12. SERVEIS UNIVERSITARIS
12.3. Digital Factory del Tecnocampus
September 198266. Around 300 heavy-duty vehicles occupied the municipal stadium of Beirut. The vehicles, thirty of which have been ordered brand new from Saudi Arabia at a cost of thirteen million dollars and delivered within the same day, manoeuvred their way out of the stadium’s only exit with difficulty. Every day, as early as six in the morning, the vehicles accompanied by around 700 ‘volunteers’67, begin their daily mission of cleaning up the rubble on the streets of a war-torn Beirut68. As the vehicles
66 The description of the cleaning project in this vignette is based on the memoir of Al-Fadel Shalaq (Shalaq and Farshakh 2006), manager of the cleaning project at the time and for a long time a key figure in the Hariri Establishment. Shalaq managed many of the establishment's institutions including Oger Liban, the Hariri Foundation and Almustaqbal newspaper. He acted as a minister in Hariri's government as well as being head of the Council for Development and Reconstruction.
67 While Shalaq described the workers as 'volunteers', he indicated that they were given remuneration, the amount of which was not specified. Of note is that those 'volunteers' included Ahmad Kobrosly, who was both a Nejmeh fan and the club's administrative director for decades. He was still in office at the time of my research.
68 The text provides an uncritical account of the events as narrated by Shalaq himself. It is essential though to point out the broader political context within which the project was taking place. The project
officially started on 6th September, 1982, but according to Shalaq's memoir (Shalaq and Farshakh 2006:
50-68) Hariri first proposed the idea on September 1st, while Beirut was still under siege by the Israeli Forces for over two months. Hariri's proposal was made only two days after PLO leader Yasser Arafat left Beirut, and a week after Bachir Gemayal was elected, with Israeli support, as Lebanon's President.
find their way in and out of the stadium, in what Hariri’s close aid at the time and the engineer responsible for the work, Al-Fadal Shalaq describes in his memoir as a ‘fascinating daily spectacle that could have been in the best of Hollywood movies’ (Shalaq and Farshakh 2006: 110), they are watched by the amazed eyes of the stadium’s neighbours, the residents of Tariq al-Jadidah. The cleaning project is Rafic Hariri’s first engagement in a public project in the city of Beirut, and for it he has the blessing of Saeb Salam, the city’s zaʿim at the time, as well as Saudi funding that he acknowledged in the stickers on the sides of all the vehicles. It is the ‘project of a lifetime’ as Hariri repeatedly tells Shalaq.
The budget of the cleaning project has no limits. Shalaq claims that an account was opened in his name in a local bank, which he used without once monitoring how much he spent nor checking what the balance was (Shalaq and Farshakh 2006). The demands on the tempo of the performance are high; at the time when 160 truck loads per day are being moved, Rafic Hariri requires that they reach a target of thousand loads.
In narrating the events of that period and the spirit by which the project was implemented, Shalaq speaks of it as a charitable one motivated by devotion for the city and an interest in its welfare as well as that of its people69.
The handling of the project did not always follow these high ideals. When for example one of the many warring militias requested that the vehicles or project workers carry out certain services for it, the drivers usually obliged. Similarly, when the Lebanese President needed to install a tennis court at the presidential palace, the same team of workers and engineers, using the same funding, unquestioningly complied.
The project provides an example of the model that Hariri, and his establishment more broadly, adopted later on in their business, charity and political enterprises. In addition to signalling Hariri’s entry into the public domain, the importance of this early phase of contracting and philanthropic work is that it marked the moment when Hariri built a network of workers who later formed the core of his team when he embarked on his political career. Amongst those, interviewed and employed by Shalaq himself in 1980, was engineer Muheib Itani who later acted as Hariri’s ‘client representative’ in the negotiations for the change in Nejmeh’s patronage and the transfer of its management into Hariri’s hands in 2002 – 2003.
I met Muheib Itani many years ago when he was director of Electricite du Liban (EDL) in the mid 1990s. Talking about the EDL’s most recent achievement of installing thousands of new electricity poles across Lebanon, Itani described how he was advised by Hariri to paint the poles the same colour as his
69 The same ‘cleaning efforts’ are argued by sociologist Nabil Beyhum and several of Beirut’s intellectuals to be part of a pretext for the demolition of large areas of downtown Beirut. Clearances in 1983 made way for the later implementation of Beirut’s city centre reconstruction plan under Solidere, which in practice allowed Solidere to seize ownership of all the land in downtown Beirut. These events are documented in an untranslated work by Beyhum et al., I'amar Beirut wa'l fursa al-da'i'a [The Reconstruction of Beirut and the Lost Opportunity] (1992:16).
bright orange lighter. He took that lighter out of his pocket to show the flashy colour, and explained that this way, both the new poles and the achievements of the Prime Minister at the time, Rafic Hariri, were made highly visible. In the following weeks, as I drove through the villages of South Lebanon, I saw the newly erected bright orange poles everywhere – an army of them dominating the arid hilly landscape.
Figure 16: Poster celebrating Rafic Hariri as the ‘man of construction’.70
Introduction
When I first began my research, I was repeatedly told, not only by random fans who might have known little about the legislation of football clubs, but also by sports journalists and football referees, that Rafic Hariri had ‘bought’ Nejmeh Club. The significance of the use of the term is that, in people’s general opinion, Hariri had obtained the club in direct
70 Source: RaficBHariri Instagram account https://instagram.com/p/ymnB8HtLmu/ accessed 19/9/2015.
exchange for financial payment rather than following the route for club presidents or patrons who are more usually chosen or nominated before undergoing formal election or appointment processes. Given that the club, like all other sports clubs in Lebanon, was registered as a sports association and therefore could not be legally bought, the use of the idiom of ‘buying’ is indicative of the key factor that gave Hariri control over the club.
‘Buying’ in the broad sense of the term, and not merely the legal or technical term, is descriptive of many of Hariri’s engagements in the public sphere. The instrumental use of wealth was key in forwarding Hariri’s public and political career.
According to political scientist El-Husseini, Hariri was ‘representative of a new trend in politics – the importance of wealth’ (2004: 249); he belonged to a category of elite which she calls ‘the entrepreneurs’. Members of such entrepreneurial elites enjoy ‘international experience, attitudes, and behaviour different from those of traditional politicians’ and are surrounded by ‘teams of experts educated in the west’. These people establish
philanthropic foundations specifically to create the clientele base and networks which they would have otherwise inherited (El-Husseini 2004: 249). This chapter provides an
ethnographic exploration of Hariri’s use of philanthropy to create a leadership position.
Through describing the transition from what fans popularly called the ‘Ghandour Era’ to the ‘Hariri Era’ within Nejmeh Sport Club, I analyse the ascent of Rafic Hariri into leadership in Lebanon and the new model of socio-political zaʿim he presented. I do this by examining how the discourse and images of Hariri as a person, and ‘Harirism’ more broadly, were presented and consumed by Nejmeh members and fans. I trace the ways in which the ‘Hariri approach’ coincided with and built on existing understandings of leadership and social capital, while at the same time highlighting what is distinctive about the approach.
In his philanthropy, as in politics, Hariri was distinguished by his wealth. His charitable endeavours resembled global trends of mega-philanthropy, a phenomenon which has shown marked growth with the significant increase in the income of the richest 1% and the emergence of philanthrocapitalism understood as ‘the application of business techniques to philanthropy by a new generation of self-made, hands-on donors—and strategic
grantmaking’ (Jenkins 2011:3). Philanthropy has long been discussed as a tool of hegemony of the capitalist class (Gramsci 1971), or at least as a gift which entails reciprocity (Mauss 1967) [1923] and contributes to accumulation of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986). Recent research which has examined the contributions of philanthrocapitalists within specific sectors has made clear the ways in which their financial contributions allow them to
promote the political agenda they support (Morvaridi 2012a). Research into the individual trajectories of philanthrocapitalists such as Carnegie provides a more nuanced
understanding of the ‘symbiotic relationship between entrepreneurship and philanthropy’
and ways in which philanthropy ‘serves as a mechanism both for capital conversion and capital accumulation’ (Harvey et al 2011: 445). Seen in these terms, economic capital is used to generate social and cultural capital, thereby increasing a philanthropist’s field of power and enabling them to contribute to decision-making on a grand scale. In turn, their involvement in such decision-making serves to bolster their entrepreneurial and economic endeavours.
The chapter consists of two sections: the first explores how Hariri’s philanthropy was presented and consumed and ways in which it contributed to his accumulation of political capital. Like the project mentioned in the vignette, Hariri’s endeavours were typically performative, characterised by exceptional scale, and the ostentatious expenditure of huge amounts of money. They were also porous, giving way for some ‘favours’ and ‘losses’, or in other words, were permissive of a certain degree of corruption which at times was
instrumentally used to serve Hariri’s political agenda. In addition to the instrumental political value of Hariri’s philanthropy - and beyond the simplified understanding of philanthropy as a way of securing political support in a dyadic patron-client relationship - I explore the symbolic and idealistic underpinnings of Hariri’s philanthropy. I also examine the impact of Hariri’s philanthropy not only on what would become Hariri’s constituencies, but also its effects on his relationship with other members of the elite.
In the second section, I focus on the experience of Nejmeh Sport Club, especially the conditions that led its management to approach Hariri as a patron and the process by which they handed the club over to him. The club had always enjoyed political patronage, predominantly from Beirut’s traditional leader Saeb Salam, yet that patronage often only provided political cover and support when administrative and political problems were pressing. The patronage of Hariri that began in 2003 was of a significantly different nature, in that full responsibility for the club was entrusted to the new patron whose remit
included ensuring both proper management and sustainable funding. The second section also presents the contrast that existed between the desired financial stability and
sustainability from Hariri’s patronage, and the fickle precarious situation of the club while this research was being implemented. Most of the time-period that this chapter is
concerned with is the phase preceding the transition of the club into the hands of the Hariri establishment. The chapter scrutinizes the ‘Hariri approach’ and illuminates the
underlying logic of the way the club later came to be managed – an issue I pursue further in later chapters.