The Syrian conflict has divided and destroyed many of the
country’s most important cities. Should the fighting cease, they will
require massive reconstruction. Yet I spoke with urban development
specialists at the National Agenda for the Future of Syria who fear that
the war-torn cities of Homs and Aleppo will never be rebuilt. Instead,
they will be razed to the ground and another Solidere will be rebuilt in
their place.
Their references to Solidere are intriguing.
Solidere is the name of the private company contracted to rebuild
downtown Beirut after the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). However,
Beirut’s reconstruction had wide-ranging political and economic
repercussions that offer an object lesson in how not to rebuild a
devastated city.
Solidere turned Beirut into a city of exclusion.
Its iconic architecture and tax incentives attracted foreign
investment, in turn helping the country’s economic recovery. But more buildings were torn down during reconstruction
than were destroyed by the war, transforming Beirut’s war-scarred
layers of history from the Roman, Mamluk, Ottoman and French periods
into a city without memory.
During
the civil war, Beirut was separated by checkpoints between Christian
East and Muslim West. Daily movement today is disrupted by what Mona Fawaz,
a scholar of urban planning, describes as architectures of security.
Soldiers and blast barriers guard the entrances to Solidere’s downtown.
The sidewalks outside public buildings are protected by concrete walls
and barbed wire, forcing pedestrians onto the road. The areas
surrounding politicians’ homes or political party headquarters
are blocked by checkpoints. The only public park was, until recently,
closed to the public for security reasons. The sentiment that those
living here need to create a bubble and live inside the bubble for
them not to lose their minds is one often expressed to me, and which I
also feel after two years of living in Beirut. These frustrations mean
that half of Lebanon’s young and educated emigrate at some point in their lives.
Solidere
also symbolizes the extent to which reconstruction has blurred the
boundaries between public interest and private profit. The process of
postwar rebuilding was especially lucrative for members of government
and their business associates, none more so than billionaire Prime
Minister Rafiq Hariri,
who upon purchasing $125 million of shares in Solidere became the
largest shareholder in the very company to which his cabinet awarded the
most lucrative reconstruction project. Hariri also owned Lebanon’s
largest private construction company, whose director was appointed the
head of the Council for Development and Reconstruction, meaning, in the
words of architect Hashim Sarkis, that “the agency that the government used to control private development has now reversed its role.”
Lebanon went deeply into debt to finance reconstruction, and with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 149 percent,
it is today the world’s third-most-indebted country. The interest
payments total more than a third of the government’s annual spending.
Yet because politicians and their families control one-third of all
banking assets — and because Lebanese banks own around 85 percent of the
debt — these payments profit the very political leaders sinking Lebanon
deeper into debt.
Lebanon’s reconstruction has preserved the war
economies once lining the pockets of militia leaders. During the civil
war, the militias established civil administrations
to service their sectarian constituencies. In return for taxing the
population under their control, they collected garbage, provided water
and electricity, managed traffic and maintained roads. Yet the militias
also turned war into a strategic resource. From drug-trafficking to
pillaging the port to speculating against the Lebanese pound, the
militias procured about $1 billion annually, creating personal fortunes for their leaders and perpetuating the civil war.
Postwar
reconstruction came without political reconciliation. The former
warlords are today Lebanon’s politicians, ministers and heads of
government. These include (but are not limited to) Walid Joumblatt, the
Druze leader who despite displacing tens of thousands during the war was
named minister of the displaced; Nabih Berri, who led Shiite forces and
has been speaker of parliament since the civil war’s conclusion; as
well as presidential candidates Samir Geagea and Michel Aoun, whose
Christian militias battled each other throughout the war. Their
inclusion may have persuaded them to lay down their arms, but according
to Reinoud Leenders,
these politicians are less willing to surrender the economic windfalls
from violence and state collapse. Today, they sit in a paralyzed
parliament — which has failed to elect a president in more than two
years (or pass a budget in over a decade) — where they line their
pockets through a system of sectarian patronage.
The
pathologies of reconstructed Beirut are laid bare in the deterioration
of basic services. Every summer when the faucets run dry, the streets
are blocked by tanker trucks delivering water to the plastic cisterns
atop apartment buildings. Compared with the average international
broadband speed of 22.4 megabits per second, Beirut’s internet crawls
along at 3.2 Mbit/s
— and only when there is electricity. There are daily blackouts of
three hours in Beirut and up to 18 hours in the rest of Lebanon. The
government subsidizes the public electricity provider $2 billion
annually, totaling 40 percent of the public debt; but with half the
bills uncollected and politicians divided over privatization, the World Bank
refers to Electricité du Liban as “the Poster Child of
Confessionally-Induced Waste in Public Spending that Plagues Public
Finances, Businesses, and Households since 1981.”
Everyone must
purchase potable water, and those who can afford it pay for a generator,
but there is no individual solution to garbage. A private company is
responsible for both the collection and disposal of Beirut’s garbage.
The council of ministers renewed its contract three times without an
open tender and its payment per ton
of garbage is one of the highest in the world. So when the landfill,
which had long reached its absorptive capacity, was closed last summer
and putrid garbage began piling on the streets, the Lebanese people
participated in the largest protests since the assassination of Hariri
in 2005 and the withdrawal of Syrian occupying troops. They were
demanding not simply a solution to the trash crisis but an end to
corruption disguised as sectarianism.
As the economic downturn
and insecurity of the Syrian war bleed across the border, Lebanese
policymakers point to the business opportunities of reconstruction. I
spoke with real estate developers who hope to be called upon for
rebuilding and commercial bankers who want to reopen their offices in
Syria.
But
as international donors and development specialists look towards
reconstructing Syria, they should heed the lessons from Lebanon.
Politically paralyzed, infrastructurally fragile and deeply indebted,
Lebanon is a model for what postwar Syria should avoid. A cessation of
the hostilities is essential in Syria. Yet reconstruction without
dismantling the war economies and political patronage networks
perpetuating them means that Syrian reconstruction will resemble
Lebanon, in all its division and dysfunction. More than rebuilding, what
is required is reorienting the political economy away from war. Lebanon
reveals this is especially problematic when the same perpetrators and
profiteers of the conflict hold political office in the postwar era.
Julia Tierney is a doctoral candidate at the University of California Berkeley in city and regional planning.
