An evening stroll through the streets of downtown Beirut, from Place des Martyrs down to the parliament building, comes as a shock to those who grew up on television images of the city through the 1970s and 1980s. This area suffered some of the most ferocious fighting of the 15-year civil war. It was part of the “green line” that divided Muslim West Beirut from the Christian East.
The Place des Martyrs, renamed Freedom Square, was once a vast crater littered with bodies and spent cartridges. It is now a car park and shopping mall. A little further on, a new Virgin Megastore occupies what was formerly a favoured position for snipers. Just to the north, rue Monod district is home to some of the glitziest bars and restaurants outside Manhattan. The hot topic on the cafe terraces is the recent concert by the fashionable Dutch DJ Tiesto at the Beirut Forum. Aside from the occasional bullet holes and strangely scarred walls, there are few reminders, as you admire the passing parade of crop-topped teenage girls and designer-clad youths, that you are standing in what used to be one of the most dangerous places in the world. Today the greatest danger in downtown Beirut is the erratic driving of the wealthy Saudi tourists. But it might not stay that way for long.
The renewal of Beirut was largely the work of Rafiq Hariri, who served as Lebanon’s prime minister for ten years between 1992 and 2004. It was he who founded and financed Solidere, the company that launched the rebuilding of the downtown area (most Beirutis now call the district Solidere in homage to the company’s work). Under his guiding hand Lebanon looked to have a real chance of a better future. This illusion was shattered by the huge truck bomb that killed him and 20 of his entourage outside the St Georges Hotel on 14 February this year.
Since then, the city’s coffee shops and bars have been alive with conspiracy theories. The finger has been pointed most frequently at the Syrian intelligence forces who, with the 14,000 Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon, tried to control the country as a fiefdom. Following Hariri’s death, a series of assassination attempts increased public anger against Syria. Most of these attacks were car bombs and carried out on a Friday night after Muslim prayers. The targets were well-known Christians, including the much-loved television presenter May Chidiac, or dissident intellectuals opposed to the Syrian presence in Beirut. Opposition protests culminated in the street demonstrations of March – the so-called “cedar revolution”. Despite counter-demonstrations organised by Hezbollah, the pro-Syrian government was forced to resign and the Syrians were ordered to leave Lebanon on the orders of Assad himself.
The apparent suicide of the Syrian interior minister Ghazi Kanaan on 12 October – only three weeks after he was interrogated by the UN team investigating Hariri’s murder – has aroused further suspicions. Kanaan was known as a tough man, unlikely to give in to pressure, and some believe he was murdered. Hariri was rich, with business interests in Riyadh, Paris and Texas (his fortune was estimated at $3.8bn in 2003). Beirut Radio reported that Kanaan, before his death, was about to implicate Hariri in corrupt business dealings with the Syrians.
In the cafes, there is no shortage of candidates for the role of Hariri’s killer. They include embittered Christians seeking to incriminate Syria; Islamists who have not forgotten Syria’s suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s; and, perhaps inevitably, Israeli or US provocateurs.
What is certain is that Hariri is still universally admired – unusual for a Sunni Muslim in a city with a strong Christian presence. There are posters of him everywhere, smiling genially upon city streets that have been spruced up thanks largely to his personal wealth. And yet, a few miles from his renaissance Beirut, on the mainly Shia southern edges of the city, there is relentless poverty. The Palestinian camps, a stone’s throw from the shiny new airport, inevitably renamed after Hariri, are mired in deprivation and anger.
The militias and the causes that fuel them never really went away. The Palestinians remain heavily armed. The Lebanese army has recently been called out on full alert to the camps – ostensibly to guard against a rumoured Israeli assault, but in reality to monitor movements in areas still under Syrian influence. Palestinian fighters have been reported moving around the Syrian border in the east Beka’a Valley. This has unnerved many, just as Syria desired.
Ramadan has come early this year and, as evening falls, Muslims break their fast alongside Christians drinking beer or arak. But people are unsettled. “Beirut has not forgotten its past,” Ramez Maalouf says to me, puffing on a large cigar as we walk through the glossy arcades of the new city, “but nobody here wants to go backwards.” Maalouf, an academic, was an important player in the redevelopment of the city. “Hariri understood that people like all of this” – he gestures at the children playing under the clock tower, the parents drinking and shopping. “They want a place to relax in and live in. They don’t want to live in a place like Baghdad.”
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