Rafik Hariri
Rafik Hariri was prime minister of Lebanon from 1992 to 1998 and from 2000 to 2004, the Sidon greengrocer's son who had made billions building palaces for the Saudi royal family. He had paid for the Taif conference of 1989 that ended the civil war and then came home to rebuild its capital. He did it through the company Solidere that took the ruined city centre from its owners for shares and rebuilt it as the Beirut of the postcards, and the airport, the motorways and the power stations, on borrowed money that took the public debt from three billion dollars to thirty-five, a hundred and eighty per cent of output, at the interest rates the banks he was close to set. The Syrians who ran the country tolerated him for the money he brought and the friends he had, Chirac above all. When in September 2004 they extended the president Lahoud's term by force and the UN Security Council, at Chirac's and Bush's urging, passed resolution 1559 demanding that they leave, he resigned in October. He was killed on 14 February 2005 by a truck bomb of a tonne of explosive on the Beirut corniche that killed twenty-one others. He was born in Sidon in 1944, studied accounting at the Arab University of Beirut for a year, went to Saudi Arabia in 1965 as a teacher and then a contractor. He built the Taif conference centre for King Khalid in six months in 1977, which made him the kingdom's builder and, in 1978, a Saudi citizen. His foundation paid for thirty thousand Lebanese to go to university during the war. The assassination brought a million people to Martyrs' Square on 14 March, the Cedar Revolution, and the Syrian army out of the country in April after twenty-nine years. The UN tribunal in The Hague convicted a Hezbollah member in absentia in 2020 of the bombing and found no evidence of the leadership's involvement, which nobody in Lebanon believed either way. His son Saad was prime minister three times and gave up in 2022. The Solidere towers stand half-empty over a bankrupt state whose banks took the depositors' money in 2019, which is the other half of his legacy.
- Lived: 1944 CE – 2005 CE
- Nationality: Lebanese
- Roles: prime minister, businessman, politician
