By NEIL MacFARQUHAR, BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 19 – On an unseasonably mild day last August, a small group of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s closest political allies could tell from his flushed face and subdued manner that something awful had happened in the Syrian capital of Damascus, where he had been summoned to a meeting with President Bashar al-Assad. The four men, all Lebanese Parliament members, recalled waiting for him at the Beirut mansion of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, in the so-called garden, basically a carport paved with concrete bricks, plus one short orange tree in a faux terra cotta tub. Mr. Hariri – wearing an expensive blue suit and a white shirt, his tie loosened – lumbered over mutely and flung himself onto one of a dozen white plastic chairs, his head lolling back and his arms dangling over the edges.
After a few moments, he leaned forward and described how the Syrian leader had threatened him, curtly ordering him to amend Lebanon’s Constitution to give President Émile Lahoud, the man Syria used to block Mr. Hariri’s every move, another three years in office.
“Bashar told him, ‘Lahoud is me,’ ” Mr. Jumblatt recalled in an interview. “Bashar told Hariri: ‘If you and Chirac want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon.’ ” He was referring to the French president, Jacques Chirac.
In the month since Mr. Hariri was assassinated, members of Lebanon’s anti-Syrian opposition have pointed to that Aug. 26 encounter in Damascus as fateful. Although opposition leaders acknowledge that they lack firm evidence tying Syria or its Lebanese agents directly to Mr. Hariri’s assassination, they link that day to his slaying on Feb. 14.
“To tell you the truth, when I heard him telling us those words, I knew that it was his condemnation of death,” Mr. Jumblatt said.
It was after that meeting that Mr. Hariri, 60, a real estate tycoon turned politician who had run Lebanon for the better part of 12 years, decided that he had to join the movement to uproot both the Syrian Army and the ever more robust tentacles of its secret police from Lebanon.
Interviews with a dozen Lebanese involved, including the three other men at the garden and some of Mr. Hariri’s closest aides, indicate that in the final six months of his life he was tormented by the predicament that Lebanon now faces – how to end Syria’s headlock without reigniting the civil war that tore this country apart a generation ago.
Whether Mr. Hariri would have succeeded in his efforts cannot be known. Nonetheless, President Assad’s decision to force Mr. Lahoud onto Lebanon again is now widely seen as an enormous political blunder, uniting many Lebanese communities in opposition and even managing to bringing together France and the United States in a concerted effort to push Syria out. Although Syria denies involvement in the assassination, Mr. Hariri’s death eliminated the one man potentially able to muster the international and domestic pressure to force Damascus to release its grip.
For the moment, his killing has inspired that anyway. But the lingering question is whether he can accomplish in death a goal that eluded him while alive: keeping the notoriously bickering opposition united for long enough to see free elections and the end of Syrian control.
“What they are really missing is a leader, that is the key problem, someone to show them the way,” said Timur Goksel, a longtime United Nations spokesman here who now teaches at the American University of Beirut. “That is a real void.”
Orders from Damascus
Syria is used to acting with impunity in Lebanon.
But by 2004, the Lebanese were expecting something different from Mr. Assad, not least because the United States had signaled by invading Iraq that business as usual was unacceptable.
The 39-year-old Syrian leader seemed to have gotten the message, telling a Kuwaiti newspaper early last summer that Damascus would not interfere in Lebanon’s presidential election in the fall. Months later, Mr. Hariri was ordered to Damascus for the ominous meeting. Mr. Assad advertised the fact that the meeting was remarkably short – 15 minutes in a country where most presidential encounters drag on for hours – to make it clear that Syria was issuing an order.
The Lebanese around Mr. Hariri were both appalled and exhilarated that the Syrians obviously failed to grasp the consequences of what was immediately condemned as a maladroit act.
