PM Rafiq Hariri's Assassination
Last Monday, right below the Green Line along the coast, the former PM Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in a massive car bomb, which left a gaping hole of destruction about 15 feet deep and some 30 feed wide. I quickly went down to the site calling ABC and Ch4 on the phone to describe what I was seeing. After having worked for 4 years watching gruesome video of similar attacks, what struck me was not so much the face of the calamity as much as the fact that it was 3 dimensional, and the color was a lot clearer and real than what one sees on video. It was incredible to think for a second that I was standing in that piece of video which I would have otherwise been screening for cutable shots in London. The other amazing sensation was the intimacy of the space. Again, watching the video of TV, it is hard to tell the scale of the situation, and in this case it was much smaller and closer than what it looked like on TV. It was also fascinating to watch the different ways people were reacting, some dazed, some curious, some wanting to help, all of that while rescue red cross workers ran back and forth from crater to ambulance caring bodies on stretchers, with smoke spiralling up from smoldering cars in the backdrop.
In the evening, I headed to the exterior of Hariri's house, just a 5 minute walk from where I am staying. Again, outside the house was a group of mourners, maybe 400, protesting his death, and at times chanting anti-Syrian slogans. Streaming through the crowd were politicians, and families squeezing their way in and out of a heavy wooden front door. Once more, what was striking was the intimacy of the space. The streets of the neighborhood, Hamra, in West Beirut are small, so fill and block up very quickly.
Tuesday, a Lebanese friend, Rachid, and I decided to attend Hariri's funeral march down to the grand mosque in downtown which made part of one of many of the former PM's construction projects around town. The street of Independence where the cortege passed through was abosuletly packed. There were tens of thousands of people moving along expressing their grief and anti-Syrian feelings. In all, the estimates of people attending the funeraly was around 200,000 to 250,000. Rachid essentially played the role of a fixer for me. He showed short cuts so that we could aim for the best views and shots of the procession. Being about 2 meters tall, 1 meter 97 to be exact, and weighing in at about 125 kilos, I knew that he was the right man to be moving through such a massive crowd. Also, his height can in handy. He became the official photographer of the team taking some excellent shots of relevant political players, Hariri's family members, the coffins... you name it. I will send you some of the photos of the event in a follow up email to give you a sense of the scene.
From Tuesday evening on, things calmed down as the city shut down for 3 days of mourning. Although I kept a low profile, watched the news, and studied my Arabic, the minute I walked out to check in with some local friends, I couldn't help but remembering Friedman's description in, Beirut to Jerusalem, of Beirut's incredibly active rumor mill, which was moving at full steam by Wednesday. I heard theories of who was behing the assassination from all different angles and made up of many, many different colors. In fact, still to this day, Sunday, the theories are being generated in massive quantities, but at the end of the day, as one journalist friend who had just come in from Baghdad said: "It doesn't matter who did it, because it is what will come of Hariri's murder that counts at this point."
It is hard to predicate what will come of Hariri's death. One of the most important and wealthiest men in Lebanon, Hariri having made his fortune in Saudi during the war, was one of the key figures behing the peace accord to end the Civil War and Beirut's reconstruction. I would guess that he and his efforts caused the international buzz of "Lebanon's back". However, despite the buzz, the beautiful reconstruction and promotion of the country, it didn't seem convincing when I was here studying Arabic last summer. To me, Beirut felt like a glass house, and place where the concrete and new stone facade were more illusion than reality. The feeling was confirmed within minutes of Hariri's death. The rumors and theories of who had perpatrated the act unveiled a very polarized population, which had split and grouped into different factions as a reaction to the murder. The massive chasms apparent during the war were right back, and gaping.
Many on the streets have often told me that nobody knows why or how the war stopped. It just did, and as some say: "maybe we were tired of the killing". So ending from one day to the next, profound divisive issues remained unresolved, and nothing really changed. The end of the war was more a truce rather than a reform. There were no legal nor political changes which might attempted to bridge differences which surfaced during the war, nor very much of a move to change the political system set up by the French in the 1920's. For instance, the last population census which took place in Lebanon was in 1940. There has never been a new one set in motion, as no one wants to deal with the reality that demographics have changed and hence the need to a fairer governmental representation. Although Beirut is undergoing a nice face lift, it is still the same city filled with sectarian differences which date back 150 year with a harsh reality that the Civil War only ended 15 years ago.
So, what next? Tomorrow there will be a massive protest in the morning which will end up in front of the parliament. It is supposed to be a statement against the Syrian presence in the country. No one knows whether it will get out of hand. A professor at AUB said that a lot of what we will be looking at is action resulting from an emotional and slightly irrational high making everything around us a little more volatile than necessary. The political players in the anti-Syrian coalition are taking advantage of the momentum as a means to reinforce their position both nationally and internationally. The opportunism is seen by many as untrustworthy and unfair. So we will see. I am not sure the story is big enough at this point to make much waves in international news, however certainly locally and regionally many are standing by watching. The melting pot characteristic of this town funnily enough implicates alot of countries around here, who are in one way or another represented in the small but fascinating city.
In the evening, I headed to the exterior of Hariri's house, just a 5 minute walk from where I am staying. Again, outside the house was a group of mourners, maybe 400, protesting his death, and at times chanting anti-Syrian slogans. Streaming through the crowd were politicians, and families squeezing their way in and out of a heavy wooden front door. Once more, what was striking was the intimacy of the space. The streets of the neighborhood, Hamra, in West Beirut are small, so fill and block up very quickly.
Tuesday, a Lebanese friend, Rachid, and I decided to attend Hariri's funeral march down to the grand mosque in downtown which made part of one of many of the former PM's construction projects around town. The street of Independence where the cortege passed through was abosuletly packed. There were tens of thousands of people moving along expressing their grief and anti-Syrian feelings. In all, the estimates of people attending the funeraly was around 200,000 to 250,000. Rachid essentially played the role of a fixer for me. He showed short cuts so that we could aim for the best views and shots of the procession. Being about 2 meters tall, 1 meter 97 to be exact, and weighing in at about 125 kilos, I knew that he was the right man to be moving through such a massive crowd. Also, his height can in handy. He became the official photographer of the team taking some excellent shots of relevant political players, Hariri's family members, the coffins... you name it. I will send you some of the photos of the event in a follow up email to give you a sense of the scene.
From Tuesday evening on, things calmed down as the city shut down for 3 days of mourning. Although I kept a low profile, watched the news, and studied my Arabic, the minute I walked out to check in with some local friends, I couldn't help but remembering Friedman's description in, Beirut to Jerusalem, of Beirut's incredibly active rumor mill, which was moving at full steam by Wednesday. I heard theories of who was behing the assassination from all different angles and made up of many, many different colors. In fact, still to this day, Sunday, the theories are being generated in massive quantities, but at the end of the day, as one journalist friend who had just come in from Baghdad said: "It doesn't matter who did it, because it is what will come of Hariri's murder that counts at this point."
It is hard to predicate what will come of Hariri's death. One of the most important and wealthiest men in Lebanon, Hariri having made his fortune in Saudi during the war, was one of the key figures behing the peace accord to end the Civil War and Beirut's reconstruction. I would guess that he and his efforts caused the international buzz of "Lebanon's back". However, despite the buzz, the beautiful reconstruction and promotion of the country, it didn't seem convincing when I was here studying Arabic last summer. To me, Beirut felt like a glass house, and place where the concrete and new stone facade were more illusion than reality. The feeling was confirmed within minutes of Hariri's death. The rumors and theories of who had perpatrated the act unveiled a very polarized population, which had split and grouped into different factions as a reaction to the murder. The massive chasms apparent during the war were right back, and gaping.
Many on the streets have often told me that nobody knows why or how the war stopped. It just did, and as some say: "maybe we were tired of the killing". So ending from one day to the next, profound divisive issues remained unresolved, and nothing really changed. The end of the war was more a truce rather than a reform. There were no legal nor political changes which might attempted to bridge differences which surfaced during the war, nor very much of a move to change the political system set up by the French in the 1920's. For instance, the last population census which took place in Lebanon was in 1940. There has never been a new one set in motion, as no one wants to deal with the reality that demographics have changed and hence the need to a fairer governmental representation. Although Beirut is undergoing a nice face lift, it is still the same city filled with sectarian differences which date back 150 year with a harsh reality that the Civil War only ended 15 years ago.
So, what next? Tomorrow there will be a massive protest in the morning which will end up in front of the parliament. It is supposed to be a statement against the Syrian presence in the country. No one knows whether it will get out of hand. A professor at AUB said that a lot of what we will be looking at is action resulting from an emotional and slightly irrational high making everything around us a little more volatile than necessary. The political players in the anti-Syrian coalition are taking advantage of the momentum as a means to reinforce their position both nationally and internationally. The opportunism is seen by many as untrustworthy and unfair. So we will see. I am not sure the story is big enough at this point to make much waves in international news, however certainly locally and regionally many are standing by watching. The melting pot characteristic of this town funnily enough implicates alot of countries around here, who are in one way or another represented in the small but fascinating city.
posted by Irina Prentice at 10:07 PM
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