A GREAT LOSS
Death of a Businessman
Rafiq Hariri was also a Lebanese nationalist.
Rafiq Hariri, who was struck down on Monday by a huge car bomb on Beirut's seafront, was the unlikeliest of martyrs for the cause of Lebanon's independence. He had risen from the obscurity and poverty of Sidon--on Lebanon's coast--to the upper reaches of Lebanese and Arab society, largely through the patronage of the House of Saud and the inner dealings of Arab rulers and courtiers. A former prime minister of Lebanon, he wasn't particularly articulate, or given to the call of political causes. He believed in the power of wealth and of pragmatism, and saw Lebanon's mission in the time-honored way of Sidon's Phoenician heritage: commerce and trade, banking and tourism. Over two long decades in the political game, he had made his accommodation with Syrian power. He no doubt paid off Syrian intelligence operatives and officers, cut their sons and daughters and wives into business deals, did what he could for the restoration of his battered country, while staying on the safe side of Syria's hegemony in Lebanon.
Hariri knew the risks of Syria's wrath: how could he not? For three decades, bigger players than he had been struck down right when they had begun to agitate for their country's sovereignty against the power of Damascus.
In 1977, it had been the turn of a Druze leader by the name of Kamal Jumblat; he was assassinated because he was a proud and difficult man of Mount Lebanon who had paid no heed to Syria's claims of hegemony. Five years later, it had been a headstrong young Maronite, Basheer Gemayyel, who had risen through the civil war of Lebanon to the heights of power. Gemayyel had been elected president in a cruel summer of Lebanon, the summer of 1982. He was a Lebanese nationalist, eager to put together a state that had come apart. But he was never to assume office. A memorable deed of terror, a blast that shattered the three-story building of his political party's headquarters, took his life. There would be other victims along the way--a president, a prime minister, lesser political figures. The regime in Damascus was hell-bent on erasing the border between Syria and Lebanon.
A Syrian political and military class around a wily and shrewd leader, Hafez al-Assad, had come to a belief that Lebanon was its rightful claim. The Lebanese had been careless: They had feuded among themselves, and the Syrians had ridden those jealousies--and the pretext of an Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon--into veritable acquisition of their Western neighbor by the Mediterranean.
A great, pitiless hoax was played on Lebanon. A country that had known the crosscurrents of the world, a place of culture--French culture in east Beirut and the mountains, American culture on the western seaboard--was to pass into the control of the conquering army of a brutal, backward regime. The Syrians had usages for Lebanon: There was money there for the Syrian kleptocracy, opportunities for drug dealings and contraband, a border from which the Syrians could wage intermittent little wars and deeds of terror against Israel, while maintaining the most quiet of borders on the Syrian-Israeli front.
Truth be known, this steady encroachment on Lebanon was aided and abetted by the silence of the world. In one of those astonishing changes, the Syrian arsonists had come to be seen as the fire brigade of a volatile Lebanese polity. A generation ago, the Pax Americana averted its gaze from the Syrian destruction of the last vestige of Lebanon's independence: In 1990-91, America had acquiesced when the Syrians put down the rebellion of a patriotic Lebanese officer, Michel Aoun, whose cause represented the devotion of the Christian Maronites to the ancestral independence of their country. That was the price paid by President George Herbert Walker Bush for enlisting Syria in the coalition that waged war against Saddam Hussein for his grab of Kuwait. Pity the Lebanese: They had cedars, Kuwait had oil. We would restore Kuwait's sovereignty as we consigned the Lebanese to their terrible fate in that big Syrian prison.
The Hariri assassination is part, then, of a big story, with an unsavory history. We may never know the intimate details of this dark deed. The trail to Damascus may never be found. Access to the "crime scene"--Lebanon itself--will be controlled through Syria and through those Lebanese who accept Syria's writ in their country.
What is obvious is that Hariri was struck down as he had set out to find his own way, away from Syria's embrace. He had been bullied by the Syrians some months ago, it was known, as they sought and secured the extension of the mandate of their satrap on the scene, President Emile Lahoud. Hariri was a man of wealth, with close political ties to French President Jacques Chirac, and to his old Saudi patrons. On the face of it, this gave him a measure of immunity. But in the slaughterhouse of Arab politics, no man is safe from terror's reach. Two months ago, I saw Hariri in Dubai. It was at a conference on the Arab future. There were luminaries there--former President Bill Clinton, of course, on a speaking gig--and Hariri seemed like a man adrift. He delivered a generic speech about reform and transparency. He never uttered a word about Syria. He seemed more subdued than usual. He did not know what nemesis lay in wait for him.
The assassination of Hariri comes at a loaded moment for Syria, and Lebanon--and for the Arab spectators to this crime. Inspired by Iraq, and weary of the extortion and the heavy hand of Syrian power, the Lebanese have grown restive. A Druze leader, Walid Jumblat, (a son and a political heir of the man murdered by Syrian agents in 1977) has become increasingly defiant. His case is the simple and straightforward case of Lebanon's dignity. Late in this hour of world history, it is galling to him and others around him to see their country as the satellite of a foreign power. Mr. Jumblat is not alone: The Patriarch of the Maronite Church, with the sanctity and protection of his special place as a cardinal in the Catholic Church, has been waging a relentless campaign of his own against Syrian rule. Now the scandal of this Syrian dominion of Lebanon is laid out in the open.
It will not do for the Syrians to profess horror at this crime of Hariri's assassination. There is an old tradition, and an old saying, in the hard hill country of Lebanon about killing a man and walking in his funeral procession. The only antidote to this terrible, senseless death, is the eviction of Syria from Lebanon. In a rare, but important, case of French-American cooperation, those two powers have backed a United Nations Security Council Resolution calling on Syria to respect the sovereignty of Lebanon. If Damascus's operatives pulled off this assassination, the deed is a response, at once pathetic but brazen, to the mounting pressure on Syria to change its ways. It would be fitting that the Syrian hegemony in Lebanon consolidated during the first war against Saddam Hussein would be undone in the course of this new campaign in Iraq.
Lebanon (my birthplace, I should add) may never have been as pretty as its tales. It may never have been the "Paris of the Mediterranean," and its modernism may have been skin-deep at times. But it was and remains a vibrant Arab country of open ways, a place for refugees and dissidents, a country where Arab modernity made a stand, and where Christians and Muslims built a culture of relative compromise.
There is talk nowadays of spreading liberty to Arab lands, changing the ways of the Arabs, putting an end to regimes that harbor terror. The restoration of Lebanon's sovereignty ought to be one way for the Arabs to break with the culture of dictators and police states, and with the time of the car bombs. Hariri sought for his country a businessman's peace. His way was a break with the politics of charisma and ideology that has wrecked the Arab world; he believed in philanthropy and practical work. His vision may not have been stirring. But there was dignity in it, and a reprieve from the time of darkness.
Mr. Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins.
