COLUMN ONE : Lebanon’s $4-Billion Redeemer : Devastated by years of civil war, a nation pins its hopes on a prime minister of massive wealth. If the country recovers, he’ll be even wealthier.

Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s tinted-glass, armored Mercedes and its entourage move out from behind the blast-resistant walls of his villa and into the streets of Beirut, and simultaneously three decoy limousines begin coursing through the city.

Is Hariri behind door No. 1? Door No. 2? In a city whose love affair with car bombs spans a generation, where a prime minister’s life expectancy may be measured by the time it takes him to get from his house to his office, not even the soldiers accompanying the convoy know for sure.

But no one is taking chances with Lebanon’s now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t prime minister, least of all Hariri himself, who invested $2 million of his own money beefing up security at the government residential compound.

Around this portly real estate magnate appointed last fall to put Lebanon back together again after 17 years of civil war, there is an aura of desperate invincibility. It is born of Lebanon’s hopes that its richest citizen can succeed in awakening the country from the coma of war when others have fallen victim to murky political squabbles or a bullet. Hariri can’t die. And he can’t fail, either. As the Lebanese see it, if Hariri can’t fix things, who can?

“This man, if he falls ill, we’re in big trouble. Everybody in this country has pinned their hopes on him. They think he’s the Messiah,” said Lebanese journalist Tewfik Mishlawi. “My only fear is that people seem to have put all their eggs in his basket. . . . That’s very dangerous, and he realizes this. . . . He has the sense that people have too many hopes.”

In a country whose commercial heritage reaches back to the days of the Phoenician traders, a land that practically invented the notion of the Middle Eastern bazaar, Hariri is the essence of what it is to be Lebanese. The son of a poor citrus farmer in Sidon who got a $120-a-month job as an accountant, Hariri went into business in the Persian Gulf and got rich. By last count, he’s one of the world’s 100 wealthiest men, with a fortune estimated at $3 billion to $4 billion.

His mammoth Oger Enterprises is a construction fixture throughout the Middle East. He has substantial real estate holdings in Lebanon, France, Monaco, Saudi Arabia and the United States, including Houston’s $275-million Texas Tower. He owns the Bank Mediterranee and significant shares of the Banque Francaise de l’Orient, the Indosuez Bank, the Arab Bank Ltd. and the Paribas Financial Co.

Asked recently how many banks he owns, Hariri replied: “I don’t know. A lot.”

“This is the first time in Lebanon’s history it has a prime minister who has given more to the country than he’s siphoned off,” said one Arab diplomat enthusiastically. “You can’t bribe the guy. He’s too rich!”

Few outside of the Middle East had heard of Hariri until December, when Israel attempted quietly to deport 415 Palestinians, most of them suspected activists with the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, across the border into Lebanon. They were met with an unprecedented response. Reacting to the news in the dead of night, Hariri bluntly stated: The deportees were Israel’s responsibility. They would not be admitted into Lebanon.

The unexpected refusal touched off a public relations nightmare for Israel and threatened the course of the Middle East peace talks, as film footage of the deportees stuck on a snowy mountainside between Lebanon and Israel was beamed uncomfortably around the world.

Since when did Lebanon, on whose land other nations have roved heedlessly in two decades of war, say no?

Then, on the eve of U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s visit to the Middle East last month, Hariri embarked on a round of shuttle diplomacy in Arab capitals aimed at putting Lebanon, often an afterthought in the Arab-Israeli conflict, squarely on the agenda.

Christopher, the prime minister insisted, should deal with Lebanese matters in Lebanon, not in Cairo or Damascus. The result: the first visit of a senior U.S. official to Beirut since 1983.

“Lebanon has paid a price for a lot of things, one of them has been accepting the Palestinians. . . . If I was the prime minister in 1948 (when the state of Israel was created in Palestine), I wouldn’t have let the Palestinians come. They have their own country,” Hariri, 48, said in a recent interview in his elegant Beirut office.

“How can Israel or anybody deport people to you without your permission? It happened in the past, it’s true. But from now on, as long as I am the prime minister, it will never happen.

“I feel with them,” he said of the stranded deportees. “I cry for them. . . (But) I have a responsibility on the account of my own country. I am trying to be Lebanese.”

Assad Mokhadem, a longtime associate and aide to the prime minister, explains his boss thus: “I have discovered that . . . it is not the richness that made the man. The money is very important, but he didn’t have the chance to show his qualifications except through the money he made.

“He tells you, ‘Maybe at the beginning we have to make some effort to make money. But then the money will bring itself. The important thing is to give meaning to the money.’ This was the first time I ever heard somebody who has money, to search for a meaning to his money. But he says that sometimes power gives you a chance to explain yourself.”

Hariri and his money have been quiet fixtures in Lebanon since the debut of the civil war in 1975. He had gone off to make his fortune in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, attracting the appreciative eye of King Fahd when he built the Massara Inter-Continental Hotel in Taif in a record 243 days, in time for a scheduled summit of Arab leaders.

His favor with the Saudi royal family earned him Saudi citizenship and contracts to build hotels, office buildings, schools and palaces all over Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, his business associates simply call him Amm (Uncle)--the Arabic equivalent of “Big Boss Man.”

In recent years, more than $100 million a year of Hariri’s money has gone home to Lebanon.

A Sunni Muslim, Hariri has helped his hometown of Sidon, an undeveloped farming community in the south whose mostly Shiite Muslim residents used to see little help from Sunni and Christian politicians in Beirut.

Suddenly, Sidon had wide boulevards, schools, stadiums and amphitheaters. Its historic grand mosque was rebuilt. It got a medical school and hospital complex with seven specialized surgical units unmatched in the Middle East until the facility was destroyed in the 1982 Israeli invasion.

Hariri turned his attention next to Beirut, where he sent packages of sugar, flour, rice and lentils, “the Hariri box,” to nearly every family in the city.

In 1984, with the Israeli siege and occupation at an end, Hariri’s Oger Liban Co. swept out the rubble of the devastated downtown city center and rebuilt the facades of the buildings around the historic Parliament and Martyrs Square. Hariri restored electricity, water and sewer lines along the main downtown streets--only to see it all crumble to ruins again with the next flare-up of the civil war.

Throughout the war, the Hariri Foundation sent Lebanese students on scholarships abroad to Britain, France and the United States, nearly 30,000 in all. Half the graduates of the American University of Beirut since 1985 have attended on scholarships from Hariri.

So it was probably no surprise that Lebanon, which saw its first president after the end of the civil war blown up with his motorcade and its first parliamentary elections in 20 years mired in boycott and dissent, where inflation was running sky-high and two years after the war you still couldn’t make a phone call across town, would finally play its Hariri card.

Within days of his nomination as prime minister in October, the troubled Lebanese pound regained a third of its value against the dollar, and private Saudi investors pledged $600 million toward rebuilding war-ravaged downtown Beirut.

“I’m flattered by this feeling of the Lebanese toward me. I hope I can live up to their expectations,” Hariri said. “It is hard, I know it will be hard. But I’m sure of one thing: I will make a difference. I will make a big difference.”

A taxi driver winding his way through a small quarter of West Beirut points out the signs of Hariri: Here, where the plainclothes officers are standing out in the street, is the heavily gated compound of the Hariri residence, where Hariri installed bulletproof glass and a blast-proof wall; here is the stately old villa being renovated to house Hariri’s new magazine; here is the hospital Hariri built; here is the building housing state television, of which Hariri just bought a 35% share.

In a city with 1.2 million cars and not a single stoplight, corner police officers in new hats and white gloves are unsnarling the madcap traffic; and for the first time in decades, legions of outrageous parking offenders are being towed, thanks to Hariri’s orders.

New garbage trucks are loading up piles of refuse from vacant lots and street corners. Stores are being raided for price-gouging. Six hundred new international phone lines have opened up, run by the national phone company, replacing the thousands of ad hoc, privately owned lines strung through to Cyprus.

For the first time since the end of the war, 2,000 Lebanese army troops moved in December into the notorious southern suburbs of Beirut, pushing aside Islamic militiamen from the streets and replacing Syrian soldiers at major checkpoints in an area that had been off-limits to the national army since 1984.

Almost simultaneously, 1,500 soldiers and 400 police officers swept into the Bekaa Valley and Al Maten regions, arresting up to 90 suspects and seizing large quantities of firearms, drugs and counterfeit currency.

“This is to demonstrate that there is no place in the country outside the reach of law enforcement agencies,” the government announced. “The war is over.”

Perhaps most ambitious of all, Hariri has embarked on a $2.7-billion project to rebuild the whole of downtown Beirut, a plan that will clear up to three-fourths of the stately old ruins and replace them with gleaming high-rise hotels, offices, banks and shopping centers, built with private capital in a project owned jointly by new investors and present landowners.

Proponents say Hariri’s project, into which he has already injected $100 million of his own capital, will revive the devastated heart of the city and restore Beirut to its former status as the commercial and financial capital of the Levant.

It is a key component of any attempt to rebuild Beirut, this 10-square-mile area of hulking, bullet-chipped stone that was the place where Lebanon’s civil war began, though detractors say Hariri is trying to introduce the steel-and-glass aura of Saudi Arabia at the expense of the Ottoman charm that was old Beirut.

“Rebuilding this area would mean that the war has really stopped, has really been put to an end. It means this country has reached political stability, which is an essential prerequisite for economic stability,” said Ibrahim Shamsuddin, a member of the Hariri design team educated at UC Irvine and UC Berkeley. “And we can throw the last stone on the grave of the war.”

By luring his investor friends into Lebanon, Hariri hopes to overcome the paralysis that has plagued the nation since the end of the war, when the aid money stopped before the economy started going again. Detractors say Hariri stands to make millions himself off the rebuilding, though he has limited individual investments in the project to 10%.

“Are you the prime minister of Lebanon or a real estate agent?” wrote one Beirut columnist.

“Our objection is this. First, he’s the prime minister; second, he’s the head of the development company, and the head for the Center for Development and Reconstruction is a Hariri man,” said Talal Salman, editor of the leftist As Safir. “So you find Hariri everywhere. If any dissenter has something to say, he has to go back to Hariri, and people are scared. There are no more limits between the public and private sector; it’s Hariri and the government. And in the end, the dictatorship of money may be worse than the dictatorship of soldiers.”

“Hariri’s main feature is that he’s bringing investors in to make money in Lebanon, instead of giving aid,” said Mishlawi, the journalist. “There is a suspicion that a lot of these projects will go to his companies. But others say, why not? Lebanon is a free enterprise system. Why not let him make money instead of foreigners making money?”

Shamsuddin, who is also the son of Beirut’s senior Shiite cleric, said many suspicions come from Lebanon’s long history of corruption.

“People have been used to corrupt politicians here who want to be minister just to make wealth. This man is different. He came from outside the club. He doesn’t need to get it from being prime minister,” he said. “Of course, he’s going to make money. He’s an investor, and this is a profitable project, and whoever puts money in it is going to make a profit.”

Many Lebanese were disappointed when Hariri’s appointment did not bring with it a massive influx of cash from Gulf state treasuries, but he is still regarded as the representative of the pro-Western, secular view of Arab politics embodied in his Saudi background.

There have been persistent reports, denied by all quarters, that the Saudis convinced Syria of Hariri’s merit as prime minister by paying about $60 million to Damascus. With 40,000 Syrian troops still in Lebanon, no decision about a Lebanese prime minister is made without Damascus’ approval, and Syria was initially reluctant to back Hariri.

“Some people suspect that one of the reasons Hariri was brought in was that Syria wants to establish a balance between Iran and another force like Saudi Arabia,” said one Beirut political analyst. “They don’t want to let Iran have a free hand in Lebanon. They want to balance it off with a Saudi presence.”

Now, many are wondering whether Hariri will have the necessary independence to say the ultimate ‘no’: To push Syria to comply with provisions of the 1989 Taif accord, under which Syrian troops were to redeploy out of Beirut into the Bekaa Valley by last September.

In a country where pictures of Syrian President Hafez Assad are posted prominently around the capital city--at Beirut Airport, Assad’s portrait dwarfs Lebanese President Elias Hrawi’s--this is no easy undertaking.

“Hariri told me there are two approaches you can take to the Syrians in Lebanon,” said one confidant. “Either a suicide approach, where you invite them to come and clobber you like (former Christian leader Michel) Aoun did, or you deal with them along an appeasement route, use that time to reconstitute Lebanese society, make it stronger and Syria will have less and less an opportunity for influence.”

“So far, the Syrian troops are helping the government, I cannot deny that,” said Hariri, pointing to Syrian aid in establishing security in Lebanon. “Lebanon and Syria, they live together. They are neighbors. It is wrong to try to say that as much as you are an enemy to Syria, you are a nationalist. . . .

“From the other side, I would like to build a strong relation with Syria based on our mutual respect and mutual independence and integrity. And confidence. Lebanon now is in very bad shape, and going to war with Syria is suicide. . . . Eventually, the Syrians will not stay in Lebanon. They have no interest, and we don’t have any. But for now, things are different.”

For many Lebanese, the honeymoon is approaching an end. Hariri had set himself a deadline of spring for improving living conditions in Beirut, where most people still have electricity only six hours a day. Recently, however, he made it clear he was talking about the end of spring.

“I just came! I just came!” he protested. “The war is ended, but a lot of things have happened after that, and you know, you cannot expect that the next day after the war is finished, the work can start. We need to clean up the mess.”

In the coastal foothills above Juniyah, north of Beirut, Gebrail Farid Soleiman was recently negotiating a deal to sell his land to expatriate Lebanese businessmen who are thinking, for the first time since the civil war ended, of coming back. The television was tuned to Hariri’s first address to Parliament.

“You want to tell Hariri something, tell him this for me,” Soleiman said. “We live in hope, and he is the hope. Tell him we want to ask him about peace. There is peace, but only half peace. Tell him, we need to rest.”