Hariri’s killing shatters Lebanon’s calm

Feb 16th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

A car-bombing in Beirut has murdered Rafik Hariri, who had quit as Lebanon’s prime minister last October, calling on Syria to take its troops out of his country. Was it Syrian revenge, internal Lebanese score-settling or an effort to destabilise the wider region?

LONG-SUFFERING Beirutis had got used to the calm. The country, torn by civil war from 1975 to 1990, has since become one of the Middle East’s quieter spots. The calm was shattered on Monday February 14th, however, as an enormous car bomb killed Rafik Hariri, the country’s prime minister until recently, as his motorcade passed through the capital’s luxury-hotel district. At least 14 others were killed in the blast, and around 135 injured. The assassination of Mr Hariri, one of the architects of Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction, and the scenes of carnage, with corpses and burning cars strewn across the streets, brought back horrific memories of the civil war—and fears of foreign military intervention that could make Lebanon a battleground once more.

Who killed Mr Hariri and why? And will the bombing mean the end of Lebanon’s calm? The answer to the first question is opaque, but whoever murdered Mr Hariri it does not appear—yet—that the attack will mean wider instability in the country. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, most speculation has centred around Syria. It keeps around 14,000 troops in Lebanon and pulls the strings in its smaller neighbour’s politics. Syria helped put an end to Lebanon’s seemingly endless war. But a growing chorus of voices—including Mr Hariri’s as of recently—have been calling on the Syrians to leave. Having served as prime minister for 10 of the past 14 years, Mr Hariri resigned last October, after falling out with Lebanon’s pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, and joined the opposition.

Some detect the work of an intelligence service—if not Syria’s, some other foreign power’s—in the method of the attack. Certainly, the size and sophistication of the bomb suggest it was the work of a well-organised and experienced group, or a government. The blast was big enough to leave a huge crater and shatter windows hundreds of metres away. Moreover, if it was remotely triggered, it was sophisticated enough to defeat jamming mechanisms, which the billionaire Mr Hariri’s convoy always used while travelling. Mr Hariri, who made his fortune in construction in Saudi Arabia, knew he had many enemies and took what countermeasures he could. However if the attack was a suicide bombing—as the Lebanese interior ministry suggested on Tuesday that it was—then no countermeasures might have prevented it from succeeding.

It would be unusual for an intelligence service to commit a suicide attack. And Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, was quick to join the chorus of international condemnation, calling the assassination “a terrible criminal act”. But innocent or not, Syria did have a possible motive for wanting Mr Hariri off the political scene. The former prime minister was set to make a comeback in Lebanon’s elections, due in May. If so, this would have been a political defeat for Syria and its allies in Lebanon, encouraging the opposition and possibly threatening Syria’s control of Lebanon itself. Many Lebanese are convinced that their interfering neighbour was behind the killing. Mr Hariri's funeral, on Wednesday, turned into an outpouring of anti-Syrian fury. At least 150,000 joined the funeral procession, with chants of “Syria out, Syria out!”

Shock and anger

But would the Syrians be rash enough to risk the international condemnation—or worse—that would follow if they were found to be behind the assassination? Already, the United Nations Security Council has passed Resolution 1559, demanding that Syria take its troops out of Lebanon. On Tuesday the Council ordered the UN's secretary-general, Kofi Annan, to investigate Mr Hariri's murder. A “shocked and angered” President George Bush has recalled America's ambassador to Syria and is pressing other Security Council members to take action against whoever was behind the assassination.

So far, Mr Bush has stopped short of directly accusing Syria. Nevertheless, America is likely to turn up the pressure on what it considers a destabilising rogue state in the Middle East. Some believe that increased regional tension, rather than internal Lebanese score-settling of whatever kind, was the goal of the attack. Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, said the bombing “proves that there are organisations and countries, such as Syria and Lebanon, striving to undermine the stability in the region and prevent democratisation in the Arab world.”

Though it seems unlikely as yet, there are reasons to fear that Israel might be drawn into any renewed conflict in Lebanon: it still suffers, and retaliates against, sporadic attacks by Syrian-backed Hizbullah militants based in southern Lebanon; and only last year, Israel’s warplanes bombed what it said was a Palestinian militants’ training camp, just a few miles south of Beirut. Lebanon hosts a chunk of the Palestinian refugee population, and for nearly 20 years its southern reaches were occupied by the Israelis, who invaded in 1982 to clean out the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, which had used it to stage attacks.

Could the attack merely have been the work of a new and deadly militant group? A previously unheard-of organisation, calling itself Victory and Jihad in Syria and Lebanon, sent a videotape to al-Jazeera, a Qatar-based broadcaster, saying that it had killed Mr Hariri because of his ties with Saudi Arabia. But this claim may well turn out to be false, and the group may not even exist.

Lacking further hard evidence of the bombing itself, experts and the police can only speculate who might be responsible. Lebanon’s politics are complex, factional and too-often violent, despite the country’s relative calm until now. The population is divided between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Maronite Christians and Druze (followers of a heterodox offshoot of Islam). These groups are further divided into clans and, in some cases, crime families.

Since 1990, the country has stayed relatively peaceful under a power-sharing formula—not too dissimilar to that which it is hoped will develop in Iraq—in which the president would be a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni and the speaker of parliament a Shia. But the peace is fragile, and has become much more so with Mr Hariri’s death. Lebanon, as well as the wider Middle East, is sure to be a tenser place as the culprits are sought.

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