Valentine’s Day bombing of 2005 still haunts Lebanon’s ambitions

Last weekend was the tenth anniversary of the moment, at 12.55pm on Valentine’s Day 2005, when a 1-tonne bomb exploded on the Beirut seafront, killing the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and 20 other innocent people.

It was a crime that would ensure Lebanon, perhaps even the region, would never be the same.

Sitting next to Hariri in his heavily guarded convoy that day was Basil Fleihan, the youthful member of parliament and a former government minister. An economist with a doctorate from Columbia University (Hariri preferred his protégés to be brainy rather than brawny), Fleihan had quarterbacked all Lebanon’s recent plays with the international financial community before he was 40.

And on that fateful day, still just 41, he was one of the brightest stars in Hariri’s firmament. The billionaire businessman and politician was plotting his return to the top job and Fleihan was a poster boy, not only for Lebanon but also for my generation, one that had either been affected or exiled by war but which still believed in a country built on the principles of democracy, prosperity, transparency and the rule of law.

Fleihan was a product of the tight-knit Beirut Protestant community, one that is shot through with keen sense of morale rectitude and duty.

He went school at the International College and then moved next door to American University of Beirut; both institutions ensured he was imbued with a strong dose of academic rigour. So much so that so that, by 1990, at just 27, the now Fleihan was the embodiment of the Lebanese dream.

In 1993, like many of his generation who wanted to roll up their sleeves and rebuild their battered country, Fleihan returned to Lebanon where he worked as an adviser to the ministry of Finance and taught at his alma mater. He also came to the attention of Hariri, who was using his wealth and connections to fashion Lebanon into a “build it and they will come” playground for Arab tourists.

It was inevitable given his CV, but also arguably even more important, his sect, that he would be included on Hariri’s “list” for the 2000 parliamentary elections.

Fleihan was a shoe-in for the one Protestant seat and was duly elected. He soon was appointed minister of economy, a job he held until 2003. During that period, he was one of the architects of the November 2002 Paris donor conference, securing over US$4 billion in aid and no doubt coming across as the sort of chap with whom the international community could always deal.

I met Fleihan on several occasions. He was a thoroughly decent, eloquent, polished and capable, the sort of guy a father would want his daughter to bring home. He’d call you “sir” and be happy to advise you on your stock portfolio.

He also made me believe in the Hariri “project” at a time when many Lebanese were still outraged by what they saw was a jumped-up Sunni buying up the country under the guise of trying to rebuild it.

Of course Hariri had an agenda, of course he was in tight with the Saudis and of course his penchant for solving problems with money would have been beyond the pale in more transparent systems.

But his vision for a bold, brash, new Lebanon in which the whole country could share, was bewitching to a generation used to being told what to do by men with private armies.

And as far as I could see, this new energy was personified in a guy, my age with a similar background, who had lived abroad and who could walk into any job in any of the world’s major capitals, and yet chose to throw in his lot with a maverick billionaire politician who offered us hope.

That hope quite literally went up in flames in front of the St Georges Hotel, where Hariri’s car took the brunt of the blast. Despite horrific burns to 95% of his body, Fleihan managed to haul himself out of the window and fall onto the road.

Within hours he was flown for specialist treatment in France but died of his injuries 64 days later, leaving a widow and two young daughters. Today he lies in the elegantly distressed Anglo-American cemetery in the shade of a carob tree, a tragic symbol of what might have been.

Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.

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