Saad Hariri's resignation
When Saad Hariri’s jet touched down at Riyadh on the evening
of 3 November, the first thing he saw was a group of Saudi policemen
surrounding the plane. When they came aboard, they confiscated his mobile phone
and those of his bodyguards. Thus was Lebanon’s prime minister silenced.
It was a dramatic moment in tune with the soap-box drama
played out across Saudi Arabia this past week: the house arrest of 11 princes –
including the immensely wealthy Alwaleed bin Talal – and four ministers and
scores of other former government lackeys, not to mention the freezing of up to
1,700 bank accounts. Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s “Night of the Long
Knives” did indeed begin at night, only hours after Hariri’s arrival in Riyadh.
So what on earth is the crown prince up to?
Put bluntly, he is clawing down all his rivals and – so the
Lebanese fear – trying to destroy the government in Beirut, force the Shia
Hezbollah out of the cabinet and restart a civil war in Lebanon. It won’t work,
for the Lebanese – while not as rich – are a lot smarter than the Saudis. Every
political group in the country, including Hezbollah, are demanding one thing
only: Hariri must come back. As for Saudi Arabia, those who said that the Arab
revolution will one day reach Riyadh – not with a minority Shia rising, but
with a war inside the Sunni Wahhabi royal family – are watching the events of
the past week with both shock and awe.
But back to Hariri. On Friday 3 November, he was in a
cabinet meeting in Beirut. Then he received a call, asking him to see King
Salman of Saudi Arabia. Hariri, who like his assassinated father Rafiq, holds
Saudi as well as Lebanese citizenship, set off at once. You do not turn down a
king, even if you saw him a few days’ earlier, as Hariri had. And especially
when the kingdom owes Hariri’s “Oger” company as much as $9bn, for such is the
commonly rumoured state of affairs in what we now call “cash-strapped Saudi
Arabia”.
But more extraordinary matters were to come. Out of the blue
and to the total shock of Lebanese ministers, Hariri, reading from a written
text, announced on Saturday on the Arabia television channel – readers can
guess which Gulf kingdom owns it – that he was resigning as prime minister of
Lebanon. There were threats against his life, he said – though this was news to
the security services in Beirut – and Hezbollah should be disarmed and wherever
Iran interfered in the Middle East, there was chaos. Quite apart from the fact
that Hezbollah cannot be disarmed without another civil war – is the Lebanese
army supposed to attack them when Shia are the largest minority in the country
(many of them in the army)? These were not words that Hariri had ever used
before. They were not, in other words, written by him. As one who knows him
well said this week, “this was not him speaking”. In other words, the Saudis
had ordered the prime minister of Lebanon to resign and to read his own
departure out loud from Riyadh.
I should add, of course, that Hariri’s wife and family are
in Riyadh, so even if he did return to Beirut, there would be hostages left
behind. Thus after a week of this outrageous political farce, there is even
talk in Beirut of asking Saad Hariri’s elder brother Bahaa to take his seat in
the cabinet. But what of Saad himself? Callers have reached him at his Riyadh
home, but he speaks only a few words. “He says ‘I will come back’ or ‘I’m
fine’, that’s all, only those words, which is very unlike him,” says one who
must know. And what if Hariri did come back? Would he claim that his
resignation had been forced upon him? Dare the Saudis risk this?
He certainly did not anticipate what happened to him.
Indeed, Hariri had scheduled meetings in Beirut on the following Monday – with
the IMF, the World Bank and a series of discussions on water quality
improvement; not exactly the action of a man who planned to resign his
premiership. However, the words he read out – scripted for him – are entirely
in line with the speeches of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman and with the
insane President of the United States who speaks of Iran with the same anger,
as does the American Defence Secretary.
Of course, the real story is just what is going on in Saudi
Arabia itself, for the crown prince has broken forever the great compromise
that exists in the kingdom: between the royal family and the clergy, and
between the tribes. This was always the bedrock upon which the country stood or
fell. And Mohamed bin Salman has now broken this apart. He is liquidating his
enemies – the arrests, needless to say, are supposedly part of an
“anti-corruption drive”, a device which Arab dictators have always used when
destroying their political opponents.
There will be no complaints from Washington or London, whose
desire to share in the divvying up of Saudi Aramco (another of the crown
prince’s projects) will smother any thoughts of protest or warning. And given
the smarmy reporting of the Crown Prince’s recent speeches in the New York
Times, I have my suspicions that even this elderly journalistic organ will be
comparatively unworried by the Saudi coup d’etat. For that is what it is. He
unseated the interior minister earlier this year and now Mohamed bin Salman is
getting rid of his opponents’ financial power.
But ruthless men can also be humble. Hariri was allowed to
see the King – the original reason for which he believed he was travelling to
Riyadh – and even paid a visit to the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates
this week, an ally-nation of the Saudis who would prevent him jumping on a flight
to Beirut. But why on earth would Hariri want to go to the Emirates? To prove
that he was still free to travel when he cannot even return to the country
which he is supposed to be ruling?
Lebanon is always going through the greatest crisis since
its last greatest crisis. But this time, it’s for real.
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