In November, during the French book fair in Beirut, the magazine L’Orient-Express – previously the monthly supplement of the daily L’Orient-Le Jour – was published as a special 10-year anniversary issue. The idea was the brainchild of the former editor, Samir Kassir, but when he was assassinated last June, it was up to the onetime staff members to prepare the content without the guidance of the irrepressible man who had been the magazine’s vital force.
The regret one felt in knowing Kassir never saw the issue was nothing compared to the disappointing reality of the aftermath of his death. The far-too-constrained national reaction showed how cheaply he had gone, so unacceptable coming from a Lebanese society that had, by the time Kassir was killed by a bomb placed under his car, regained its sovereignty. At the essential moment of newfound emancipation, an avatar of that effort, a writer who had risked his personal safety for years to condemn the order the Lebanese had lately demonstrated against, was virtually forgotten. That’s why the anniversary issue of L’Orient-Express was a bittersweet experience; it pleased the insiders, those who knew Kassir, but it also proved a mere sideshow for the society as a whole. Through that indifference, the Lebanese effectively forgot a part of their post-war self, and not by a long shot the least attractive one.
Four different lives, one Lebanon
It says much about the contradictory nature of Lebanon that four of the prominent deaths recorded in 2005 – those of former premier Rafik Hariri, the providential businessman who rode into the country on a white checkbook; Basil Fuleihan, his protégé and among the best and brightest of the returning wartime generation; Ghazi Kanaan, long the tough cornerstone and cynical broker of Syrian power in Lebanon; and Kassir, the prodigal son, who alighted from Paris and used his talents of writer and polemicist as an antidote to the worst of the new order – offered up a striking image of post-war equilibrium. Each complemented the other in some way, even when they were antagonistic. What ensued was a Levantine compromise, but one, also, destined to shatter amid the false expectation of indefinite steadiness. The greatest irony of all was that the four died as their ambitions were either about to be fulfilled, or had been.
The face of post-war Lebanon
To describe what Rafik Hariri meant for Lebanon after 1990 has been done ad nauseam. In all respects he embodied the energy of reconstruction after the conflict, was the indispensable agent of economic confidence, and, through his death, showed he had the power to play a post-mortem trick on a Syrian regime that had for years used him to advance its interests, while also mistrusting his every move. What made Hariri dangerous was that unlike his foes, he had a striking vision for Lebanon. It was flawed, hubristic, narrow, elitist, unaccountable, and, for all of those reasons, helped generate the crippling debt Lebanon faces today. But a vision there was, and it had a place in the modern world, so unlike the cheerless substitute offered by Syria and Hariri’s foes, where the choice roles were left to intelligence officers, and where the ambient philosophy was essentially the same as practiced by organized crime rings.
Orbiting Hariri
Hariri was the axis of the system in which Fuleihan, Kanaan and Kassir navigated. While Fuleihan was so closely tied to the late prime minister that drawing a boundary between the two seems almost absurd, he was also something distinct: an embodiment of the best that Hariri had managed to attract in the early 1990s: the 30-something university graduate, preferably with a degree from a foreign institution, devoted to the art of making money, and crafted in the best ateliers of urban mobility in London, Paris, or New York. Beirut was awash with such figures in the immediate post-war period (it still is), and while they were naturally drawn to a prime minister who offered them status, they were also often the antithesis of what Hariri himself had been.
Like many a returning Lebanese in those years, Fuleihan was a man of theory, hungering for action, and to achieve that objective he needed to hitch his fortunes to a man of action like Hariri. Fuleihan’s intelligence ensured he would succeed, but countless others, fighting for the limited number of stools in the Hariri set, were either denied entry, or found themselves banished to a mediocre anteroom, far from the inner circle, moving among the sycophants the prime minister was so good at turning to his advantage, but who were otherwise eminently forgettable.
Samir Kassir’s most memorable encounter with Hariri showed another side of post-war Lebanon, and of Hariri himself. In 2000, Kassir had written a now-famous article criticizing, without naming him, the then-head of the General Security service, Jamil Sayyed, and more generally the role played by the army in Lebanese life. Sayyed responded by threatening Kassir and ordering carloads of agents to pursue him for weeks, relentlessly, at times aggressively. One evening, Hariri asked Kassir and the editor of As-Safir, Joseph Samaha, to join him at a swanky Beirut restaurant. The point was not to feed the pair, however, but to have them follow him home in their car, enclosed within the confines of his motorcade. When the General Security agents tried to follow, Hariri’s guards blocked their path, earning Kassir a momentary reprieve.
Hariri was not the first or last politician who shielded Kassir against arguably the most powerful man in Lebanon. But the incident showed something about both men: for Kassir, free expression and provocation were oxygen, and he was willing to go to the line in defending it, though his pen had often been directed against Hariri. For Hariri, Kassir was more than just an enemy of the security services and men he loathed, he was also an expression of what Hariri, sometimes reluctantly, imagined Lebanon to be. The late prime minister did not like criticism, but he was willing to argue with his critics without dispatching goons to exact retribution; and he anyway preferred co-opting others to threatening them. Kassir was never co-opted, but Hariri never held that against him. Indeed, why should he have?
Free men
Kassir, much like Fuleihan, was part of that exiled Lebanese war-time generation that came home after the fighting stopped. Yet where Kassir was a man boisterously of the left, Fuleihan always seemed more the solid burgher, levitating above ideology. That was the façade: anyone who knew both men could recall how Fuleihan was readily a militant in his days at the American University of Beirut, while Kassir, while never abandoning his leftist roots, steadily became more bourgeois as he kicked into his mid-40s. Sometimes opposites, toward the end objective allies, Fuleihan and Kassir distilled the post-war cosmopolitanism of Beirut, the very same that was overpowered by, and somehow coexisted with, the hard, rural stewardship of the fourth man who died in the past year, Ghazi Kanaan.
In the same way he could acknowledge the importance of a freethinker like Kassir, Hariri could just as pragmatically accept the reality of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, and work with its top administrators. Of all the strange relationships in post-war Lebanon, the bond that existed between Hariri and Kanaan was surely the oddest. Whatever brought together the businessman and the intelligence agent, the visionary and the anti-visionary, the natural co-opter and the unambiguous enforcer?
Many things, in fact: their shared appetite for power, their instinctive grasp of how best to achieve their mutual interests, their successes as men of action, and their dislike of abstraction. At play between Hariri and Kanaan were near perfect market forces, as both regularly resolved their differences by finding an equilibrium between what both were after. Kanaan ran Lebanon like a country estate, and Hariri, technically the lord of the manor, accepted him as the foreman he could not fire. The prime minister’s critics pointed to this as proof that he was an essential prop in the Syrian order; Hariri’s defenders argued that, under the circumstances, smooth collaboration with Kanaan was far better than a confrontation the Lebanese could not win. Perhaps, though one must measure the implications of Hariri’s policy: it did at times let him do what he wanted, but by allowing Syrian interference in every aspect of decision-making, it also institutionalized Lebanon’s sense of dependency. Paradoxically, as many a journalist would admit, Kanaan was little concerned with the excesses of a free Lebanese media. It was revealing that Kassir’s problems were primarily with the post-1998 order set up by President Emile Lahoud. Kanaan rarely directed threats against journalists; Kassir’s difficulties were provoked by the Lebanese over whom Kanaan presided. It was his misfortune to pay the price for the desire of Lebanese security officials to prove themselves to their Syrian superiors. Yet how ironic that before Hariri’s murder, it was much easier to mock the Syrians than it was to attack Lahoud. Syrian rule allowed this latitude to the Lebanese media, and those like Kassir took advantage of this. What he did not realize – his own killing being the warning – was that once the Syrians withdrew, the margin for such expression would disappear.
Staying on good terms with Syria
In understanding Hariri’s relations with Syria, it is important to grasp that he was no revolutionary. A conservative businessman, he preferred stability to the potentially destructive unpredictability that a break with Syria could have led to. Hariri’s ambition at the end was not, as the hagiographists have written, to take Lebanon out of Syria’s orbit; it was to widen his own margin of maneuver inside that orbit. In the weeks before his death, Hariri had made clear to the Syrians he would not take on his electoral lists the more egregious of their supporters, as he had in the past – in effect announcing that he planned to make the parliamentary elections a real contest. But at best, he and other opposition candidates hoped to win around 50 or so seats. This was no coup against Syria; it was an effort to re-impose the equilibrium that Hariri had put to good use in the days before Lahoud and Rustom Ghazali replaced Elias Hrawi and Ghazi Kanaan.
What Hariri didn’t grasp was that, for his enemies, this would anyway be misunderstood as a bid to overturn the Syrian order. They feared Hariri’s triumph because he would have easily won the round. Instead, he got too close to the sun, and paid the ultimate price. Yet it was not so much the game that was too big for Hariri; it was Hariri who unwittingly proved too big for the game. For a supremely self-assured man, this descent into momentary modesty proofed fatal, as it did for Fuleihan.
If we are to believe what we hear about Kanaan, in his final days he was unhappy that everything he had built up in Lebanon had collapsed. It’s difficult to imagine a hardy survivor of the Baathist order devoting any time to nostalgia. It’s equally difficult to lend credence to official Syrian reports that Kanaan killed himself in response to a hostile campaign in the Lebanese media. No such campaign was waged, and Kanaan was not someone to let words get him down. In fact, if anything was likely to have killed him, or caused him to kill himself, it was that he posed a mortal threat to the worried Syrian regime he served. His adeptness highlighted its incompetence. At the threshold of his crowning moment, when he could have for the first time imagined exercising absolute power, Kanaan may have fallen victim to his prospective success.
As for Kassir, he was on a cloud after the Syrian withdrawal in April. On the eve of his death he was described as being his usual confident self when discussing political changes. He was very far away from imagining that his murder was already in the final stages of preparation. Kassir had won and his years of effort had paid off. Afterwards, it was clear that his was the accomplishment not of money or power, but of ideas. In being the first to die after Syria’s pullout, Kassir proved how essential his weapon was in destabilizing the enemies of free expression.
