Exactly six years ago today at 12:55 p.m., a 1-ton bomb exploded on the Beirut seafront killing 22 innocent people, including the target of the attack, former prime minister and opposition MP Rafik Hariri. Families were destroyed forever and a nation would never be the same again.
Whoever carried out the attack had a simple calculation: With Hariri dead the opposition would be declawed. Lebanon, as it had done many times before, would mourn another assassinated leader, and the blame, as it always is, would be laid at Israel’s door. Life would return to normal. Job done.
Not exactly. The bomb awoke something in the Lebanese people. Hariri was a “civilian.” He was not a member of the civil war gang of militia leaders and feudal zuama who might have been considered “legitimate” targets. With his billions Hariri had rebuilt Beirut and had come to symbolize the post-war optimism. The way he rode into town and got things done may not have been pretty. He rewrote the rulebook to get his way, and he ruffled many feathers, but he had a vision for a country when others had none, and in this way he was able to reach out to Lebanon’s many sectarian groups where others had failed.
In the same car as Hariri was the MP and former economy minister Basil Fleihan, a youthful technocrat (Hariri preferred his protégés to be bankers rather than gunmen) who had helped cement Lebanon’s reputation in the international financial community. Fleihan would die of his injuries 64 days later, bringing the final death toll to 22. Their deaths resonated with those who, for 15 years, had been working to make Lebanon a country they could bequeath to their children. These were men of the new Lebanon killed by those who operated by the rules of the old. Enough was enough. The rest is history.
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