Saad al- Hariri wants to know the truth about his father. So do I!
Given that my father didn’t steal a huge plot of land in downtown Beirut that could fit a crowd of people-diminishing as it may be- I’ll have to make my point in the following lines.
Very briefly, I will recount important episodes from my father’s life that I hope would make my point clear.
The only piece of weaponry my father mentions he has ever laid hand on was a Belgian-made 14mm pistol with a “semi-shiny” wooden handle. I remember these details because my father was very proud of this weapon, as most men who possess guns probably consider it an extension of their virility. The only time my father shot his gun, at least according to what he says, was when President Jamal Abdel Nasser passed away in 1970.Like many others, he expressed his grief in an exhibitionist manner by emptying a round of bullets in the air.
When he got married, and my mother and he had my two older brothers by the early years of the civil war, my mother panicked and insisted that he sells his gun lest one my brothers played with it and caused a catastrophe. To his grief, my father sold his gun and never acquired another, at a time when people were probably using AK-47's for interior decoration.
In short, my father never participated in the civil war; in fact I don’t believe he has actually ever shot at anything, let alone having shot at anyone. Instead, my father was a victim of the war himself. Having escaped death and injury on several occasions, my father was finally hit by fragments from a mortar shell while he was standing in front of his bakery in 1988, and consequently lost 7 cm of bones from his right leg ; he had to wait for a year and half before he could walk again after recovering from a bone transplant surgery.
As if it weren’t enough to be a victim of war, my father became a victim of peace. After the war, the country was blessed by an economic “plan” for reconstruction designed by the late Rafiq Hariri. An large part of that plan,in addition to legalising the forced selling of estates in downtown Beirut to Hariri's company Solidere, was the development of infrastructure.
In reality,this meant that my father had to sacrifice another year and a half waiting for the completion of a great and ingenious construction project designed to build a tunnel underneath the road that passed in front of his bakery;customers could barely walk into the bakery when the tunnel was still under construction.
Once construction was complete, it turned out that the pavement was titled towards the bakery and consequently all the rain water would flow in. Seeing this flaw, the engineer appointed by the municipality refused to acknowledge the completion of the project. However, the company was able to find another engineer who had different technical views on the matter.
Hence, my father had to hire workers and pay for them himself to fix this flaw.
The bakery never recovered from the whole setback, and hence my father is still indebted with huge sums since 1995, which I believe he could never repay in his lifetime. The tunnel, let it be known, was designed to link the airport to the Pheonicia Intercontinental five-star hotel, so that rich tourists would never be stuck in traffic.
Remembering all of this on one hand, and listening to Mr. Saad Hariri insist on revealing the Truth about his father’s killing on the other, make me think about the following :
why is the truth about the killing of Mr. Rafiq Hariri so crucial while the truth about jeopardizing and terminating the lives of thousands during the war should never be discussed again?
Why did my father have to make a sacrifice during peace (on top of suffering during the war ) for the construction of a tunnel that allowed cars to flow easily into a hotel in which he would never dream to set foot ?
Why should my father be convinced that he could live without health care at the age of 67 and should not question the economic policies that have deprived him and many others of that right, yet he should not think for a minute that he could live without knowing the Truth?
Why is it that my father who loved this country and preferred to live in it in its worse conditions could never question the people who deprived of a peaceful life-be it Hariri or others?
In fact, he loved this country long before a stupid, simplistic and politically malicious media campaign- which sounds more like promoting Coca Cola than making a nationalist claim- told him to say “Ana Uhibbu al- Hayat ! –I Love Life ! (Then again the Hariris own both the Coca Cola company and Lebanon, so I doubt they actually see any difference as to how they should run either of them).
We have always been told that investigating war crimes and political corruption in Lebanon would disrupt the status quo, and hence risk starting a civil war.
Well let it be known then : “finding” the Truth about the killing of Hariri also risks starting a civil war, irrespectively of whether or not Hezbollah has actually assassinated him .
We either investigate all the war crimes and the corruption that followed –perpetrated by both Hariri and his pro-Syrian opponents alike- or we don’t investigate anything at all.
We could only afford one civil war at a time !
