Road from Damascus

The Ghosts
of Martyrs Square

Photo Credit: Corbis

An Eyewitness Account
of Lebanon’s Life Struggle
by Michael Young
Simon & Schuster, 295 pp., $26

This past February, Le Monde published a detailed report suggesting that Hezbollah participated in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The story was old news—Der Spiegel had run a comparable story last year—but its repetition in Le Monde increased the allegation’s credibility. Today, fallout from the contention that the Shiite militia helped kill the leader of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim community continues to reverberate in Beirut, and two decades after a civil war that cost 150,000 lives, sectarian tensions stemming from Hariri’s murder once again threaten to plunge Lebanon into conflict.

These tensions provide the backdrop to this excellent new study by Michael Young, opinion page editor of the leading Lebanese English-language paper, The Daily Star. It begins with the assassination of Hariri in downtown Beirut. Young, like many Lebanese, holds Syria responsible for the massive car bomb that dispatched Hariri and 21 others that day. The motive: The Assad regime in Syria believed that Hariri, in league with then-French president Jacques Chirac, supported U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 demanding an end to the decades-long Syrian occupation. Worse, Damascus feared Hariri might be preparing to ally himself with a growing coalition of anti-Syrian politicians. This was, according to Young, “a high stakes game [in which Hariri’s] successes endangered Syria’s twenty-nine-year-old rule over Lebanon as well as Bashar Assad’s authority at home.”