Solidere saddled up as a Trojan Horse

Why has Beirut's downtown redevelopment led by the developer Solidere become such a failure?

Solidere, the company charged with rebuilding and managing the Beirut Central District, has been attracting some mighty bad press recently. Features in The Guardian and The Washington Post, as well as my column in this paper last week, all asked how an urban area, bombed to rubble in the opening years of the Lebanese civil war and transformed in the '90s with painstaking attention to detail and breathtaking expense into an exciting regional retail and tourism hub, could have become a busted flush.

Solidere’s mandate, according to its website, is as “land developer, real estate developer, property owner, property and services manager and operator”. The company also claims to be “establishing a solid base for prosperity in the city centre through its value-added activities”.

Only it isn’t. And to make matters worse, the company’s reputation is so shredded that, even if the country’s political, economic and social conditions improved, one wonders if the most controversial company in Lebanon’s post-war era has either the credibility or the skill sets to continue to manage the 2 million square metres of central Beirut, an area that is capable of inspiring raw emotion among many Lebanese.

Amid allegations of bullying tenants and landlords, and shamelessly exploiting its political connections, Solidere has surely lost the trust of not only the Lebanese public but also the local business community and, most crucially, foreign investors. Aloof and out of touch, there have also been rumours of embezzlement, corruption and undeserved fat cat salaries among the senior management, while the enduring accusation that the company was a Trojan horse to reinforce Lebanon’s Sunni credentials simply refuses to go away.

In April 2014, Solidere appointed Jamal Itani, the former head of the council for development and reconstruction (CDR), as its manager of operations, presumably because it sensed things weren’t going well. However, since his appointment there hasn’t been any “out with the old in with the new” feel-good moments; no apparent effort to allay concerns over the area’s decline and no hint of any strategic shift in direction. Can Solidere bring back business to the centre of Beirut, even if it means thinking outside the box and offering the first year rent-free? There is nothing to lose, the place is empty and no one is queuing up to lease property. The area, with its relatively good infrastructure, would be a great hub for start-ups and retail entrepreneurs. And it would restore a sense of normality to the area.

Lebanon has a knack of throwing up monsters. In the ‘90s, we all bought into the idea of Hizbollah and its brave resistance fighters who, in 2000, were able to rid South Lebanon of its Israeli occupiers. OK, we weren’t entirely happy when the party provoked a disastrous month-long war with Israel in 2006 and if we are being honest we were decidedly unchuffed when the party finally showed its true colours and staged an attempted coup two years later.

Today, the charade is over. We all know the party takes its orders from Tehran and we are not surprised that its soldiers are fighting in Syria to support the regime of the president Bashar Al Assad, a move that many observers believe has incurred the wrath of Jihadists group such as ISIS and the Nusra Front.

But back in the day when all the party did was take pot shots at Israel, I used to argue (some would say with alarming naivety) that the simple solution to all this was for the government to call time on the Resistance. Israel had gone and therefore it was a case of “thanks very much chaps but the job’s done. We’ll take over from here”. But of course we couldn’t because the state had, and still has, no authority over what it was essentially meant to be a national movement.

Solidere, thank goodness, is not the most powerful non-state army in the world, and as such, its failure — brought on either by a heady blend of incompetence and arrogance or by the unfortunate quirk of history, depending on how you look at it — must surely be easier to address.

Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.

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