sustain the status quo—and ties that might provide future openings—to ensure its own survival. Full democracy in Lebanon might infect neighboring Syrians.
When I visited Hariri, he had become a virtual prisoner in his father’s palace in downtown Beirut. The whole area was cordoned off to traffic. Security inside was at least as tight as any American airport, including metal detectors and screening equipment for bags. Cell phones had to be left with the flock of well-armed security guards at the entrance.
Like many Lebanese politicians, Hariri admitted that he feared more car bombs. The elder Hariri’s assassination had not been the last.
“We have a neighbor that wants to control Lebanon, like Saddam Hussein wanted to control Kuwait,” he told me. “They want to prevent the wave of democracy from crossing the border into Syria.”
Hariri had preserved his father’s plush office in Qoreitem Palace as it was when he died. The fortified family mansion was filled with Phoenician artifacts, Persian carpets, antiques, and chandeliers. But most striking were the six-foot-tall posters of Rafiq Hariri on walls, tables, and easels throughout the palace. One of the biggest was perched on his chair behind his old desk. I sat with his son in oversize dark green leather furniture across from it.
When we spoke in 2006, he was one of fourteen politicians in a wobbly new national dialogue. Assembling them all at the table was the dialogue’s only real success; it had avoided the issue of eliminating Lebanon’s sectarian divide in government. Underscoring the problem, one half of its members were the same geriatrics who had dominated Lebanese politics since Hariri was a toddler—and torn the country apart during its civil war.