The Killing
Of 'Mr Lebanon'
By Robert Fisk
16 February, 2005
The Independent
I
saw the blast wave coming down the Corniche. My home is only a few hundred
metres from the detonation and my first instinct was to look up, to
search for the high-altitude Israeli planes that regularly break the
sound barrier over Beirut. There were customers coming bloodied from
their broken-windowed restaurants and the great cancerous stain of smoke
rising from the road outside the St George Hotel.
Beirut is my home-from-home,
home from the dangers of Baghdad, and now here was Baghdad in Lebanon,
a St Valentine's Day massacre in the streets of one of the Middle East's
safest cities. I ran down the Corniche, everyone else fleeing in the
opposite direction, and walked into a mass of rubble and flaming cars.
There was a man, a big, plump man lying on the pavement opposite the
still-derelict, war-damaged hotel, a sack, it seemed, except for the
skull, the top missing. And there was a woman's hand in the road, still
in a glove. There were bodies burning in a car, flaming away, a terrible
hand hanging outside a motorist's window.
There were still
no policemen, no ambulances, no fire brigade. The petrol tanks of the
cars were starting to explode, spraying fire across the street. No one
could take in the extent of the damage because of the heat and the smoke.
Then I recognised one of Rafik Hariri's bodyguards, standing in terror.
"The big man has gone," he said. The Big Man? Hariri? At first
I thought that Lebanon's former prime minister, "Mr Lebanon",
the man who more than anyone else rebuilt this city from the ashes of
civil war, must have left, "gone" away, escaped.
But how could he
have escaped this funeral pyre? A group of cops ran into the devastation,
and a man, another bodyguard, ran shrieking towards a set of burning
Mercedes limousines crying "Ya-allah", calling upon God to
be his witness. Hariri travelled only in a convoy of heavily armoured
Mercedes. No wonder the explosion was so massive. It would have to be
to rip open the armoured doors. I followed a plain-clothes detective
past a still-burning car - there was another body inside, cowled in
flames - to the edge of a pit. It was at least 15ft deep. This was the
crater. I slowly clambered down the edge. All that was left of the car
bomb were a few pieces of metal an inch long. The blast had sent another
car, perhaps one of Hariri's, soaring through the air into the third
floor of the empty hotel's annex, where it was still burning fiercely.
Hariri, I kept repeating.
I had sat with him many times, for interviews, at press conferences,
at lunches and dinners. He once spoke most movingly about the son he
lost in a driving accident in America. He had said he believed in the
afterlife. He had many enemies. Political enemies in Lebanon, Syrians
who suspected - correctly - that he wanted them out of Lebanon, real
estate enemies - for he had personally purchased large areas of Beirut
- and media enemies because he owned a newspaper and a television station.
But he could be
a good and kind man, even if he was a ruthless businessman; I once compared
him to the cat which eats the canary then cheerfully admits that it
tasted good. He sent the quotation off to his friends. His hand was
one of the mightiest I had ever shaken.
I could not see
his body. But amid the smoke and fire, I looked beyond to the new Beirut
centre ville, the reconstructed centre of this fine city which Hariri's
own company - he owned 10 per cent of the shares in Solidere - was building
from its Dresden-like ruins. He had died within metres of his own creation.
This was a bomb
that took a long time to construct, a long time to plan. Parked outside
the wall of an empty hotel, few would have looked at the car or noticed
that it was weighed down on its axles by the weight of explosives, as
it must have been.
The perpetrators
were ruthless men, heedless of the innocent. They wanted to kill Rafik
Hariri. Nothing else mattered. In the surrounding streets, men and women
were emerging with blood all over their clothes. Thousands of windows
had smashed into them and they stood there, dribbling blood on to their
shoes and trousers and skirts as the first ambulancemen screamed at
the firemen to clear their hoses from the pavements.
The length of the
street was slippery with water and blood. I counted 22 cars exploding
and burning. The Saudi billionaire who dined with kings and princes
- whose personal friendship with Jacques Chirac helped Lebanon ride
its $ 41bn ( £21.7bn) public debt - had ended his life in this
inferno.
In private, he did
not hide his animosity towards the Hizbollah, whose attacks on Israeli
occupation troops before their 2000 retreat would set back his plans
for Lebanon's economic recovery. And while he tolerated the Syrians,
he had his own plans for their military departure. Was it true, as they
said in Beirut, that Hariri was the secret leader of the political opposition
to the Syrian presence? Or were his enemies even more sinister people?
Lebanon is built
on institutions that enshrine sectarianism as a creed, in which the
president must always be a Christian Maronite, the prime minister a
Sunni Muslim - like Hariri - and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim.
Anyone setting out to murder Hariri would know how this could re-open
all the fissures of the civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Thousands of weeping
followers of Hariri gathered outside his palace at Koreitem last night,
demanding to know who had killed their leader. Hariri men toured the
streets, ordering shopkeepers to pull down their shutters. Were the
ghosts of the civil war to be reawoken from their 15 years of slumber?
I do not know the answer. But that black cloud that drifted for more
than an hour over Beirut yesterday afternoon darkened the people beneath
with more than its shadow.
Copyright: The Independent