The Dreamers
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
—FRENCH-ROMANIAN PLAYWRIGHT EUGENE IONESCO
They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
—AMERICAN ARTIST ANDY WARHOL
Two dynamics will define political change in the Middle East for years to come. The first is the oldest force in politics—identity, the accumulative package of family, faith, race, traditions, and ties to a specific piece of land. Few regions have a more complex or competing set of identities, long before factoring in Israel. The clash of cultures begins within the Middle East.
The second dynamic is the newest force in the Middle East—youth and an emerging generation of younger leaders. The young have never been so important: More than seventy percent of the people living in the region stretching from Tehran to Rabat are under thirty years old. The young will have more influence than any previous generation because, for the first time, the majority of them are literate. They are also connected enough to the outside world to be deeply dissatisfied with the status quo at home. They are the dreamers.
Both dynamics play out in Lebanon with spectacular passion.
No country in the Middle East has more legally recognized identities than Lebanon—seventeen, to be precise. All are religious. The range is vast and unusual. Lebanon is home to the Maronites, an eastern wing of the Catholic Church that emerged around a Christian hermit named St. Maron in the fifth century. Their priests are allowed to marry. Lebanon also has the largest concentration of the secretive Druze, an eleventh-century offshoot of Shiite Islam with tenets influenced by Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, and Christianity—and known fully, after “initiation,” only to its elders. They believe in reincarnation, do not accept converts, and are not considered to be Muslim by other Muslims. Lebanon also has Orthodox, Alawites, Sunni, Chaldeans, Shiites, Protestants, Melkites, Copts, and two types of Armenian Christians, among many others. Each of Lebanon’s seventeen sects has an official role in government, claim to jobs, and a share of the military.
All seventeen are also crammed into the Arab world’s second smallest country. Think twenty percent smaller than Connecticut.
On my first day back in Beirut, it took less than ten minutes to get from the Shiite stronghold of Hezbollah, conspicuous by the posters of martyrs and turbaned mullahs, to a Christian suburb where a van with a fifteen-foot dying Christ on a crucifix drove solemnly through the streets, religious hymns echoing through a megaphone, in the run-up to Easter.
That disparate identities coexist in a confined space is a virtual miracle in the turbulent Middle East. “If you understand Lebanon, it’s because someone hasn’t explained it to you,” reflected Paul Salem, the head of one of only two independent think tanks in the Arab world and son of Lebanon’s former foreign minister.
A T-shirt I found for sale at the glitzy new Virgin Megastore, which is housed in the former Beirut Opera House, summed it up: WE ARE DIFFERENT. WE ARE LEBANESE.
But Lebanon has always been a fragile miracle. Its future now depends on what an array of younger actors do about sectarian divisions. Since 2005, Lebanon has witnessed breathtaking moments of hope as well as events that generated crushing despair. Lebanon is rarely a country of moderation.
Saad Hariri is one of the young faces in Lebanese politics. Born in 1970, he was elected to parliament in 2005. He also heads Lebanon’s new Future Movement. Among Lebanese, he is considered something of an Arab heartthrob. He wears his wavy black hair gelled back and just long enough to curl up a little on the nape of his neck. He has a mustache and cropped goatee that curve around his mouth, a style now widely emulated by his peers, a Lebanese hairdresser told me.
Hariri’s goal is to eliminate the role of religious sects in politics—completely. “Most people are fed up with the rhetoric of confessionalism,” Hariri reflected, when I visited him at Qoreitem Palace in the Muslim-dominated sector of West Beirut. Hariri is a Sunni Muslim, one of Lebanon’s three most numerous sects.
“The problem is: How do we strengthen our sense of belonging to this country, rather than to just our religion?” he said. “Over the past year, as we’ve talked about reconciliation and unity, the sense of confessional loyalties has actually grown.”
The underlying conundrum is that Lebanon exists only because of its sectarian identities.
After World War I and the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, France took control of the Levant region along the Mediterranean, while Britain took the inland area that became Iraq and Jordan. Each power drew up borders as it saw fit. To protect the Maronites, France decided to create a separate nation. It carved a slim strip of land, from the mountains to the Mediterranean coast, out of Syria. Lebanon comes from laban, a word in Aramaic, the language of Christ, meaning “white” and referring to the snow-capped Mount Lebanon range that was for centuries a Christian refuge in the Muslim region. European Crusaders built strongholds among the Maronites more than 800 years ago.
Before departing in the 1940s, France brokered an unwritten gentleman’s agreement, known as the National Covenant. It stipulated that Christian sects would abandon any claim to European protection, and Muslim sects would abandon any pan-Arab aspirations, including a return to Syria’s fold. Based on a 1932 census, which showed that Christians were fifty-four percent of the population, the covenant also gave Maronite Christians permanent right to Lebanon’s presidency. The premiership went to Sunni Muslims. And parliament’s speaker went to Shiite Muslims.
All seats in parliament and all government jobs—from the top judge and army general down to kindergarten teachers and traffic cops—were then divided up in a permanent ratio: six Christians for every five Muslims. Within each category, Christians and Muslims then divided up slots among their own diverse sects. It was the ultimate quota system.
Ever since then, religion has always trumped merit in Lebanon. In elections, all candidates have to run as members of their faith. And all voters cast ballots only for candidates in the town where their ancestors first registered to vote—often connected to one of the seventeen sects—even if the family has not lived there for generations.
In everyday life, Lebanon also practices a version of sectarian apartheid, or segregation, which affects everything from the way people are married to where they are buried. To wed someone from a different sect, Lebanese have to find a civil authority in another country to officiate. Cyprus is the most common destination. Marriage is only performed—and recognized—within a sect. Every Lebanese identity card lists religion, so there is no getting around the rules.
“Our system doesn’t allow us to be just Lebanese,” sighed Lebanese political scientist Nawaf Salam, a friend from my days covering the civil war who was appointed to Lebanon’s electoral commission in 2005 to reform the law. “We have to have a declared religion, whether we practice it or not.”
The arrangement did, however, produce the Middle East’s first fledgling if flawed democracy, way back in the 1940s. In 2005 and 2006, Lebanon still ranked the highest of any Arab country on an international freedom index.1
Ironically, Lebanon is also strictly secular. It has no Islamic law and no Christian law. Its constitution borrows heavily from that of France, the former colonial power. Article Nine of the constitution stipulates: “There shall be absolute freedom of conscience. The state in rendering homage to the Almighty shall respect all religions and creeds and guarantees, under its protection, the free exercise of all religious rites.” And it does.
The result is a maelstrom of diversity that has made Lebanon the political laboratory for the Middle East since its independence in 1943. The Lebanese embrace East and West, Christianity and Islam, postmodernism and traditions dating back millennia to their seafaring Phoenician forefathers—and both decadence and piety.
A Hedonist’s Guide to Beirut describes the Lebanese capital as “party central” in the Middle East “highlighted by extravagant dining, drinking, and decadent partying” at some of the chicest nightclubs in the world.2 Casino du Liban is also the region’s most infamous gambling joint. Lebanon makes the best wine in the Middle East; its Kasara label was once (although only once) internationally rated. Beirut’s racetrack, which runs only purebred Arabian steeds, is packed with rowdy bettors on Sundays. The Mediterranean beaches are awash with men in the barest swimming briefs and women in skimpy bikinis, while billboards are plastered with lovely young things, alluringly posed, legs spread, lips glistening, in ads for jeans. Singers from all over the Middle East come to compete in Superstar, the wildly popular Arabic version of American Idol. Radio stations play punk, rap, heavy metal, hip-hop, and the new electronic music. And when I was there in 2006, the most sought-after theater ticket was for a local variation of The Vagina Monologues.
Another local T-shirt succinctly frames the country’s laissez-faire attitude: TALK ARABIC. THINK ARABIC. FEEL ARABIC. LIVE LEBANESE.
Yet Lebanon is also a place where people cling to the practices and allegiances of both Christian and Muslim faiths.
It is the only Arab country where thousands of men turn out annually with chains or whips for the self-flagellation ceremony of Ashura, when Shiites commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein in the seventh century. Both the book and movie versions of The Da Vinci Code were banned after an insistent appeal by the Christian Maronite patriarch. Police once seized hundreds of DVDs—including Some Like It Hot, Rush Hour, Key Largo, Jesus of Nazareth, The Nutty Professor, and all of Stanley Kubrick’s films—from the Virgin Megastore on grounds that they “undermined religions and contravened good morals.”3 Conservative Islamic dress and headscarves are as common in some areas as barely butt-covering skirts and tight tank tops are in others. The main beer available in conservative southern Lebanon is nonalcoholic, imported from Iran. Competing with Superstar for the biggest audience share on television and radio are the sermons of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. And the most unusual interview I did in Beirut was with a gynecologist who performs hymen reconstruction—on both Christian and Muslim females—so grooms will not know their brides have already had sex with someone else.
But the formula for coexistence—to make sure everyone feels included—has also made Lebanon a battlefield.
The covenant designed to avert sectarian tension became a nightmare as demographics shifted in favor of Muslims. Shiites particularly had higher birth rates; tens of thousands of Maronites emigrated. Unlike Iraq, where one sect has the largest representation because it has the votes, Lebanon’s seventeen sects have permanently allocated seats in parliament—even though their shares have not reflected their numbers for decades. The Lebanese have been both unwilling and unable to carry out a new census since 1932, for fear of what it will show. So the system has no elasticity; the political pendulum can not swing. Battles over the imbalance of power almost undid Lebanon during a civil war that raged for fifteen years.
I arrived back in Beirut on April 13, 2006—the thirty-first anniversary of the day the war erupted. I lived in Lebanon for five years of the worst fighting. The conflict ended in 1990, but almost a generation later many buildings still had gaping holes from artillery or deep pockmarks from rockets, grenades, and sustained gunfire. The Murr Tower, the unfinished shell of a high-rise where militias used to post snipers and execute rivals by pushing them off upper stories, still stands empty in the middle of town. I went to dinner at a fancy refurbished restaurant but parked around the corner in front of a gutted building with broken glass on the ground that had probably been there since I left in the mid-1980s.
The Lebanese did most of it to themselves. Many sectarian leaders had their own militias, armed with vast arsenals. The truest believers—Christians and Muslims—were among the most brutal. An array of regional players, from Israel to Iran and often featuring the Palestinians, exploited the divide, armed allies, and dispatched their own forces into the militia melee. At least four percent of Lebanon’s population was killed between 1975 and 1990—the equivalent of twelve million Americans.4 Iraq’s insurgency may be nastier, but no other Middle East country has been so traumatically riven for so long by people who worship the same God, only in different ways or on different days.
Politics in labyrinthine little Lebanon are complicated by the clans. They are more like political mafias with bosses—zaim in Arabic—who function with a modern version of feudal patronage. Many of the faces of the twenty-first century are from the same families—including the Gemayels, Jumblatts, Chamouns, Franjiehs, Karamis, Murrs, and Salams—that have dominated politics as far back as the 1930s.
Saad Hariri is no exception. He inherited his political position from his father Rafiq Hariri, a man of epic wealth, wide girth, and Groucho Marx eyebrows. The difference is that the elder Hariri was trying to change the face of Lebanon both politically and physically. He founded the Future Movement.
Born in 1944, Rafiq Hariri was the son of a greengrocer. He went to Saudi Arabia as a young math teacher but turned to construction and amassed billions from putting up office blocks, palaces, and conference centers during the boom oil years. He grew close to the royal family; the king eventually made him a Saudi citizen. With holdings all over the world, including Houston and Boston, Paris and Monaco, Forbes ranked him among the world’s wealthiest men.
But Hariri never lost ties to Lebanon. During cease-fires in the 1980s, he spent millions to clean up Beirut. He even paid to have new palm trees planted on the long seafront corniche. I remember the big orange trucks that came in to clear away rubble; they were one of the few signs of hope in the midst of anarchy. But it was always for naught, as the fighting soon started again. He also built a new university and a hospital in his hometown of Sidon. And his Hariri Foundation funded more than 20,000 scholarships for Lebanese youth, both in Lebanon and abroad.
In 1989, Hariri was pivotal in organizing and bankrolling a reconciliation conference hosted by Saudi Arabia in Taif, a mountain retreat near Mecca. The meeting brought all the warlords together and finally ended Lebanon’s grisly conflict.
The Lebanese celebrate that turning point in a T-shirt too. It says: THE GREAT LEBANESE WAR 1975–1990. GAME OVER!
The Taif Accord radically overhauled Lebanon’s National Covenant. It stipulated an end to politics based on religions. It called for a transition, in phases, to full democracy. Terms were to be worked out in a new commission—with equal representation of Christians and Muslims. It also required all government jobs to be based on capability rather than sect. And it mandated the disarming of all Lebanon’s militias.
During the interim, it changed the ratio of Christians and Muslims in government to parity—fifty-fifty in everything, even though that still did not fairly represent their shares. Muslims by then outnumbered Christians by at least three to two, which effectively meant that a Christian vote counted more than a Muslim vote.
In 1992, after Lebanon held its first elections in two decades, Rafiq Hariri ended up as prime minister. He approached the post-war era with the same swashbuckling ambition he did business. He lacked charisma. He did not come from one of Lebanon’s clans and did not have a militia to enforce his will, so he used the leverage of his wealth as a tool.
“I want to go down in the history books,” he said, “as the man who resurrected Beirut.”5 He boasted that Beirut would become the Singapore of the Middle East.
“Rebuilding the country,” he added, “is the revenge of honest people on war as an idea and the miseries arising from this choice, including all the savagery, destruction, and catastrophes. It is revenge on the idea of resorting to weapons to resolve problems.”6 His big ideas, wealth, plain talk, and political aspirations occasionally led to comparisons with Ross Perot.
Some Lebanese saw Hariri as a savior, others as an exploiter—and many saw him as a bit of both. He ran Lebanon’s reconstruction like a personal business, reaping profit along the way. He was the largest shareholder in the company that rebuilt Beirut. His government borrowed heavily from his banks at steep interest rates, in what even allies admitted was a gross conflict of interest. He reportedly used government contracts and his profits to curry favor with the traditional political elite and the warlords.7 His plan put Lebanon into exorbitant debt for expensive infrastructure—a new international airport and new roads—while the poor felt few immediate benefits.
Yet Rafiq Hariri did have a vision, however controversial. He was particularly devoted to renovating the commercial district of picturesque old French buildings along the notorious Green Line that divided Christian and Muslim militias during the war. The ravaged area reemerged as an architectural jewel in the center of Beirut, bringing in high-end businesses, charming outdoor bistros, classy boutiques, bustling city life, and revenue-generating tourists. If Hariri had not run reconstruction the way he ran his businesses, given Lebanon’s squabbling warlords and tendency to implode, it might not have happened.
“I was afraid that if I did not contribute, confidence in the project would be lost,” he once explained, “and many people would in turn not contribute, which could lead to the failure of the project.” All profits, he claimed, went into the Hariri Foundation for charities.8
In the end, Hariri did what virtually no other Lebanese politician could do—restore confidence that Lebanon was a viable country. Lebanon’s beleaguered currency soared by thirty percent after he took office; the famed black market disappeared.9 Since he had no role in the war, Hariri could also credibly reach out to all of Lebanon’s sects. He eventually won grudging respect even from those who did not like or trust him. He became known as Mr. Lebanon. Political analysts wrote about “Hariri-ism.”10
But to be Lebanon’s prime minister, Hariri also had to make a devil’s bargain with Damascus. More than a half century after they had been separated into two states, Syria was not over losing Lebanon. Damascus still dominated its little neighbor. It intimidated politicians. It harassed newspaper editors. It threatened religious leaders. Its intelligence services were widely linked to assassinations of anyone who dared to defy it.11 After the civil war erupted, Syria was one of a handful of nations that dispatched troops to Lebanon under an Arab League mandate to try and end the war. They failed. In 1979, the other nations left; Syria stayed—and stayed and stayed—in defiance of Arab and United Nations requests to leave. Lebanon once again fell under almost total Syrian control. And every leader had in some way to do its bidding.
Hariri was no different. He acquiesced on appointments, security, foreign policy, and working with Syria’s hand-picked candidates for president of Lebanon.12Baksheesh is the Arabic word for bribe; it is an integral part of life in the Middle East. Hariri reportedly paid plenty of baksheesh to Syria, including construction of a new presidential palace in Damascus.13
Asked once about the ubiquitous pictures of Syrian President Hafez al Assad in Lebanon’s international airport, Hariri told The Boston Globe with unusual candor, “It’s not a problem to put them up. It’s a problem to take them down.”14
Hariri calculated that restoring Beirut’s old splendor and strengthening its economy would, in time, create leverage to counter Syria’s pull.15 In the meantime, however, the relationship was a roller coaster. Hariri resigned once after Assad handpicked an army general and ally, Emile Lahoud, to be Lebanon’s president in 1998. Lebanon’s president is elected by parliament, and Syria then controlled the majority by graft, intimidation, and manipulating the political system of a country its troops had occupied for decades.
Hariri returned to the job after new Lebanese parliamentary elections in 2000—and Assad’s death. But in 2004, relations ruptured permanently when Syria pressured Lebanon to pass a constitutional amendment extending Lahoud’s term for three years. Lebanon’s president is limited to a single term of six years.
Hariri opposed the extension. Behind the scenes, he appealed to French President Jacques Chirac to help stop the erosion of Lebanese sovereignty. Chirac took the appeal to President Bush. In 2004, Paris and Washington were still deeply at odds over Iraq. But Lebanon was one issue on which they could agree—and which they could use to rebuild their own relations. Together, they agreed to go to the United Nations to propose an unusual resolution. It called for presidential elections in Lebanon as scheduled, “without foreign interference or influence.” It also called for all foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon, an even bigger affront to Damascus. Without its heavy military presence, Syria would have limited leverage.
The resolution was a direct slap at Syria. It also had rippling consequences.
A week before Lebanon’s parliament was to vote on August 26, 2004, as momentum was building at the United Nations behind the new resolution, Hariri was summoned to Damascus. The session with Syrian President Bashar al Assad, who had taken over after his father’s death, was stormy. It lasted less than fifteen minutes.
Hariri later told his son that Assad put it bluntly, “This extension is to happen, or else I will break Lebanon over your head.”16
On September 2, the United Nations passed resolution 1559.
On September 3, Lebanon’s parliament went ahead and voted to extend the president’s term. In the end, Hariri also voted with the majority to keep Syria’s man in power, even though he had rallied an international effort to defy Damascus.
Six weeks later, however, he resigned.
Over the next four months, Hariri increasingly struck out on his own with the new Future Movement. It was more of an idea than a party. But it reflected a shift in his focus, from rebuilding Lebanon physically to reshaping the nation politically. Lebanon was due to hold elections for parliament in May 2005. They would serve as the test, pitting Hariri’s new coalition against Syria’s candidates.
Hariri knew he was being closely watched. After Lebanese analysts began predicting his alliance would sweep the vote, he received another warning from Damascus. Syrian security services had him “cornered,” a senior official told him bluntly. Hariri should not “take things lightly.”17
The St. George Hotel has long been a landmark on Beirut’s scenic corniche, a symbol of Lebanon’s riches and its woes. The four-story luxury hotel was named after the Christian martyr who allegedly slew a dragon somewhere nearby in the fourth century. When Beirut became the Middle East’s center for banking, education, culture, and espionage in the 1960s, kings, foreign film stars, and spies stayed at the hotel. Its bar overlooking the Mediterranean was the place deals were brokered, secrets exchanged. The St. George became a victim itself shortly after the civil war erupted in 1975. It was left a haunted shell, its pink facade charred. But the pool and an outdoor bar famed for its Bloody Marys remained open. During the five years I lived in Lebanon in the 1980s, Beirutis flocked there during cease-fires, however brief. Whenever the rat-a-tat-tat of rifles or ka-boom of artillery started again, men packed up their backgammon sets, and women grabbed their towels, and we all scurried home—until the next cease-fire. It became a symbol of Lebanese resilience.
On Valentine’s Day, 2005, Rafiq Hariri held talks about the upcoming election with colleagues in parliament. At lunchtime, he headed back to Qoreitem Palace. Hariri always took precautions. His limousines were armored-plated; they also had jamming equipment to block any remote-control device that might set off a bomb. But it was not enough. Just as his five-car motorcade rounded the corner in front of the St. George, then in the final throes of reconstruction, a bomb with over 1,000 pounds of explosives went off. It tore apart the armored cars and the bodies inside. Hariri was killed instantly. Twenty others also died; more than 100 in the area were wounded. The facades of the St. George and buildings in all directions were ripped off. Windows more than one-quarter mile away were blown out. The sound rippled for miles. A black cloud of smoke rising from the bomb site could be seen beyond the city limits.
The crater left in the road in front of the St. George was more than thirty feet wide and six feet deep.
Hariri’s murder was the most traumatic event in the fifteen years since the civil war ended—and perhaps even longer. The assassination was another of the seminal events in the early twenty-first century—like the Palestinian elections and Egypt’s May 25 crackdown—that provoked people in the Middle East to engage in ways they had never done before. It mobilized Lebanese like no single event since the nation was created.
It also launched a new generation of activists. Saad Hariri inherited his father’s mantle, after consultations within the family. “We decided that what my father wanted to achieve had not been achieved,” he said, “and that we had to continue.”
But the assassination also spurred people well outside clan politics.
Asma-Maria Andraos was one of them. She heard the massive blast on the Christian side of the old Green Line. It blew open the windows of her office, whooshed a sliding glass door down its track, and then blasted open the inside doors—all in the flash of a second.
“Everything moved. It was like an earthquake,” she recalled, when I visited her office in Christian-dominated East Beirut. “You think you’ve forgotten those noises from the war, but it came back instantly. I ran to the balcony and saw the black cloud of smoke. Then we switched on the television and those horrible pictures of burnt corpses and burning cars and people crying and ambulances.”
Andraos, a tall woman with a long face, throaty voice, and brown hair that falls down her back, had been highly critical of Hariri’s policies. “He was a ruthless businessman, and I believed you can’t be both prime minister and the biggest businessman in the country,” she explained.
“But he also had a dream, and I admired that,” she said. “And when I heard it was Hariri who was killed I went quite mad, and I wondered: What was going to happen to us? Who was going to hold us down? Who else was doing to fight for us at the superpower level? As long as he was around, we could stick it out.
“I became scared, physically scared,” she said.
Andraos was born in 1971 and was only four years old when the civil war broke out. She is an event planner for product launches, everything from mobile telephones and sport clothing to hygiene products. She had been typical of the young in Lebanon—disillusioned with or disinterested in politics.
But on the day of Hariri’s funeral, Andraos was one of more than 150,000 who turned out on the streets of Beirut. Maronites, Sunnis, Catholics, Druze, Orthodox, Shiites, Armenians, and others—some bitter rivals during the war—followed the ambulance carrying Hariri’s body to the district he had restored. People threw rice from balconies as the cortege passed. Hariri and his bodyguards were laid to rest near Martyr’s Square, in a special burial site in the former parking lot of the Virgin Megastore that was converted into a tented shrine. Christian church bells rang amid the Islamic incantations and calls to prayer from mosque muezzins.
“Brothers, we must all grieve together,” a Muslim imam told mourners.18
Beirut’s Maronite Bishop, Boulos Matar, declaimed, “This was a man of moderation and unity.”19
Many in Lebanon assumed Syria was ultimately responsible for Hariri’s murder, but no one dared to say it. Saad Hariri came the closest. Asked by a British television correspondent who assassinated his father, he had responded simply, “It’s obvious, no?”
So Andraos and a group of friends brought two banners to the funeral. In big letters, they had written, IT’S OBVIOUS, NO?
“We didn’t know how free we were to say what we wanted to say,” she told me. “The Syrians were still running the show. They were everywhere in Lebanon. We could not have had this conversation back then without them knowing about it. The Syrians killed him, and it had to be said in some way for everyone to see.”
A threshold was crossed the day of Hariri’s funeral. As the mourners marched, they began to shout: “Syria out! Syria out!”
And that was only the beginning.
The next morning, Andraos went back to Hariri’s grave site and began calling friends and asking them to join her—and to call their friends and neighbors too. “A lot of people said it was back to business as usual,” she recalled. “But I said, ‘No way.’ This was way too big.”
On an impulse, Andraos also organized a petition to generate a sense of doing something besides mourning the past. She had no pen, so she used lipstick. She wrote only one word on a piece of cloth: “Resignation.” The focus was broadening—now to the Lebanese government, too.
“I realized we had to kick the bastards out,” she said.
As word spread about a sit-in, people poured into the area. They signed the petition too. Within three days, the petition was 1,200 feet long with thousands of signatures.
“It was that spontaneous,” Andraos said, looking back. “We didn’t really fully realize what we were doing.”
The sit-in vigil grew into a full-time protest, and the call for the Lebanese government to quit became its rallying cry. Most of the protesters were students. Two young men set up individual tents and vowed to stay until the government stepped down. Hundreds of other youths soon joined them. Most were students who had never been involved in politics. They came from all sects. Most had never met before; they just showed up.
“Suddenly, I was leader of a group that had no existence a few days earlier,” Andraos said. “We realized the opposition was confused. We assumed they had a plan but they didn’t. They were lost. So ten of us met—we were from multiple confessions and none belonged to any party—and came up with a piece of paper in which we said simple things, all around ‘Let’s unify.’”
Andraos became the mother superior of the protest—mobilizing a task force of about 100 people, both Christians and Muslims, to assemble supplies, food, literally tons of water, portable toilets, hundreds of mattresses and blankets, gas lamps, and a big tent for the 500 young people who by then had pledged to sleep near Hariri’s grave site until their demands were met. She raised $200,000—in a country with a per capita income of only $6,000 dollars—through word-of-mouth requests, refusing all funding from political parties or foreign donors. In the evenings, when thousands more came down to Martyr’s Square after school or work to join the protest, she organized a dialogue among the students.
“This is the first time in Lebanon that the politicians followed the people,” Andraos said. “The heartbeat was the youth. They dropped out of jobs or didn’t go to university to carry the message through to the end. Young people in this country have not been active like that before. They had always deferred to the politicians. The other part of the movement was civil society, which some had thought was dead.”
The crowds became so large that a giant screen was set up around Martyr’s Square to let everyone see and hear speakers at the evening rallies.
Exactly two weeks after the assassination, on February 28, the prime minister who had replaced Hariri stepped down. His government collapsed. Tens of thousands watched it happen live on the screen set up at Martyr’s Square.
The protest had won the first round.
Encouraged, the demonstrators pressed on. They pledged nationwide strikes until four demands were met: Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon. The resignation of Lebanon’s security chiefs. Elections on schedule, with no delays or outside interference. And a thorough international investigation into Hariri’s death.
President Lahoud, Syria’s ally and Hariri’s old nemesis, tried to ban the protests, to no avail. Every Monday—the day of the week when Hariri had died—the nation all but closed down as tens of thousands of workers, businessmen, and teachers either did not go to work or showed up to join the running demonstration. En masse, lawyers dressed in their black robes and doctors in their white coats appeared at Martyr’s Square.
A big banner scrawled on the wall next to Hariri’s grave summed up the public mood: ENOUGH.
Syria was stubborn. On March 8, its allies, led by Hezbollah, staged a counter-rally to support Damascus. Hundreds of thousands turned out. But, for a change, there were no pictures of the Syrian leader, no Syrian flags, not even Hezbollah banners. There were new limits that even Syria’s allies would not cross.
Infuriated by Syria’s attempt to hold on to Lebanon, Saad Hariri and Andraos were among dozens who called on the Lebanese to turn out on March 14, the one-month anniversary of Hariri’s death, to support a rival protest. And they did. More than one million Lebanese—about one quarter of the entire population, the proportionate equivalent of seventy-five million Americans—poured into Beirut from all over the country. Despite the cold, windswept day, the throngs were so thick that many had to abandon their cars on the outskirts and walk all the way to the seafront grave site. In a pointed jab at Syria, they waved tens of thousands of red-and-white Lebanese flags emblazoned with the cedar, a symbol of the fragrant trees on Mount Lebanon. Some of the young painted their faces with both a crescent and a cross—the symbols of Islam and Christianity.
It was the largest protest ever assembled in a modern Arab country. Mass outpourings in the Middle East tend to be rent-a-crowds mobilized and transported by the government. The Lebanese surprised even themselves.
“It was shocking in a positive way—the students and the children, the people in wheelchairs, the turbans, the old hags, they all came in to say, ‘We want our country,’” said Jamil Mrowe, a Lebanese Shiite and publisher of The Daily Star, the largest English-language paper in the Middle East. “The Syrians made the mistake of killing someone who would not have been an icon, but in their killing he became an icon who represented the entire Lebanese ethos. The shrapnel that killed him hit every Lebanese. I can’t take it from my mind—that cold, dry anger you saw after he was killed.”
In stark contrast to Lebanon’s tense civil war, when people shot at each other just to break up traffic jams, the people-power confrontation with government unfolded peacefully. Demonstrators passed around flowers and sweets to security forces and police deployed around the capital.
The March 14 Movement, as it came to be known, achieved all four of its goals: By the end of April, only seventy-two days after Hariri’s death and the protest began, Syria pulled out its last troops. Its twenty-nine-year occupation was over.
Lebanon’s top security officials were sacked; some were later arrested for complicity in Hariri’s murder.
In an unusual step, the United Nations then voted on a second resolution to conduct an investigation into Hariri’s murder. It also warned Syria to cooperate—or face punitive action.
And finally, elections were held on time, in May and June 2005. A coalition led by Saad Hariri, who had taken over his father’s Future Movement, won seventy-two of the 128 seats in parliament.
“Today, Lebanon is united in you,” the younger Hariri told supporters who massed outside Qoreitem Palace after the vote.20
The State Department dubbed the mass protest the Cedar Revolution, after the country’s famed tree. The name was picked up around the world—except in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s outpouring was never a revolution, like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Georgia’s Rose Revolution, or Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. It was instead a cry for sovereignty, for a formal divorce from Damascus, for a Lebanese identity, and for justice. And it made stunning progress. In the Arab world, it was the first broad popular movement to demand sweeping change and get it.
But it was only the opening round of a much longer political battle. When Lebanon settled down, as it did quickly after the election, it was stuck with the same sectarian system. None of the reforms to eliminate the sectarian quotas, as mandated in the 1989 Taif Accord, had been implemented—or seemed imminent. And President Lahoud was still the head of state.
When I visited Lebanon the next year, the specter of unfinished business hung over Beirut. Massive posters of Rafiq Hariri were still plastered throughout the capital fourteen months later. The most striking was a giant black billboard at the entrance to Hamra Street, the city’s main drag. At the top was a red electronic ticker counting the days that had passed between the assassination and the ongoing investigation to determine, officially, who was responsible. THE TRUTH FOR THE SAKE OF LEBANON, the billboard said.
After the election, many Lebanese had expected Saad Hariri to become prime minister, in part to signal Lebanon’s commitment to his father’s agenda. “I don’t have a magic wand,” he had warned, acknowledging his total lack of experience. “I would have to grow pretty fast. A month ago, I was a businessman.”21
But President Lahoud refused to step down. Syria still had one powerful ally in place. Hariri would get no traction on reforms as long as Lahoud was still there. Syria’s motive was to sustain the status quo—and ties that might provide future openings—to ensure its own survival. Full democracy in Lebanon might infect neighboring Syrians.
When I visited Hariri, he had become a virtual prisoner in his father’s palace in downtown Beirut. The whole area was cordoned off to traffic. Security inside was at least as tight as any American airport, including metal detectors and screening equipment for bags. Cell phones had to be left with the flock of well-armed security guards at the entrance.
Like many Lebanese politicians, Hariri admitted that he feared more car bombs. The elder Hariri’s assassination had not been the last.
“We have a neighbor that wants to control Lebanon, like Saddam Hussein wanted to control Kuwait,” he told me. “They want to prevent the wave of democracy from crossing the border into Syria.”
Hariri had preserved his father’s plush office in Qoreitem Palace as it was when he died. The fortified family mansion was filled with Phoenician artifacts, Persian carpets, antiques, and chandeliers. But most striking were the six-foot-tall posters of Rafiq Hariri on walls, tables, and easels throughout the palace. One of the biggest was perched on his chair behind his old desk. I sat with his son in oversize dark green leather furniture across from it.
When we spoke in 2006, he was one of fourteen politicians in a wobbly new national dialogue. Assembling them all at the table was the dialogue’s only real success; it had avoided the issue of eliminating Lebanon’s sectarian divide in government. Underscoring the problem, one half of its members were the same geriatrics who had dominated Lebanese politics since Hariri was a toddler—and torn the country apart during its civil war.
Hariri argued that a process had at least begun. The March 14 movement had demonstrated for the first time that change was possible. “This is the first time the Lebanese have empowered themselves,” he said. “In the past, Lebanese couldn’t talk among themselves without a foreign chaperone. The National Dialogue is the first time Muslims and Christians have come together and are doing it by themselves.”
He had become sanguine, however, about the prospects for progress.
“This is like a boxing match,” he reflected. “Some rounds you win, and some you lose. Sometimes you will bleed, fall, break a rib, or lose a tooth. Sometimes the allies of Syria seem to be making a comeback. I assure you it’s not something we didn’t know would happen. In politics, nobody just fades away. But we’re determined to see it through all twelve rounds.”
Beirut’s Virgin Megastore carried another T-shirt made for the moment. DEMOCRACY: THE LEBANESE TRIAL VERSION.
Andraos, however, was anything but a prisoner. On April 30, 2005, she and her friends organized one last dinner for the student protesters to celebrate Syria’s departure. They packed up the tent and went home. Then they got even busier.
“I was hooked. I had to keep going,” Andraos told me, in her deep, throaty voice. “We started calling each other, and we all said the same thing: There has to be more. For us, we knew there was no way we could count on the warlords and the mafia that destroyed postwar Lebanon to do anything for us. They are the problems. Fairy tales don’t exist in politics.
“People know they have power now. We just have to figure out what to do with it. Half the people in this country don’t belong to a political party, and a lot of those in sectarian groups would like to get out if there was an alternative. We wanted to help give them a voice. But we didn’t want to form a political party—yet. We decided we needed to do more basic things.”
They instead founded Amam 05—an acronym for an Arabic phrase meaning “to the front,” and ’05 was for the year that changed Lebanon.
Andraos, who is an Orthodox Christian, was busy organizing three projects when I visited her office. Amam 05 had mobilized more than sixty nongovernment organizations to form a common lobby to sustain pressure on all Lebanon’s politicians. It had also just received a World Bank grant to set up a municipal council in one of Lebanon’s poorest areas, near the Syrian border. The project was investing power and funds in the young. It included municipal elections—just for youth—to select a council, identify the region’s needs, develop projects, and then implement them. For the summer, Amam 05 had also designed a traveling exhibition with games to teach the concept of citizenship to the young; it was scheduled to hit every Lebanese city.
“March 14 petered out because there was no structure,” Andraos said. “We are trying to build institutions and generate different ideas and educate.”
The fledgling civil-society groups are no match for the warlords and entrenched clans. Yet they had begun to grab some of the new space created since Hariri’s assassination. They represented a radical departure from traditional and deferential Lebanese politics.
“I’ve undergone a total transformation,” Andraos said. “I went from someone who was disinterested in Lebanon’s politics, sort of sleepwalking and living in a bubble. I was awakened at Hariri’s death. I’ve become obsessed. And I’m not alone. There are others like me.”
In 2005, Time magazine named Andraos one of thirty-seven heroes—“extraordinary people who illuminate and inspire, persevere and provoke. They take on challenges the rest of the world often prefers to avoid, reminding us all of just how much a single person, even in the face of adversity, can accomplish.”22
I asked Andraos if she was disappointed at the difficulty in achieving enduring change in Lebanon.
“People forget how much has changed. More has happened in the past year than in the past thirty-five years,” she responded. “Why should we feel disappointed? It will take fifteen years if we all start working now. But fifteen years is OK. We’ve wasted the last thirty years doing nothing.”