A Fearful Lebanon Marks Ex-Premier’s Slaying

Saad Hariri is the majority leader of parliament in this troubled seaside nation, but he has spent the last six months in self-imposed exile, too fearful to set foot on his native soil.

When he finally came back to mark the first anniversary of the assassination of his father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, he arrived almost surreptitiously.

And a bulletproof shield separated him from the hundreds of thousands who heeded his call to flood the streets Tuesday, a year since a massive truck bomb killed his father and 22 others here in the capital.

“By being present here today, you foil the conspiracy ... against Lebanon, against Rafik Hariri, against Lebanon’s freedom,” the younger Hariri told an emotional crowd.

Though the 35-year-old Hariri’s presence at the head of a demonstration may have reinvigorated an uncertain public, it’s his long absence that lingers as the metaphor for Lebanon’s current struggle.

For six months, the legislator has beaten a path from the White House to Paris to Jidda, Saudi Arabia. But the billionaire patriarch of his nation’s Sunni Muslim community has steered clear of Lebanon.

Even now, he’s making no promises to stick around. “The danger still exists,” a pale, goateed Hariri said in an interview at his family’s mansion Sunday, a massive portrait of his father looming behind him.

Rafik Hariri’s death helped drive Syrian soldiers out of Lebanon and provoked a powerful wave of patriotism. But these days, the heady promise of unity and independence has withered.

Politicians and journalists are killed in broad daylight, with apparent impunity. The government seems to be run by ghosts -- leaders who have not fled the country are afraid to leave their fortified mansions. Ordinary people plaster their cars and homes with pictures of aging civil war militia leaders and swap pessimistic talk about the economy and foreign interference.

It sometimes seems as if the only force that keeps chaos at bay is the Lebanese themselves, a people spiritually and materially tapped from years of civil war. No matter what depth of instability gapes before them, they go doggedly about their shopping, schooling and work. This determination to shrug off unrest has characterized Lebanon ever since its 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.

Last winter, for a few weeks, Lebanon seemed on the brink of reinvention. Hariri’s slaying, widely believed to have been the work of Syria, made Lebanon howl for the first time in years. People poured into the streets to shout their demands: that Syria stop controlling the government in Beirut and put an end to its de facto military occupation.

The international community piled pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad, and it worked: Lebanon’s Syrian-backed government collapsed, the prime minister stepped down and Syria was forced to withdraw its troops.

But a year later, the shadow of Syria stretches across this small country. The president, Emile Lahoud, is a close ally of the Syrian government in Damascus. Many Lebanese firmly believe that Syria is to blame for the 14 explosions that have rocked the country in recent months. Journalists and politicians critical of Syria have been targeted for assassination.

“I know something quite sure,” Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said during a recent interview in his mountain redoubt. “We’ll never have peace with this Syrian regime. They’ll never give us relief, and we’ll never forget that.”

One of the most prominent anti-Syrian politicians to remain in Lebanon despite the threat of death, Jumblatt has ensconced himself in his ancient palace in the Chouf mountains, his ancestral home turf. He receives visitors and oversees his parliamentary faction by cellphone, but generally refuses to venture out of his house.

Like most leaders in this country where political posts are apportioned according to religion, Jumblatt inherited power from his father as the head of his sect. A decade and a half after the civil war ground to a halt, Lebanon continues to abide by the carefully wrought boundaries that were designed to end the bloodbaths of the religious militias. It was meant as a temporary, transitional system, but Lebanon has never set aside its sectarianism.

“There is an independent Lebanon, but there are not independent Lebanese. We don’t have citizens, we have people living here,” said Gen. Michel Aoun, a former military commander who has become the most powerful, popular Christian leader in today’s Lebanon. “We have to change the government and the presidency. Otherwise we are going to hell.”

Nattily clad in a pinstriped suit, Aoun sat on a recent afternoon in a basement office of a house in the predominantly Christian hills overlooking Beirut. The day brimmed with the kind of transcendent beauty that occasionally eclipses, for a brief time, the tortures of this country’s politics.

But the former civil warrior known by his followers as “the General,” usually in a tone that implies that there has never been another general of real consequence, was cloistered from the world behind layers of paramilitary checkpoints. Gunmen loitered around the gate; guards at the front door unscrewed pens and peered anxiously into purses for signs of explosives. Journalists had to fax over copies of their passports in advance for security clearance.

“It would be strange if I didn’t live like this -- because of my past, because of my present and especially because of my future,” Aoun said. He was “threatening the socio-mafia,” he explained. “You can’t fight corruption with moderation.”

Like most leaders in Lebanon, Aoun speaks as if he, and only he, brings a clean conscience and a workable solution into a dirty political fray. He doesn’t approve of Syrian influence, but, like most, has his own list of Syrian collaborators.

It’s a peculiar truth that Lebanese argue about who among them is allied with Syria. Some analysts believe that Aoun, a longtime Syria foe who fled Lebanon after the civil war, came to an accommodation with Damascus before returning from exile last spring. Aoun vehemently denies any such pact, but suspicions were fed when he formed an alliance with Syrian-backed Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim party and militia concentrated in Lebanon’s south.

If you ask Aoun, however, it’s precisely the politicians who present themselves as “anti-Syria” who are the corrupt bedfellows of Damascus. It’s hardly a baseless accusation: Before falling out with the Syrian government in recent years, both Rafik Hariri and Druze leader Jumblatt were close friends and allies of Damascus -- and participants in the Syrian-run government.

Collaborating with outsiders has a long history in Lebanon. So, too, does the tribal notion that politics can only be accomplished through a powerful community figurehead.

Reshaping this web of loyalties into a coherent democracy has been Lebanon’s burden.

“We the Lebanese, as simple as that, don’t trust each other,” said Hussein Naboulsi, a Hezbollah spokesman. “When the Syrians were here, they had the upper hand. If two officials fight,” he slapped his hand down on the desk as if he were swatting a fly, “the Syrians solved it.”

These days, it seems, fights aren’t getting solved. Despite a massive international investigation, Hariri’s killers remain unidentified. Nor have Lebanese authorities managed to solve the string of assassinations and attacks that have followed.

The United Nations team that’s hunting for Hariri’s killers stays out of sight in the hills outside Beirut. There, in ultra-tight secrecy, its members are combing through reams of documents, while they lobby, mostly unsuccessfully, to get access to Syrian officials for questioning.

“Anybody now can do anything. Any intelligence service can do anything. There is no control,” Naboulsi said. “Now every intelligence agency can come and kill anybody to make the gaps [among Lebanese] wider and wider.”

At the center of one such gap is Hezbollah. Some Lebanese want the anti-Israel fighters to lay down their guns; others defend their right to arms. Depending upon whom you ask, Hezbollah is either an illegitimate state within a state or a brave and historic resistance movement that helped drive Israeli troops from Lebanon.

Months after its withdrawal, Syria lingers as a sort of psychological scapegoat here. Many Lebanese are convinced that Damascus is still running the country and orchestrating all manner of problems, including recent riots over the European cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and bombings in Lebanon’s Christian neighborhoods.

“The people still have fear in their hearts. Nobody thinks they really left,” said Khalid Mais, mayor of Majdal Anjar, a small Bekaa Valley town on the Syrian border. “They left before and they came back.

“Now it’s like a ghost,” he added. “They pass, but you can’t see them.”

His wife’s eyes filled with tears, and she turned to look at the sky. She didn’t think it was safe for her husband to talk with journalists; they squabbled about it in Arabic.

“Before, if people were talking and somebody said one word about the Syrians, the others would inform on him,” said Hassan Abdel Wahad, Mais’ 70-year-old neighbor. “The system used to be apparent, but now it’s undercover. And we don’t trust each other.”