January 2013

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The battle over the St. Georges hotel and yacht club

Thursday, January 17, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon | 2 comments

A view of the St. Georges bombed out structure from the St. Georges Beach Club, which is still open.

I didn’t come to Lebanon to investigate the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri but I have to admit I’ve become rather fascinated by the whole affair. Particularly considering what’s going on in Syria right now.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you a related story. Yesterday, Waffa and I had lunch at the Phoenicia Hotel, which, as I’d mentioned, sits kitty-korner to where the truck bomb blew up that killed Prime Minister Hariri eight years ago. At the time, the Phoenicia was one of the glitziest hotels in Beirut but after the bombing, they had to close for many months because of the damage. After lunch, Waffa and I went on a tour of the property with the hotel’s PR director, Michelle Mallat Rishani, and I have to say the hotel looks gorgeous. More on that at a later time.

What was fascinating to me was that from the Phoenicia’s pool, you could look across the street and see the old St. Georges Hotel. The bomb exploded right in front of the St. Georges and while the Phoenicia is back in business and looking more beautiful than ever, the St. Georges is still basically just a dilapidated bombed-out shell. But there’s a reason for that which goes beyond the damage done to the hotel.

A postcard from the 60s of the St. Georges Hotel back when Liz and Dick were visitors.

Built in the 1920, the St. Georges was once synonymous with the glitz and glamour of Beirut, hosting the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as well as royalty and other celebrities such as the Shah of Iran, Egyptian diva Oum Kalthoum and the notorious double British agent Kim Philby.

“Before the (1975-1990) civil war, Lebanon was the world’s capital and the St. Georges was the capital of Beirut,” recalls Serge Nader, whose family ran the beach adjacent to the hotel until 1997.

During the war, the four-storey pink stone building was gutted by fire and sat empty for years until a new owner, Fady Al-Khoury, bought the building and began a massive remodeling of the old structure. The hotel was close to being finished when the bomb went off killing Hariri and severely damaging the building once again. The irony is that for years Khoury had been battling Rafiq al-Hariri’s development project, Solidere, over the hotel. According to Khoury, Solidere wanted to take over St. Georges’ waterfront and marina.

A statue of Hariri looks out over the St. Georges Hotel whose development he tried to stop.

Depending on who you talk to in Lebanon, Solidere is either the company that should be credited with rebuilding war-ravaged Beirut or despised for wiping out its heritage and driving its original residents and merchants out while reaping tens of millions of dollars in profits for itself.

Meanwhile, Khoury has hung a massive sign on the eastern façade of the old St. Georges with a simple, declarative message: Stop Solidere. Over the years, the government has come and taken the sign down only to have Khoury hang it back up. Meanwhile, the historic St. Georges sits empty.

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Why it’s dangerous to talk about Syria in Lebanon

Wednesday, January 16, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon

The truck bomb that killed Rafiq al-Hariri destroyed several buildings and left a 30-foot crater in the road. Photo by Wael Hamzeh/European Pressphoto Agency.

Yesterday I wrote about having lunch at the café in Place de l’Ètoile which was where the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafiq al-Hariri, sat for coffee before embarking on the fateful journey that saw him assassinated. Hariri is Lebanon’s JFK and there are just as many conspiracy theories about who assassinated him as there were with Kennedy. It’s been almost eight years, but it’s still a very sensitive subject in Lebanon. People don’t like to talk about it. Ask a Lebanese who they think killed Hariri and you’re liable to get a shrug of the shoulders. Not because they don’t know but because it’s a dangerous subject to discuss.

Here is what we know: On February 14, 2005, Hariri, who is largely credited with reconstructing Beirut after the 15-year-civil war, was assassinated just after 1P.M. when a suicide truck bomber detonated 2,200 pounds of explosives as the Prime Minister’s heavily guarded six-car armored convoy passed the St. George Hotel along the Beirut seafront killing Hariri and 21 others while blowing out all of the windows of the luxurious 446-room Phoenicia Hotel.

Here is what we don’t know: Exactly who did it. From an article in The Atlantic: “Eight months (after the bomb that killed Hariri), a report to the UN about the assassination outlined a conspiracy of remarkable breadth and complexity. It revealed that three months before Hariri’s death, his security detail had been mysteriously reduced from 40 to eight; that six anonymously purchased mobile phones were used on the day of the attack to keep the bomber informed of Hariri’s movements and to provide intelligence on the three possible routes that Hariri could take from the parliament building to his home; that the suicide truck moved into position one minute and 49 seconds before Hariri’s convoy passed by; and that the truck itself had been stolen on October 12, 2004, in Sagamihara City, Japan. The killers appeared to be sophisticated, politically connected, and well-funded: clearly this was not the work of an extremist or a fringe group. It bore the hallmarks of a government-sponsored assassination.”

And who was the government sponsoring Hariri’s assassination? According to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other publications, most fingers pointed directly at Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Syria, of course, became Lebanon’s overlord following the Lebanese Civil War as well as a state-sponsor of Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group that controls south Lebanon, and the group indicted by the Special Tribunal court in The Hague for having organized Hariri’s assassination. But as long as Assad remains in control of Syria (thus casting a huge shadow over Lebanon), everyone must be very careful of what they say about Assad’s and Syria’s role in the assassination. When Assad goes (and he will go), it might be a different matter. We’ll see.

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A Lebanese birthday party

Tuesday, January 15, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon | 1 comment

A Sunday birthday party on the Place de l’Etoile in Beirut. Photo by David Lansing.

If you’re hanging around Beirut’s Place de l’Ètoile, what better place to have lunch than the Place de l’Ètoile Café? Actually, I’m being a bit facetious. There is little distinction to the Place de l’Ètoile Café except, perhaps, that it is the last place former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri dined before being blown up by a car bomb in February 2005. Other than that, the café could be anywhere—Paris, New York, Rome—with its odd international menu of hamburgers and pasta, Caesar salad and onion soup. Except they serve no alcohol. Which surprised my guide who had assured me we could get a beer here.

“Why don’t you serve beer?” he asked our rather-bored looking waiter.

We used to, the man said. But the café was recently purchased by a new owner, a decidedly Muslim owner who ordered alcohol to be taken off the menu. The waiter shrugged. “It’s a shame,” he said. “People like to have a glass of wine with their meal, but we cannot.”

The café, like the square, was mostly deserted. At one of the outside tables next to us a family was celebrating a young boy’s birthday. There were two Hello Kitty helium balloons tied to the chairs and the birthday boy was excitedly digging in to a plate of French fries while his father and an uncle puffed away on their nargilehs. Just a typical quiet Sunday afternoon in Beirut.

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Nejmeh Square on a Sunday afternoon

Monday, January 14, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon

Place de l'Etoile, Beirut

The eerily deserted Place de l’Etoile in Beirut on a Sunday afternoon. Photo by David Lansing.

Sunday afternoon I walked around Beirut’s reconstructed downtown district, the Solidere Area, and decided to have lunch at a stylish café across from the famous 1930s clock tower, in what is known as the Place de l’Ètoile or, to the locals, Nejmeh Square. The square, built in an Art Deco style by the French in the early 20th century (and a big reason for why Beirut was often called the “Paris of the Middle East”) suffered major damage during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) but the government has done an amazing job restoring the neighborhood to its pre-war glitz in a relatively short time.

Except that there’s something vaguely off about Nejmeh Square. The four-sided clock is there. The buildings have, for the most part, been rebuilt (specifically to look almost exactly the way they did before the war). There are shops and cafes and businesses—all the things you would expect to find in the center of any capital city. Yet it stills feel eerily empty. Here it was on a cool but clear Sunday afternoon and other than a handful of children riding their bikes in circles while their parents nervously watched, there was almost no activity around the Place de l’ Ètoile. A few people eating lunch on the sidewalks outside the cafes; soldiers, clutching tight to their automatic weapons, standing guard on the street corners; a city worker picking up trash. That was about it. No hustle and bustle. No energy. No cheerful enjoyment of the environment; no exulation of spirit, no joie de vivre. Instead, the city center felt dead. And rather spooky.

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The streets of Beirut

Friday, January 11, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon

Photo by David Lansing.

The traffic in Beirut is worse than Los Angeles. It is worse than Manhattan and London, Mexico City and Rio. The only city I’ve ever been in that is comparable is Nairobi. But I think Beirut is even worse.

The thing is, there are no cops in Beirut. There are soldiers—lots and lots of soldiers. There are tanks positioned along every major boulevard and military trucks parked on the streets, but the soldiers don’t give a rat’s ass about traffic. So things like traffic signals and highway lanes are just suggestions. Suggestions that are seldom taken.

If a signal if red and you think that means cars coming from the other direction will stop, you’re taking your life in your hands. A red light in Beirut is like a no smoking sign in Paris; nobody pays any attention. On the wide boulevards and freeways you’ll will find five or six lanes of cars scurrying over two or three lanes of highway. People drive on the shoulder. People drive on the sidewalk. People double park. People triple park. It’s crazy.

You have to be zen about it. You let go. You free your mind and stop speculating on your impending death. Yesterday I was in a taxi headed to the national museum and I realized that one way to let go of the fear that grips me every time I get in a car here is to not look ahead; look out to the side. Look at the sea. Look at the buildings. Look at the people walking around the neighborhood.

I was sort of zoning out when I suddenly noticed that there was a cacophony of shouting coming from the blue bus jostling along next to us. It was filled with teenagers and, like me, they were ignoring the road ahead of them and looking for something of interest beside them. What they saw was me. And so they started yelling at me. In a good natured way. When they finally got my attention, they did something very unusual; they smiled and waved at me. No funny faces, no obnoxious hand signs, just beautiful, beatific smiles and a wave. It felt like I was being blessed.

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