Hariri

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Why Hariri’s grave is in a circus tent in Beirut

Friday, January 18, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon

Rafik al-Hariri's grave in Beirut

Hariri’s gravesite, beneath the big top, in downtown Beirut. Photo by David Lansing.

So. I went to the café where Lebanon’s former Prime Minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, sipped his last cup of coffee. Then I stood on the very spot where he was assassinated by a truck bomb. This morning I went to his rather macabre grave site next to the Mohammed al-Amin Mosque directly across the street from the Martyrs’ Square Statue (riddled with bullet holes from the Lebanese Civil War).

I say the grave site is macabre because it’s situated inside of what looks like a white circus tent. I mean, I walked in all but sure that I was at the wrong location. Surely this was a Cirque du Soleil show or something. But, no, once you get inside, you see Hariri’s coffin, covered in white roses, as well as a shrine to his slain bodyguards and others who were killed in the explosion, a photo-montage of the man, and a quarter-mile-long wall covered in hand-written messages by people from all over the world. (One such message: “Rafik Hariri is the person who made Lebanon a nice place from a place that had nothing nice in it.”)

I asked several Lebanese why Hariri’s grave was housed under a white tent 8 years after his death and got various reasons. One was that the entire Martyrs’ Square is being redone and once it’s completed, visitors to Hariri’s grave will be able to turn around and look directly at the Martyrs’ statue.

But I like the reason I heard from an old man who was paying his respects the same morning I was. He told me that the temporary tents would remain in place as a reminder that until the persons (or state) responsible for Hariri’s death were brought to justice, Hariri would not permanently rest in peace.

We’ll see, once Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad is toppled, whether this is true. I hope so.

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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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