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A matter of life and debt: the untold costs of Rafiq Hariri's New Beirut

The images accompanying the first reconstruction project to appear after Lebanon's sixteen-year long Civil War are seductive indeed. The unabashedly modern urban life depicted within the project's promotional images is peaceful, orderly, affluent, leisurely. While these labour-free images of Beirut quietly sidestep the issue of money, the fact of the matter is that this first reconstruction project did nothing less than to obsess over it. Money lay at the heart of this project. For without it, how would the war-ravaged economy replace 1200 damaged or demolished buildings, sanitise a 60-hectare toxic waste site, and replenish 150 hectares of city, in what would be the world's largest urban renewal? The much-vaunted answer has a familiar ring to it: privatisation. And Rafiq Hariri, Lebanon's billionaire homeboy made good was just the man to do it. The first step entailed Hariri's agitation as Lebanon's new Prime Minister virtually to ‘give’ the city centre to a new development corporation optimistically named Solidère. The state's eventual payback would issue from profit on sales of its properties and income generated by the site. The government would also underwrite a public offering of shares in this company, a subscription that would capitalise the company to the tune of more than one thousand million dollars, making it the largest corporation by far in Lebanon (and one of the largest in the Middle East). And in order to attract other investors, Hariri would leverage his financial reputation by himself investing in the project, as would virtually all of Hariri's family and key business associates. The Lebanese government together with its Prime Minister would be invested in the publicly traded company, thus ensuring government oversight. Today, Lebanon's once-vaunted privatisation programme is regarded contemptuously by most economists who have downgraded Lebanese treasury and corporate bonds to junk levels. For the truth of the matter is that Solidère, still Lebanon's largest company, has not truly privatised, and does not truly grow out of the free market. Instead, it epitomises a complicated public/private arrangement, less partnership than Faustian pact. The private sector holds the public sector hostage as its private fortunes are equated with the government's. Meanwhile the public sector does what it can to protect its investment and to damage-control the activities of its business model and the world's perceptions of the Lebanese marketplace. Neither public nor private, Solidère epitomises a hybrid economic world whose viability is fundamentally dependent on huge infusions of state capital, public revenues that might otherwise serve other unsung sectors of the economy. Tacit state guarantees also encourage profligate fiscal irresponsibility, fraud, croneyism, monopolism, and excess expenditure that further draw down the state's meagre resources, explode its national budget deficit, and atrophy the civil state. For the state to call Solidère a day would be to admit the failure of its economic centrepiece as well as the defeat of the very modernist social programme that propelled the project in the first place. What's more, to leave Solidère incomplete—a ruin—would be to acknowledge the futility of Lebanon's dreams for social and economic reform, a reality which sadly this part of Solidère's story serves but to illustrate.