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After the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the world over mourned what has presented as a great man seeking to rebuild his war-torn nation.
Hariri was portrayed as a great Lebanese prime minister brutally struck down by the Syrians. The image of an almost holy Hariri (promoted in large part due to the billions his family commands) became the uncritical image. Rarely what is mentioned that Hariri was quite a corrupt individual who owed his rise to an alliance with Syrian and Saudi intelligence.
One of the ubiquitous mentions was that Hariri rebuilt Beirut after the Civil War. This is true. But what does it mean to rebuild? Hariri did not command the rebuilding as prime minister in the name of all of the Lebanese people. But engaged in a selective rebuilding in the name of billionaires like himself.
Hariri greatly increased his fortune through his construction firm Solidere. When Hariri first became prime minister his fortune was estimated at $4billion, but it was $14billion when he died some years later. How did he gain $10billion through his tenure in office? Hariri first undercut property owners in Beirut's central district by forcing them to sell their property to Solidere often at 15% of value. And then, in his capacity as prime minister, Hariri took out billions of loans and funneled that money into his construction firm to rebuild downtown Beirut. Lebanese's nation debt increase several fold into the tens of billions under Hariri.
So consider the Hariri economic model: Use government position to take out national loans to rebuild Beirut, but then funnel most of that money into one's own private firm which allows one to use the political system to take out national firms for the interest of private wealth while burdening the Lebanese people with tens of billions of debt. This is blatant corruption. And it made Hariri richer.
But we may say that 'well, somebody had to rebuild and Lebanese was going to take out billions in loans anyway, so what not Hariri's firm being the recipient of money to rebuild? It may be corrupt that Hariri would use his own firm, but somebody had to do it. Why not him? And, if anything, it makes sense since Hariri has deep knowledge of his firm and can thus ensure efficient use of the fund.' Okay. We may forgive the blatant violation of an office holder's fiduciary obligations if the Lebanese people benefited from it. But did they? No.
Hariri's sole concern with rebuilding Lebanon was not 'Lebanon' but solely the downtown area of Beirut. He did not care about rebuilding basic infrastructure and poor areas which would aid most Lebanese, but solely concerned with turning downtown Beirut again into a playground for millionaires. Hariri's idea of Lebanon was a Beirut with fancy clubs, restaurants, hotels and shops which would be inaccessible for most Lebanese but greatly welcoming to the Saudi royals. That is the Hariri economic model: a millionaires' hedonism. Today Solidere is most concerned with making Beirut a culinary center for the elites then establishing a 24/7 power network (which still does not exist). Hariri even complained once that the rich would have to past the poor suburban slums of Beirut in their drive into the downtown. This is how callous and indifferent this man was to normal Lebanese. His sole concern was his profits and creating an exclusive downtown in his billionaire image.
And we see the consequences of his economic selfishness:
Economists in the country believe that the gap between the rich and the poor in Lebanon has widened notably. 'Seventy per cent per cent of the gross domestic product in Lebanon goes to only 30 per cent of the Lebanese,' one economist, Louis Hobeika, told dpa. Fawaz Traboulsi a political science teacher at the Lebanese American University said 'Lebanon has very strong social contrasts.
'According to a recent study by the United Nations Development Program, the number of poor in Lebanon increased by at least 5 per cent between 2004 and 2007. More than 30 per cent of the population, or about 1.2 million people, live on just 4 dollars per day, it said. The study said poverty is heavily concentrated among the unemployed and unskilled workers, chiefly from the construction and agriculture sectors, which employ around 38 per cent of all the poor.
This is the Rafiq Hariri Economic Model.
