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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
A huge crowd mourns Lebanon's assassinated former leader, while a few dare to wonder whether his death will somehow lead to long-awaited independence from Syria.
Feb 16, 2005 | The crowds began forming in the early morning hours Wednesday outside the house of the deceased Rafik Hariri. Two days prior, Hariri, the billionaire former prime minister of Lebanon, had been assassinated on the Beirut waterfront in a massive explosion that knocked windows out of buildings over a mile away.
Lebanon was in its second day of mourning, and in the mostly Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Qoreitem, men and women made their way to his house to pay their final respects. So too did large crowds of young Lebanese men, waving flags, chanting, singing and marching. Some people even brought their children, and I watched as two young boys jousted with their matching Lebanese flags. The boys could hardly have understood the significance of the moment, but nonetheless, their fathers must have felt their sons needed to be there just to be able to say, years down the road, that they had bid the great man farewell.
The red and white Lebanese flag, of course, was everywhere, but so too were makeshift black flags, waved side by side with the national flag. I know the bearers intended their banners to be symbols of mourning, but I couldn't help thinking they could have just as well been the black flag of anarchy -- since that's what many fear Lebanon is on the verge of slipping into.
When the bomb went off on Monday, I was walking with my girlfriend, Tara, a little less than a mile away. Nonetheless, we could both feel the explosion reverberate in our ribcages, which was the first sign that what we had just heard was not just a demolition charge from a nearby construction site. Still, we had no idea just how big the bomb was until we arrived on the scene 10 minutes later.
I had felt explosions reverberate in my body before, and it's an eerie feeling, like someone has just shocked you with a heart resuscitator or punched you full force in the solar plexus. Once, as an Army Ranger on a mission in Iraq, I had ordered the use of fragmentary grenades to clear a room in the midst of a firefight. The resulting concussion bounced off the walls and shook those of us in the adjacent rooms; I could imagine what it had done to the people inside before we even entered.
By contrast, the bomb in Beirut had done the same thing from almost a mile away, and unlike the grenade, it wasn't even in a confined space where it could reverberate off anything. So I shouldn't have been shocked when I arrived and saw how big the crater caused by the bomb was, but I was.
Later that afternoon, I discussed the blast with a friend, a former United Nations official who lived in Lebanon during the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 (a war that Hariri helped mediate from abroad before he returned to his native Lebanon and became prime minister). We both estimated the explosive charge to have been massive, over 300 kilograms in weight. The crater it left in the middle of the Corniche was at least three meters deep and 20 wide, astonishing given all the asphalt and rock it had to blast through.
The first culprit on everyone's minds was Syria. Hariri had resigned as prime minister in protest of Syria's meddling in Lebanese affairs, and those opposed to the current pro-Syrian prime minister, Omar Karami, had been courting him of late. (Syrian troops' presence in Lebanon was legitimized by the Arab League after Lebanon's civil war, but U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for the troops' withdrawal, has emboldened Lebanese opposed to their presence.) Later in the day the groups opposed to Karami would issue a statement placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of Damascus.
For the rest of the day on Monday, Beirut remained in a state of shellshock. Without even being told, shops and restaurants shuttered their businesses midafternoon. People went home to their families, city residents back to their villages in the mountains and the south. Many of those who remained dressed up in their best dark suits and made the drive to Qoreitem to pay their respects to the Hariri family.
Tuesday was much the same. All stores and restaurants remained closed for the duration of the mourning period. Tara, a photographer, sent her pictures back to New York, and then we both headed out of town, up north to the coastal town of Byblos in search of a good restaurant still open.
When we arrived back in town that night, Beirut remained a ghost town -- the streets still empty, the stores all still shuttered. The only signs of life were the glossy pictures of Hariri that had suddenly sprouted up everywhere -- on apartment buildings, on billboards, on windows and on cars.
