I mistook the explosion that killed Rafiq al-Hariri for a sonic boom, as it rattled the wooden curtain box above my balcony window.
It was almost 1 p.m. on Monday, February 14, 2005, and I was working in our apartment in eastern Beirut, 3 kilometers (about 2 miles) from the blast. The first sense I got that something had happened was my wife telling me, as she walked into the house, that what she had heard was no sonic boom. By midafternoon we knew that Hariri had been assassinated, that the image many of us had seen on our television screens of the charred remains of a victim being lifted onto a stretcher was of the charred remains of Rafiq al-Hariri. In the car sitting next to him was Basil Fuleihan, formerly an economy minister and a friend from my university days. Basil survived but was so badly burned that when he passed away on April 18, the miracle of his being kept alive seemed a curse. A friend who saw the explosion described cars, heavy armor-plated cars, tossed up dozens of meters into the air, as the shockwave made him feel like the flesh was being torn from his body.
Hariri's killing struck me as astonishing. His enemies had gone too arrogantly far, without gauging the consequences. Unlike a surprising number of other people who had not known the former prime minister (I had met him only twice), I did not take the assassination personally. But I do recall telling a friend that it was the end for Syria in Lebanon, and feeling that now we had to deal with the enormous vacuum left behind by Hariri, because, like or dislike him, he had filled center court in the country for almost fourteen years. I had never been close to the Hariri entourage, and had criticized the prime minister's social and economic program in the mid-1990s.
But Hariri was no thug; he enjoyed defending his ideas against argumentative journalists, and wouldn't crack your knees for disagreeing with him. He had a tendency to see the state as a version of himself writ large, and collected people without allowing himself to be played by them. The son of a modest family from the southern port city of Sidon, throughout his social rise he had had the determination and astuteness of the upstart who hasn't yet acquired a vanity fed by the city. Hariri's feat was to conquer Beirut, to reinvent himself as a personification of the capital by way of a successful contracting career in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s.
But with Syria always looking over his shoulder, Hariri usually won his hands with three aces, never four. Nothing demonstrated this better than the fact that he was now dead, having tried but failed to pick that fourth ace.
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That evening I went to the Hariri residence in the Qoreitem neighborhood to see what the atmosphere was like. As I stood in a crowd outside the door waiting to enter, I heard a young man shout, "If we want to know the truth, it is Syria that killed Hariri."
This was an audacious statement to make then, but not because Syria was innocent, for it was plain that Syria alone had the motive, the means, and the intention of killing Hariri; but because the young man was almost certainly a Sunni Muslim, from a community that had long resisted condemning the Syrians in Lebanon.
Inside the building were hundreds of people, as leaders of the opposition to the government of Prime Minister Omar Karami gathered to issue a statement. When it came, the statement held Syria and the pro-Syrian government responsible for the crime, demanded an independent international investigation, called for the government's resignation, and demanded that Syria withdraw its forces from Lebanon. The last point restated the central demand of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 approved the previous September, which had also called on armed groups in Lebanon to surrender their weapons-a provision directed primarily against Hezbollah. The participants insisted that the Syrian withdrawal take place before parliamentary elections in May and June, and declared a three-day general strike. These ideas would be given a label on Friday the eighteenth, when the opposition declared the launching of the Independence Intifada.
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