May 29, 2011

Lebanon’s Political Honeypot: What’s Behind the Telecoms Spat

Posted by Qifa Nabki under Free Patriotic Movement, Hezbollah, Lebanon, March 14 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
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The following commentary is by a well-informed reader of this blog who goes by the pseudonym “Charles”. He was one of the authors of the excellent Lebanese Political Journal blog (largely defunct since about 2007, but a must-read during the post-Hariri assassination years), and his intervention provides some much-needed context on the larger issues behind the telecoms showdown in Lebanon.

Reader Commentary by “Charles”

It appears that the basic problem is a lack of state accountability. Two oligarchic factions are standing off against one another.

The discussion to privatize Ogero goes back to the days of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri (and Finance Minister Fouad Siniora) who had the political and economic clout to privatize Ogero and make it his own. From 2003-4, the Syrians severely limited Hariri’s privatizations, which resulted in Moody’s downgrading Lebanon’s bond rating, as the government was not following its own debt restructuring program according to the guidelines set out in Paris II, which included promises to privatize the telecommunications network, the electrical grid, MEA, amongst other things.

Of course, the re-election of Lahoud and the removal of Hariri put everything else on hold, but Hariri’s men remained in their positions in the ministries waiting for their leader to return to power. Omar Karami’s (and Finance Minister Elias Saliba’s) failures alongside Syrian heavy handedness almost guaranteed Hariri’s return to power and a return to privatizations.

When M14 won the 2005 elections and then negotiated Paris III, the privatizations were supposed to continue, but did not because of opposition from Jumblatt, Berri, and Hezbollah, who humiliated Hariri and Siniora by rudely making their opposition to privatization known during the PM and Finance Minister’s meetings in New York and DC (something we saw them do once again to topple Hariri’s gov’t in 2011).

The telecoms privatization continued to fester under Marwan Hamade who, despite his affiliation with the March 14th coalition (M14), also had problems with Abdel Monem Youssef who was still waiting to become the director of the newly privatized Ogero and make his millions. The M14 appointed and affiliated director of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) Kamal Shehadeh had major problems with both Hamade and Youssef.

The transfer of telecoms to Gebran Bassile was a remarkably intelligent move by Michel Aoun. Without a financial power base of his own, Aoun needed a source of wealth to finance his politics, and he went to the same sources of money that finance a huge portion of Lebanese government operating costs: (1) foreign backers; (2) and the government owned telecommunications networks that allow Lebanese to do what we do best: talk on cell phones.

Since then, both specific interests within the Future Movement (not the entire party, and definitely not all of M14) and specific interests within the FPM (not the entire party, and definitely not all of the March 8th coalition [M8]) have determined the debate over telecommunications. This debate went from being nasty under Gebran Bassile to being an all out war under Charbel Nahhas, under whose tenure the esteemed technocratic TRA head Shehadeh resigned in disgust (Shehadeh’s personality and political disposition is remarkably similar to Ziad Baroud).

Hariri/Siniora provide political backing and will reap the profit; Rifi provides enforcement; and Youssef holds the fort. Aoun/Bassile provide the political backing and will reap the profit; Nahhas, OTV, and the ISF Embassy division (this division swears allegiance to the FPM?) provides the enforcement; and Aoun holds the fort through tedious negotiations over cabinet formations.

In the mean time, Hezbollah established their own network, thus by-passing the squabbling over privatizations, making millions (if not billions) using its own telecommunications network, weakened the Lebanese government through depriving it of one of its greatest sources of revenue (receipts from telecommunications traffic), provided cheaper and better communications for its partisans and others, and defending its own interests with its weapons.

Sure, there is espionage stuff going on – which Future, the FPM, Hezbollah, Israel, etc. like to play up because once it is brought up Lebanese brains stop behaving rationally, but its really about who reaps the spoils from the biggest honey pot in the country.

The current squabble is over the privatization of Ogero and the possible creation of a third mobile network. Aoun and Bassile refused to play the Lebanese political game in which they would have made a deal with Hariri and received a cut (Lebanon’s system of creating consensus), and have been trying to take the candy away from Hariri/Youssef for years. Nahhas has been the most effective at dismantling the Hariri/Youssef network, which is why the relationship between the two factions has become so nasty. They don’t understand why Aoun isn’t playing by the corrupt rules of Lebanese politics with them, even though he does with almost every other faction.

Youssef hunkering down created a stalemate to be resolved in the future. Nahhas is trying to resolve the situation now, because…

Enter Najib Miqati, and the situation becomes an emergency for both FM and FPM, which is why they are behaving so badly at this precise moment. The Miqati billions were created through telecommunications. Taha Miqati was a small time construction contractor in Khaleej until he established his satellite communications up link, which created enough profit for the Miqati brothers to make their billions. Their business relationships with the Assad regime (and more specifically with Rami Makhlouf) involve telecommunications.

If Miqati gets the telecoms portfolio in the next government, Hariri will cut a deal and Youssef will get his pay out (and he’s been waiting a long, long time). Aoun and Bassile get screwed. However, Hariri has a much worse hand with which to negotiate if Youssef doesn’t have a full network and doesn’t have a large base of operations that he controls.

Miqati has the political might to privatize the telecoms networks, or at least upgrade them, but he will have to cut deals all around, including with HA, Berri, and Jumblatt. Hariri is in a much better position if Youssef is in a dominant position. Youssef can throw a wrench in the works of any future privatization deal.

Nahhas technically had the right to take his action with the equipment, but the FPM isn’t following the “no victor, no vanquished” consensus model of Lebanese politics. They made it personal, and Future is responding in a surprisingly immature manner given how much they have to lose in this.
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November 23, 2010

Neil Macdonald Addresses Questions About CBC Hariri Exposé

Posted by Qifa Nabki under Hezbollah, Lebanon, March 14 | Tags: , , , , , , , |
[82] Comments 

I wrote to Neil Macdonald (author of the CBC report about the UN investigation into Rafiq al-Hariri’s murder) asking him if he would respond to some of the questions published on this blog earlier today about the timeline presented in his account of the investigation’s proceedings.

Mr. Macdonald had argued in his piece that “Brammertz could not be persuaded to authorize the one technique that those investigators wanted above all to deploy: telecommunications analysis,” and that “the UN commission in Lebanon did no telecom analysis at all for most of its first three years of existence.”

As some of our fearless readers have pointed out, the Mehlis report itself clearly indicates that the Commission was using telecoms data in its investigation to track Hariri’s killers. So why, I asked Mr. Macdonald, would Brammertz have had to authorize telecommunications analysis if the Commission was already using it in 2005? Or was that earlier work done under Mehlis a different kind of telecoms analysis from the stuff performed by Wissam Eid?

Mr. Macdonald responded to my query with the following note, which I quote with permission:

“The question we addressed in the documentary was when the commission began carrying out actual telecomms analysis of phone records. My sources — and they were there  — are absolutely firm. The commission did none until late 2007. The Lebanese police did. Capt. Eid was the first to discover the red network, and the first to identify the co-location phones. The commission under Mehlis was aware of the ISF’s early telecomms work. Brammertz referred to the commission’s collection of phone records (I refer to that in my piece; they obtained the entire 2005 phone database for Lebanon). But actual telecomms analysis by the commission itself, as I reported, was not authorized until late 2007, at which time FTS, the British firm, was brought in.“

The floor is yours, armchair investigators…
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November 22, 2010

Hizbullah Tied to Hariri Plot…Again

Posted by Qifa Nabki under Hezbollah, Lebanon, March 14 | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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The alleged confidential document obtained by CBC news which connects Hizbullah to the Hariri crime. Click to enlarge. (h/t BeirutSpring.com)

I imagine that any regular reader of this blog has already heard about Neil Macdonald’s special report on the Hariri assassination for CBC news. It’s a must read, if only because it will be all anyone will talk about in Lebanon for the next few weeks. You can also see the brief video report on the story that appeared on Canadian television yesterday here.

This is the third “scoop” about the Hariri investigation in a series of articles dating back to August 2006, when Georges Malbrunot published a story in Le Figaro that first hinted at the possibility of Hizbullah’s involvement. The infamous report by Erich Follath in Der Spiegel three years later added more details to Malbrunot’s revelation that telecommunications data was being used to track Hariri’s hit team.

Macdonald’s report builds on the two earlier stories but also provides some new (and surprising) information:

  • The UN didn’t make much headway on the investigation until late 2007.
  • Captain Wissam Eid — a Lebanese police officer investigating the crime who was killed in 2008 by a car bomb — had made huge strides towards cracking the case all on his own by using telecommunications data (i.e. signal intelligence) and submitted a report to the UN, only to have it shoved into a drawer for over a year.
  • Eid was killed a week after the UN rediscovered the report and re-connected with him, which suggests that he was being watched by Hariri’s killers.
  • Several senior officials in the investigation suspect that Col. Wissam al-Hassan (the head of the Internal Security Forces’ Information Branch and close confidante of Saad al-Hariri) had former knowledge of the plot to kill Hariri Sr., and they have evidence that he was in close communication with members of Hizbullah on the night before the murder.
  • Apparently the UN is demanding that CBC news return the confidential documents that Macdonald secured, and is refusing to comment on the story.

There’s a lot to say about this report and I’m sure it will generate a lively discussion, but I’ll confine myself to just a few observations for now:

First, can we tentatively assume that Malbrunot’s source back in 2006 was either Wissam Eid himself or his boss Samer Shehadeh, since the article came out before the UN “discovered” Eid’s report in 2007? Perhaps they hoped to send a message to The Hague to look into this material that had been ignored thus far.

Secondly, where did Macdonald get all of his information? Is the STL leaking like a sieve, or are his sources all former disgruntled officials who are dissatisfied with the direction of the investigation? The detailed information about Wissam Eid is particularly interesting, and leads one to suspect that Samer Shehadeh (Eid’s former boss who was targeted unsuccessfully by a car bomb and is now based in Quebec) might have been one of Macdonald’s sources, but this is pure speculation.

Thirdly, the material about Wissam al-Hassan is clearly the most disturbing and complicating element in this whole report. It’s an accusation that makes everybody’s life more difficult. Given al-Hassan’s close ties to Saad Hariri, no one in March 14 is going to be happy with these claims, and the Americans were apparently very uncomfortable with them. It also causes problems for Hizbullah and its allies: how can the opposition embrace the revelation about al-Hassan’s alleged culpability while disavowing the rest of the report? Finally, the Syrians, too, will not be happy with this leak, as Wissam al-Hassan was Hariri Sr.’s main channel to Rustom Ghazzali (former Syrian head of intelligence and de facto viceroy in Lebanon), which puts Damascus back under the spotlight. My guess is that what we’re likely to see is a lot of tiptoeing by Lebanese politicians with respect to this new story.

While I believe that a healthy dose of skepticism about all STL matters is certainly warranted, let us imagine for a moment that Macdonald’s report is based on solid sources. If you thought (like I did) that the prospect of Hariri sending the army to arrest members of Hizbullah was about as fantastical a scenario as anyone could imagine, we now stand corrected. No, the most fantastical scenario is the one where Hariri sends the army to arrest members of Hizbullah and his own intelligence chief for the murder of his father. And unless another Western newspaper reveals in a year that it was none other than Saad himself who ordered the crime, I think the Hariri affair’s irony index has hit an all-time high.

For other reactions to the story see: Beirut Spring, Friday Lunch Club, Angry Arab… [I'll keep adding them as they appear.]
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August 8, 2010

The Hariri Murder: Hizbullah Presents Its Case Against Israel

Posted by Qifa Nabki under Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, March 14, Syria | Tags: , , , , , |
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I will be live-blogging tomorrow’s speech by Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, which is slated to begin at 20:30 Beirut time (17:30 GMT, 13:130 EST).

In case you’ve been living under a rock, this speech promises to be one of the most significant political events of the past five years. Hizbullah has announced that it will unveil “material evidence” that Israel was responsible for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri on February 14, 2005, while also revealing sensitive information about how exactly it came upon this evidence.

The party’s opponents say that this is a ploy to deflect blame away from Hizbullah itself–which is rumored to be facing an imminent indictment by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon–while its supporters believe that the STL is an American/Israeli plot targeting the Resistance.

I can guarantee you that both friend and foe will be watching very closely.

Tune in on Monday for live coverage and a rowdy discussion in the comment section. To bring yourself up to speed on this story, click here for my most recent commentaries.

**

8:37: Nasrallah begins speaking. He will address the question of why Hizbullah is revealing this information now and not years ago, after he has had a chance to present it. (The front row of the press conference is full of journalistic luminaries: Jean Aziz, Ghassan bin Jeddo, etc.)

8:38: In 1993, a Hizbullah operative named Ali Deeb (Abu Hassan) was imprisoned by Syrian intelligence.

8:42: The reason for his imprisonment, according to Ghazi Kanaan, was that an Israeli collaborator in Lebanon told Hariri that Imad Mughniyeh was planning to kill him, and so Hariri passed on this information to the Syrians, who imprisoned the Hizbullah operative because Mughniyeh was not able to be captured.

8:44: An Israeli agent named Ahmad Nasrallah (no relation to SHN) confessed to passing along this information to Rafiq al-Hariri’s security people. He attempted to plant in Hariri’s mind the idea that Hizbullah was trying to kill him. He specifically told them that Imad Mughniyyeh was trying to kill Hariri, and that they had made several attempts, and that they were thinking about killing Bahiyya al-Hariri, and that Rafiq would be compelled to go to Saida for the funeral, and they could kill him too. This agent was imprisoned in 1996, freed in 2000, and is now living in Israel.

8:54: A presentation of Israel’s accusations that Hizbullah killed Hariri, since the assassination.

8:57: We move now to the second portion of the presentation, which consists of our accusation against Israel. Israel possesses the ability to carry out the assassination. Today we will show that Israel has a variety of collaborators in Lebanon, in every domain.

9:00: Bashar al-Assad informed me, just months before UNSCR 1559 was passed, that Syria was told that it could keep its troops in Lebanon as long as Hizbullah was disarmed and the Palestinian camps were disarmed. Syria refused, and so a great event was needed to pressure Syria to get out of Lebanon. This is the context of the Hariri assassination.

9:05: Israel possesses various sources of intelligence in Lebanon. Most important are the spies and collaborators. These only began to be discovered in 2009 and 2010, so for those of you who are asking us why we didn’t provide evidence in the past, this is one of the main reasons.

9:08: A presentation of the various collaborators and what they confessed to providing in the way of information, to Israel. One, named Philipos Sader, confessed to providing information about the residence of the Lebanese president and the yacht of the General of the Army.

9:10: Why has the STL never looked into the confessions of these collaborators? These statements are available and they are legitimate. Instead, the STL is relying on false witnesses.

9:14: One collaborator confessed to passing on information about the movements of Samir Geagea, and of Saad al-Hariri’s visits to the former. Why is Israel interested in the movements of Geagea and Hariri? They’re not interested in Hizbullah’s leaders, but they’re interested in Geagea and Hariri? The collaborator was also asked to survey certain cafes in Jbeil (Byblos) and which politicians frequented them. Now, as far as I know, Mohammed Fneish and Na`im Qassim (two Hizbullah leaders) are not visiting cafes in Jbeil, and maybe some of our allies in the FPM are, but for the most part the politicians who are going to cafes in Jbeil are part of March 14th.

9:18: The bomb found in al-Zahrani was intended for Nabih Berri, and it was planted by Israel. The intent was to create sectarian violence in Lebanon. They killed the Sunni prime minister of Lebanon, and then they wanted to kill the Shiite Speaker of Parliament. (This is based on a confession by a another collaborator, named Mahmoud Rafi`.)

9:21: Another collaborator admited to transporting large black boxes full of weapons and explosives.

9:24: I call on people to go through all of the confessions of all of the collaborators, which are available in the Lebanese security agencies, to develop a map of the entire Israeli collaborator network in Lebanon.

9:28: The cornerstone of all of Israel’s operations in Lebanon is aerial reconnaissance. Israel possesses a very high degree of technical competence in this field. The secret that we want to reveal today is the following:

Hizbullah acquired the ability, at a point in the 1990′s, to tap into the direct feed from Israeli reconaissance planes that passed from their cameras to the Israeli control center.

9:32: We did not have the ability to know exactly what they were filming at all times, or why, nor were we able to capture all of the various reconnaissance operations at all times, because there were many. At some point, Israel began to encrypt the feed and we were not able to capture everything.

9:34: On September 5 1997, an Israeli commando team landed in Lebanon via the sea and made its way to a spot that the Israelis had been surveying for a long time, and which we determined was going to be the scene of an operation. So we placed an ambush there and waited for months to see if there was going to be an operation. [The Ansariyya Operation] Fifteen people were killed.

9:41: We are going to show two other examples of Israeli surveillance prior to assassinations. We don’t have footage of the actual assassinations because even though the Israeli UAV was in the air at the time, its signal was encoded. (These include the targeted killings of Mahmoud al-Majzoub [leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad] and his brother.)

9:46: I will now move to discuss the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri. I was asked by the Hariri family if Hizbullah could help in the investigation, shortly after the killing. We formed a joint investigation commission, but after the political turn of the ensuing years, it came to naught. [See question session below].

9:50: Recently, Hizbullah formed a team of experts to go through our enormous archive of Israeli surveillance films leading up to the 2005 assassination so as to determine whether there was indeed evidence that Israel was preparing an operation. We are still in the process of this, after hundreds of hours, and yet we have come to very important conclusions.

9:53: The footage that we will show is from Beirut and from the road that leads from Beirut to Hariri’s residence in Faqra.

9:58: [Shows presentation of footage of the route that Hariri took when he was killed. There is a special focus on street corners, because those are the places that are favored for car bomb attacks against politicians (because the convoy has to slow down).]

10:05: In all of these places that we showed you (in Ras Beirut, etc.) does the Resistance have control centers or offices, etc.? No. Is it just coincidence that the Israelis were surveilling these areas in such detail before the assassination?

10:07: [Shows a presentation of footage of the road to Faqra, which is the only way to get there from the coastal highway. This was the road that Hariri used to take to get to his resort.]

10:09: No one from Hizbullah, to my knowledge, lives in Faqra. Now we will show you surveillance footage focusing on the highway into Saida, leading all the way up to Shafiq al-Hariri’s house (the brother of the victim).

10:14: There is another important secret that we may reveal in the future, if a serious investigation is launched.

10:15: [Presents information about Israeli aerial activity over Lebanon on the day before and day of the assassination. This information is available to anyone with radar in the area.]

10:20: We have evidence that an important collaborator named Ghassan al-Jid was in the area of the assassination on the day before (February 13, 2005).

10:25: Question session begins.

10:28: Question: What will the resistance do if the STL ignores your evidence or if Lebanese parties don’t follow it up? Nasrallah: We will interpret this as proof that the Tribunal is completely politicized.

10:32: We were surveilling an Israeli collaborator who had been following Rafiq al-Hariri’s routes, and we told this to Saad al-Hariri in 2005 or 2006.

10:35: Question: Syrian intelligence had offices in many of the locations that the Israelis were surveilling, even if Hizbullah did not. Plus, how do we know that you haven’t taken a long Israeli film and made a specially edited montage to prove your point? Answer: we will present all of our evidence to Lebanese investigators, and let them come to their own conclusions.

10:43: Nasrallah: The whole point of the STL indictment is to tarnish the image of Hizbullah. We want the truth about who killed Hariri, but we also are very, very, very concerned about public opinion in Lebanon and the Middle East, as it relates to the resistance. This is why we are presenting this evidence to the public.

10:45: Question: Will Hizbullah resign from the government if it is indicted? Answer: We will not discuss these kinds of political issues until after the indictment.

10:49: It was after the July War that our relation with the Hariri family and the joint investigation effort went sour.

10:52: I will not ask Saad al-Hariri to drop the investigation or to renounce the tribunal or Bellemare or anything. What we want is the truth and justice.

10:54: We have not presented this evidence directly to the STL because we won’t cooperate with anyone we do not trust.

10:56: Jean Aziz’s question: The inaugural declaration of this cabinet includes a clause which states that the government will cooperate with the STL. Does this press conference demonstrate the lack of truth in that statement? Nasrallah: we were cooperating with the STL until they decided to go on summer vacation. When they come back, we’ll revisit the issue.

11:01: Press conference ends.

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August 2, 2010

Nasrallah to Issue Decisive Word on U.N. Tribunal Indictments?

Posted by Qifa Nabki under Hezbollah, Lebanon | Tags: , , , , |
[90] Comments 

Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah will deliver a major address tomorrow (Tuesday August 3, 2010) on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the July War. The address will begin at 20:30 Beirut time (17:30 GMT).

It is widely expected that Nasrallah will address the issue of STL indictments and that he will reveal the “new information” about them that he promised in two earlier addresses (see my commentaries here and here). One imagines that he might discuss what took place in the meetings between the STL investigators and the Hizbullah members called in for questioning, and once again bring up the issue of false witnesses that he has discussed in the past.

On the other hand, there’s a significant possibility that this speech will not be nearly as aggressive as earlier ones, in anticipation of a possible settlement over the STL. (This is, at least, what this report about Nabih Berri’s meeting with Nasrallah suggests to me.)

At any rate, it should make for a very interesting evening.

Depending on the quality of the online feed, I plan to comment on the speech in real time. Stay tuned.

**

9:09: Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (SHN) has begun speaking. He will discuss what happened today on the border, the STL indictments, and the July War.

9:16: Issuing a tribute to the Lebanese Army and the soldiers who were killed today.

9:21: Directly addressing all the questions that will arise from today’s incident. “Is the Hizb trying to create a problem, etc.?” People with bad intentions will try to ask these kinds of questions.

9:24: SHN: “The Israeli hand that stretches toward the Lebanese Army will be cut off by the Resistance.”

9:26: SHN is now discussing the issue of cluster bombs in South Lebanon. 200,000 have been removed and one million remain.

9:30: Discussing Israeli spies in Lebanon. SHN: “One hundred have been discovered in the country so far. How many more are there?”

9:32: SHN calls for Israeli spies to be put to death.

9:34: SHN: “Some in Lebanon talk about the need for a defense strategy. What about a liberation strategy for those territories that we all agree are part of our land? [i.e. Shebaa Farms, Kfar Shouba, Ghajar, etc.]“

9:36: SHN: “We all heard the Israeli General Ashkenazi report that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon would indict Hizbullah members.”

9:39: SHN: We welcomed the Saudi-Syrian visit to Lebanon, and we look forward to Ahmadinejad’s visit after Eid al-Fitr.

9:41: SHN: We all want the truth, and we reject politicizing the Tribunal. We want justice and we want to protect our country and civil peace.

9:42: SHN: “I had promised you a press conference, and I will hold it on next Monday, August 9th.” (This is the second part of the promised two-part series.) “The first part of the press conference will deal with our accusation against Israel that it carried out the assassination of PM Rafiq al-Hariri.”

9:46: SHN: In the press conference of August 9th at 8:30PM, I will present evidence that Israel killed Hariri. I will reveal an important secret about the Resistance’s efforts to prove that Israel was responsible for the murder.

9:49: SHN: We are prepared to present evidence to the Lebanese government that demonstrates Israel’s guilt. And we are capable of discovering the real culprit.

9:52: SHN has completed discussing the Tribunal. I will stop transcribing here…

10:11: SHN: If the Israelis want to believe that we have an air defense or not, let them believe what they want. We are not going to reveal anything.

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February 12, 2010

Effective Corrupt Leadership: Assessing Rafiq al-Hariri’s Legacy

Posted by Qifa Nabki under Lebanon | Tags: |
[33] Comments 

Yesterday, Saad al-Hariri pulled his sponsorship of a conference held at Antonine University, in which a speaker quoted an “offensive” statement about Rafiq al-Hariri from a recently-published academic study. What was this offensive remark, you ask? That Rafiq al-Hariri was an efficient and productive leader who also happened to be corrupt, though not as corrupt as most other Lebanese prime ministers. Shocking, I know.

The media is having a field day with this issue. Here’s the news report in Naharnet, and here’s an article in al-Akhbar (thanks KT). In the meantime, why don’t we take a look at the academic study that was the source of the offensive statement (“The dynamics of effective corrupt leadership: Lessons from Rafik Hariri’s political career in Lebanon,” by Mark W. Neal and Richard Tansey.)

The article is thought-provoking, worth reading, and sure to generate controversy. Hariri-haters will dismiss it as a bunch of social-scientific claptrap meant to vindicate one of the most corrupt politicians in the history of the country, while Hariri-lovers (except, of course, for Saad himself, Fouad Saniora, Tarek Mitri, and all of the other Mustaqbal officians who stormed out of the conference) will find themselves nodding along in agreement with the basic argument, which is this:

“This article introduces the notion of “effective corrupt leadership” to distinguish those in public office who engage in corrupt practice, who are more effective, and better for their people, than alternatives. The paper examines a case of such leadership by discussing the career of the late Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese Prime Minister who initiated and achieved the rebuilding of Beirut after the Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990. Using the historical case-study method, an examination of Hariri’s activities allows us to appreciate the difficulties of achieving tangible welfare benefits in corrupt circumstances. Notably, the moralizing attacks by Hariri’s rivals show that while achieving and sustaining political powermay require corrupt practice, such practice can ultimately undermine the leader authority and power. This “blifil paradox” demonstrates how difficult it is to lead effectively in corrupt circumstances. Through a discussion of these difficulties and challenges, the article attempts to demonstrate the significance of “effective corrupt leadership”, both in terms of its impact upon people, and its importance for the refinement of our understanding of leadership.”

I’ve written to Leadership Quarterly to get permission to post this article here at QifaNabki.com, so you can feel free to download the entire text guilt-free.

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