RAFIK HARIRI will be remembered in Lebanon long after his death. Not only was he a central figure in the country’s tortuous politics over the past two decades, including ten years as Prime Minister, but the story of his rise from the impoverished son of a greengrocer in a provincial town to become one of the world’s richest men and a friend of kings and presidents will continue to inspire many.
He is also likely to be remembered as the founder of a new dynasty, in both Lebanon and Europe. He leaves to his wife and six children numerous financial and media companies stretching from Saudi Arabia to Brazil, and worth perhaps up to £4 billion.
Similarly, he will be remembered as a champion of Lebanon’s independence from Syria, which maintains a military presence in the country. Had he confined his life to that of a businessman in Saudi Arabia, where he made his wealth, he would probably have become even wealthier — and almost certainly he would have lived longer. Instead, he spent a significant measure of his income on philanthropic projects in Lebanon and on reconstructing its economy after the devastating civil war of 1975-90.
While he began his premiership as a perceived stooge of Syria, he ended it as an opposition leader struggling to bring the Syrian presence to an end soon. As such, he annoyed not only President Bashar Assad in Damascus, but also a number of powerful, secretive Syrian financial clans who benefit hugely from the occupation. Only a day before an explosion destroyed his motorcade in Beirut, he told his friend and confidant Walid Jumblat, the Druze leader, that he sensed that his end was imminent.
Had he lived, he might have expected to return to the premiership with a large majority in the forthcoming Lebanese general elections. He counted such diverse figures as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, President Jacques Chirac of France and President George W.Bush of the United States as his friends.
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Rafik Baha Eddine Hariri was born the third child of a Sunni Muslim greengrocer and tenant farmer in the south-Lebanese coastal town of Sidon. After a general secondary education in Egypt, he moved on to Beirut to study accountancy at the Arab University in 1964. But his training had to be interrupted after only a year, apparently because he could not afford to pay the tuition fee. Instead, he answered a newspaper advertisement and migrated to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to be a school teacher.
There his rapid ascendancy began on the back of the oil boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when prices quadrupled. After a year or two as a bookkeeper in a small engineering firm, Hariri founded his own company, Cisconest, in 1969 and began to build offices for the Government. It was said at the time that he doubled his wealth every few months in partnership with local potentates. In the late 1970s, he bought the French construction company OGER and found himself the owner of the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia.
With the purchase also began his intimate involvement with the French establishment, including the Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. He also became a confidant of Crown Prince Fahd, for whom he built a number of palaces. In 1978 he was granted Saudi citizenship and became an insider, officially, as well as in reality.
In retrospect, it appears that even in those early beginnings of his prominence, Hariri thought of returning one day to his native land as a political figure. Lebanon was in the grip of a civil war driven by the rivalries of its diverse communal leaders and the ambitions of outsiders, the Israelis, Palestinians and Syrians.
While not neglecting his newfound love of luxury yachts, private aircraft and Parisian mansions, he poured a portion of his wealth into charities in the poorest parts of Lebanon that often gave him a high public profile. In 1979 he founded an institute of higher education in Sidon and the Hariri Foundation for Culture and Higher Education in Beirut which has, to date, paid the tuition fees of some 30,000 students at home and abroad. Such work was not possible without relationships with the warlords and Hariri was suspected by some of financing opposing militias.
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In the early 1980s, Hariri began to act as a mediator in Lebanon on behalf of King Fahd and was instrumental in convening the “National Dialogue” conferences of Geneva and Lausanne in 1983 and 1984. At about the same time, he courted the late President Assad of Syria, to the extent that he built a palace for him in Damascus as a personal gift.
In the end, such mediation did not succeed, one of the reasons being that Assad aimed at reducing Lebanon to an official vassalage. In 1985 and again in 1987, two intense heaves by Hariri to urge Lebanese Christians to accept Syria’s overlordship failed among much recrimination and bloodshed.
The Lebanese crisis deepened in late 1988 when Christian and Syrian forces prevented members of parliament in areas under their control from meeting to choose a new president. A subsequent military push by the caretaker Prime Minister, General Michel Aoun, to expel the Syrians from the country failed, and paved the way, a year later, for the Saudis’ convening of an emergency meeting of the Lebanese parliament in Taif, Saudi Arabia. The Taif Agreement ratified the presence of the Syrian Army in Lebanon and led to the occupation of Beirut by the Syrians in 1990. It marked the end of the civil war, but also the effective appointment of the country’s governments by a foreign power.
Two years later, in 1992, by which time Hariri had convinced Damascus that he would not challenge its control over Lebanon, he became Prime Minister. He was given almost unlimited freedom to revive the economy, though the Syrian Army and intelligence services would remain in charge of security and would have to be consulted on major appointments.
Hariri proceeded by appointing many of his own business managers and confidants, beside Syrian clients, to the Cabinet and persuaded many of his foreign partners to invest in Lebanon. As a result, the Lebanese currency began to revive and investment flowed into the country. The Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah released its hostages, and Beirut became relatively safe, once more, for foreign visitors.
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Part of the strategy was effected by a new company, Solidere, that Hariri set up to concentrate on the rebuilding of the commercial centre of Beirut. Widespread powers were acquired to purchase land, and taxes were reduced drastically to provide incentives to investors.
Hariri was at the same time accused of sucking the country dry and neglecting the poor. Beside his cronies, many a Syrian nominee also became rich through government contracts. Some people believed that, at any rate, the concentration on the capital and on finance, at the expense of agriculture and the countryside, was misguided.
Hariri similarly appeared lavish with his issuing of government loans through Eurobonds that were eventually to saddle the country with a foreign debt of some $35 billion (£18.5 billion). Nevertheless, tens of thousands of new jobs were created, and Beirut became a semblance of its former self again.
Hariri’s second premiership, the result of a landslide parliamentary victory in 2000, ended with his resignation in late 2004, after Syria had forced parliament to extend the presidency of his rival, General Emile Lahoud, beyond its constitutional limit. By this time, Damascus suspected that Hariri was in secret contact with Washington and that he was the primary influence behind France’s decision to sponsor a resolution at the Security Council of the UN to demand the express withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.
Though Hariri himself never openly demanded an end to the Syrian presence, he sided with the parliamentary opposition that did so. Observers expected that he would be returned to power with a comfortable majority in May.
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Hariri had an able partner in his wife, Nazek, who fronted much of his philanthropic work. The petite and glamorous Mrs Hariri, whose Kurdish first name means “slim”, heads the Children’s Cancer Centre of Lebanon, beside numerous other charities, and is generous with her gifts to many cultural foundations. She was behind a performance in London in 2002 of one of Mozart’s lesser-known operas, Il Re Pastore, which is set in Lebanon.
She survives her husband with six children, some from a previous marriage.
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Rafik Hariri, politician and businessman, was born on November 1, 1944. He was assassinated on February 14, 2005, aged 60.