Behind Lebanon Upheaval, 2 Men's Fateful Clash

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR Published: March 20, 2005
BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 19 - On an unseasonably mild day last August, a small group of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's closest political allies could tell from his flushed face and subdued manner that something awful had happened in the Syrian capital of Damascus, where he had been summoned to a meeting with President Bashar al-Assad.

The four men, all Lebanese Parliament members, recalled waiting for him at the Beirut mansion of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, in the so-called garden, basically a carport paved with concrete bricks, plus one short orange tree in a faux terra cotta tub.
Mr. Hariri - wearing an expensive blue suit and a white shirt, his tie loosened - lumbered over mutely and flung himself onto one of a dozen white plastic chairs, his head lolling back and his arms dangling over the edges.
After a few moments, he leaned forward and described how the Syrian leader had threatened him, curtly ordering him to amend Lebanon's Constitution to give President Émile Lahoud, the man Syria used to block Mr. Hariri's every move, another three years in office.
"Bashar told him, 'Lahoud is me,' " Mr. Jumblatt recalled in an interview. "Bashar told Hariri: 'If you and Chirac want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon.' " He was referring to the French president, Jacques Chirac.
In the month since Mr. Hariri was assassinated, members of Lebanon's anti-Syrian opposition have pointed to that Aug. 26 encounter in Damascus as fateful. Although opposition leaders acknowledge that they lack firm evidence tying Syria or its Lebanese agents directly to Mr. Hariri's assassination, they link that day to his slaying on Feb. 14.
"To tell you the truth, when I heard him telling us those words, I knew that it was his condemnation of death," Mr. Jumblatt said.
It was after that meeting that Mr. Hariri, 60, a real estate tycoon turned politician who had run Lebanon for the better part of 12 years, decided that he had to join the movement to uproot both the Syrian Army and the ever more robust tentacles of its secret police from Lebanon.
Interviews with a dozen Lebanese involved, including the three other men at the garden and some of Mr. Hariri's closest aides, indicate that in the final six months of his life he was tormented by the predicament that Lebanon now faces - how to end Syria's headlock without reigniting the civil war that tore this country apart a generation ago.
Whether Mr. Hariri would have succeeded in his efforts cannot be known. Nonetheless, President Assad's decision to force Mr. Lahoud onto Lebanon again is now widely seen as an enormous political blunder, uniting many Lebanese communities in opposition and even managing to bringing together France and the United States in a concerted effort to push Syria out. Although Syria denies involvement in the assassination, Mr. Hariri's death eliminated the one man potentially able to muster the international and domestic pressure to force Damascus to release its grip.
For the moment, his killing has inspired that anyway. But the lingering question is whether he can accomplish in death a goal that eluded him while alive: keeping the notoriously bickering opposition united for long enough to see free elections and the end of Syrian control.
"What they are really missing is a leader, that is the key problem, someone to show them the way," said Timur Goksel, a longtime United Nations spokesman here who now teaches at the American University of Beirut. "That is a real void."
Orders from Damascus
Syria is used to acting with impunity in Lebanon.
But by 2004, the Lebanese were expecting something different from Mr. Assad, not least because the United States had signaled by invading Iraq that business as usual was unacceptable.
The 39-year-old Syrian leader seemed to have gotten the message, telling a Kuwaiti newspaper early last summer that Damascus would not interfere in Lebanon's presidential election in the fall. Months later, Mr. Hariri was ordered to Damascus for the ominous meeting. Mr. Assad advertised the fact that the meeting was remarkably short - 15 minutes in a country where most presidential encounters drag on for hours - to make it clear that Syria was issuing an order.
The Lebanese around Mr. Hariri were both appalled and exhilarated that the Syrians obviously failed to grasp the consequences of what was immediately condemned as a maladroit act.

"We knew Bashar had made a fatal error," said a close political adviser to Mr. Hariri, who, like several other people interviewed, asked not to be identified given the current tension and fear of reprisals in Lebanon. "Hariri said that we are all just gnats to them, he kept repeating that until his death."
The Americans and the French, alienated since Paris opposed the war in Iraq, reacted with rare simultaneous anger over Syria's move. Quietly urged on by Mr. Hariri, they pushed through Security Council Resolution 1559, which demanded a Syrian withdrawal and the disarming of Hezbollah. The Syrians were furious at what they took to be solely Mr. Hariri's handiwork.

Syria considered Mr. Hariri a threat both because he was a Sunni Muslim figure admired in both countries and because he had important friends in the West. Syria's minority Alawite rulers deposed the once dominant Sunnis there, so an obviously independent Sunni leader in Lebanon might inspire unrest next door.
In fact, one reason Mr. Hariri was always reluctant to confront Damascus was that his Sunni Muslim constituency still viewed Syria as its portal to the wider world of Arab causes, and they did not particularly want to be allied with the Maronites, their traditional rivals.

Mr. Lahoud ignored the fact that the prime minister was supposed to lead all cabinet meetings. At one October meeting, he sat down and announced that items 1 through 15 on Mr. Hariri's agenda would not be discussed, one former minister recalled, sweeping away every substantial item.
Over the years Mr. Lahoud and roughly 18 ministers allied with Syria voted against any project Mr. Hariri proposed, from small items like buying land for new schools to economic reforms. At a 2002 meeting of international donors in Paris, the French president and Mr. Hariri managed to secure more than $4 billion in aid to Lebanon, which was heavily in debt, in exchange for economic reforms. Mr. Lahoud effectively torpedoed all the reforms.
"Every cabinet meeting was an ordeal," Mr. Hamade said.
New Hope, and a Sudden End
The end for Mr. Hariri as prime minister came in October after the Syrians sent him a message to step aside. He resigned on Oct. 20, somewhat relieved, his aides said.
The next months were consumed mostly with planning for parliamentary elections due in the spring and wrangling over the election law. The Syrians were trying to gerrymander districts around Beirut and the rest of the country to weaken the opposition. But the Christian-Sunni Muslim-Druse coalition appeared to grow ever more formidable.
During this period, while he was planning his comeback, Mr. Hariri seemed to become his old self again, friends and allies said. Mr. Renaud, the European Union ambassador, recalls visiting him at his combined office and mansion right after Christmas and seeing him emerge from behind his desk waving a sheaf of papers and grinning, saying, "We are going to win the elections!"
To test his Future Movement's popularity, Mr. Hariri announced that to celebrate the Muslim feast of Al Adha, he would receive visitors at his Beirut mansion on Jan. 10. The reaction was huge. Some 20,000 well-wishers poured through, said Ghattas Khoury, a member of his parliamentary bloc.
By late January, Mr. Hariri was feeling confident enough that he decided he would not accept any Syrian-nominated members on his election list, his advisers say. His 19-member bloc in Parliament included three men chosen by Rustom Ghazale, the head of Syrian intelligence based in Anjar in the Bekaa region, and the man Lebanese believe really ran their country, his aides said.
Mr. Hariri invited Mr. Ghazale to lunch in late January and told him about the decision.
"They were not happy," said Ghazi Aridi, a former minister of information who resigned in September over the Lahoud extension. He recalls Mr. Ghazale telling Mr. Hariri, "You have to think about it and we have to think about it."
It was beginning to look like the opposition could capture about 60 seats in the 128-seat Parliament, enough to elect a president other than Mr. Lahoud. Around this time, Mr. Hariri and Mr. Jumblatt, the Druse leader, had a meeting. Mr. Hariri's earlier confidence that he would not be assassinated had slipped; the two men figured one or the other would be killed soon.
"Any field where you challenge them, they get mad," Mr. Jumblatt said. "Such totalitarian regimes cannot understand that you can have the freedom to chose your own M.P.'s, or you choose your own local administrators or I don't know what."
Two weeks after that conversation, the huge bomb that rocked all of Beirut struck Mr. Hariri's motorcade. He, along with 18 other people, died.
"The goal of killing him was killing the political movement that could succeed in controlling Lebanon, particularly since it looked like the Syrians would have to leave," said Mr. Sebah, a member of Parliament from Mr. Hariri's bloc. "I think they killed him because they did not want a new political era in Lebanon."

The strain showed. Mr. Hariri, a burly, gregarious man who loved to make puns, became quiet and introspective. A friend since childhood said that at one point the prime minister put his hand on the friend's shoulder and wept, something he'd never done before.
The Syrians, acknowledging that Mr. Hariri might be able to defuse the gathering international storm, asked the prime minister to form a new government. Mr. Hariri started drawing up lists of potential ministers, but most were rejected by Damascus.
"He was like a boxer still reeling from a direct punch," said Patrick B. Renaud, the Beirut ambassador for the European Union. "He was shocked by the harshness of the message he received from the Syrian president."
An even harsher message followed.
As Marwan Hamade, the former minister of economy and trade and a Hariri ally, drove away from his seaside apartment building on Oct. 1, a roadside bomb flung his Mercedes into the air. He clambered from the flaming wreckage and collapsed to the ground at the very moment the car's fuel tank exploded, sending shrapnel flying in all directions. Mr. Hamade managed to survive with head injuries, severe burns and a broken leg.
He was one of four cabinet ministers who had voted against the Lahoud extension and then quit the government. He was also among the 29 Parliament members who voted against the constitutional amendment granting Mr. Lahoud three more years. The failed assassination was seen as a warning.
The Hamade bombing convinced Mr. Jumblatt that open defiance of Syria was the only route left to restore democracy to Lebanon. He began organizing a series of opposition meetings at the Bristol Hotel in Beirut. Mr. Hariri did not attend, but several members of his Future Movement did. After his assassination, it was this core group that organized the huge street demonstrations that pressured Syria to start withdrawing its forces.
In the days after the Hamade bombing, Mr. Hariri changed his security routine somewhat. Bassem Sebah, a Shiite member of Parliament from Mr. Hariri's bloc, said he used to drive the two of them to meetings in a black BMW while sending his usual convoy of armored limousines out as decoys.
He was confident that he would not be assassinated, though, aides and political allies recalled, particularly because Washington had publicly rebuked Damascus after the Hamade bombing, warning that it would hold Syria responsible for any similar attacks.
Slowly throughout September and October, Mr. Hariri edged closer to the opposition. Aides said he could no longer stomach another three years battling Mr. Lahoud, whom he considered not only a lightweight but also a Syrian pawn who was undermining Lebanese institutions by backing the encroachment of secret police agencies that mirrored the ones running Syria.
As Mr. Hamade put it in a speech after the assassination, Mr. Hariri had been subverted because "the role of the intelligence was no longer to keep up security, but to plant agents, generalize wiretapping, distribute newspaper articles, threaten judges, bind ministers and besiege members of Parliament."
A President as Insurance
Among Lebanese, Mr. Lahoud, 68, has a reputation for lounging through most afternoons in his Speedos by the pool at the Yarze country club, reading Paris-Match magazine and holding a tanning mirror. News accounts that he was swimming during Mr. Hariri's funeral reached such a crescendo that he felt compelled to deny them. "I swim every day - it's my workout - but on that specific day, I did not swim," he told a gathering of the Journalists' Union Council.
Opposition figures are convinced that one key reason Mr. Lahoud was extended was that his family had developed close business ties with the Assad clan in Damascus.
Foreign embassies suspect the same. "We have no solid evidence, but we believe there is a big link," said a senior Western diplomat. "His family seems to have done quite well for itself."
Mr. Lahoud rejected a request to be interviewed for this article. Ever since he assumed the presidency in 1998, Mr. Lahoud proved Syria's main insurance for keeping Mr. Hariri in check.