THE RELUCTANT POLITICIAN

Jamal Itani never wanted to be mayor of Beirut. But at the request of his country’s leaders, the successful executive with a master’s degree from Penn State set aside his career for a turn at public service. Today, he leads a proud historic city still dealing with the effects of regional turmoil, and he’s working on everything from attracting long-term investments to literally keeping the lights on in an effort to transform his hometown into a modern 21st century city nd a gateway between the West and the Middle East

Jamal Itani

RIGHT OUTSIDE THE MAYOR’S line, but the memory of a line that, between 1975 and 1990—during Lebanon’s long and bloody civil war-marked the sharp divide between Beirut’s east and west sides and separated various warring factions: Christians from Muslims, Sunni Muslims from Shia Muslims, Palestinian militia from Lebanese military. From either side of the Green Line, as the demarcation came to be known, bombs exploded and tanks fired, as opposing sides fought to gain control of and hold onto the heart of Beirut. By the end of the 15-year conflict, virtually every building in a city center that for 5,000 years had been a bustling hub of commerce and social interaction, and under which lie the remnants of the Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires, was destroyed.

Lebanon’s first post-civil war prime minister, the late Rafic Hariri, wanted to rebuild downtown Beirut to look exactly as it had before the war began. Hariri – one of Lebanon’s wealthiest businessmen—set up a public-private partnership, Solidere, into which he invested large sums of his own money. He hired accomplished engineers and architects from within Lebanon and across the globe to restore the city’s historic core from the ground up. It’s said that he even rolled up the sleeves of his designer shirts more than once to push rubble aside and help clear the way for the new downtown. Those efforts were not in vain: Beirut’s downtown—just a few minutes’ walk from the Mediterranean Sea—is nearly identical to its pre-civil war self. Its cobblestoned streets are lined with cafés, shops, office buildings, and private residences. On a perfectly sunny afternoon in early April, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, and the sun shines on snow-capped mountains in the distance. Small groups of fashionably dressed Lebanese—flawlessly made-up young women, some wearing lead scarves, young men sporting carefully curated five o’clock shadow—lirger over plates of mezze and tiny cups of strong coffee, smoking shisha, the traditional Middle Eastern pipe, and chatting quietly, their Arabic peppered with French and English. From Beirut’s main Mohammad Al-Amin mosque, the muezzin’s call to prayer rises in the warm spring breeze and mixes easily with the ringing of church bells. It was Hariri’s greatest wish, Jamal Itani ’85 MEng Eng says, that the rebuilding of downtown Beirut would erase the literal and figurative divisions created by the Green Line and result in a gathering space for all Beirutis, regardless of socioeconomic status or religion. “Hariri wanted to rebuild the heart of Beirut, to bring people from the east and west of the city back together, to encourage peace, to encourage living together,” Itani says.

Sempre Jamal Itani nel suo ufficio

Hariri was assassinated in 2005, and his dream has yet to be entirely fulfilled. For one reason or another, the heart of Beirut is quiet, virtually empty as afternoon turns to evening and evening to night. Some allege that the slickness of the city center, with its high-end European designer stores and pricey, exclusive restaurants, is off-putting to many Beirutis. But the specter of conflict might also be an issue, even if it has been close to 20 years since the civil war ended, and more than a decade since Lebanon’s 2006 war with Israel. Across the border in Syria, a war that began in 2011 still rages, and down south, Israel’s hardline prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has won a fifth term in office. Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite political party and militant group that’s funded by Iran, is a powerful entity—not only politically (in Lebanon’s 2018 parliamentary elections, Hezbollah gained control of the important health ministry), or because it has its own army, or even because it virtually controls the south of Lebanon, but in terms of what many Lebanese liken to an invisible militia of civilians that can be mobilized at a moment’s notice. Itani shrugs off both internal politics and regional geopolitics as just part and parcel of life in Lebanon. “It’s always a reality,” he says, “but we Lebanese, we live in the moment.

We enjoy life-we like good food, parties, fashion. We like to live.” As mayor of Beirut—a position he took on in 2016—Itani is working to further the Hariri legacy, to bring people from different parts of the city together, and to reinvigorate downtown. He wants Beirut’s citizens to enjoy their city-its many cafés and restaurants, its exquisite beaches, its carefully designed seafront. He’s keen to remake Beirut as both a tourist destination and business hub, to fashion it again as a “Paris of the Middle East,” as was the city’s moniker in the pre- civil war era for its cosmopolitan atmosphere, intellectual vibrancy, and a unique Middle Eastern flair that set it apart from both the West and the rest of the Arab world. Most of all, he wants Beirut to become a technologically smart, environmentally friendly, and ecologically sound 21st-century city. It’s an ambitious agenda, but one that Itani, from day one, has been doggedly working on. In the first three years of his tenure, he’s successfully addressed several items on his list: building sew- age lines and constructing sidewalks where they didn’t exist or were broken down; paving many of Beirut’s streets; rehabilitating gardens and planting new trees across the city; revamping old bridges; building new parking garages; and implementing new traffic management systems to ease congestion on city roads.

But there’s lots more to be done if Itani is to succeed where his predecessors didn’t, and that means tackling the most difficult issues from the inside out and finding solutions to the core problems that continue to make life difficult for Beirut’s citizens and hamper tourism. Trash, for example, has been a huge challenge since 2015, when a large landfill outside the city closed. Images of people dumping their garbage in the Beirut River were broadcast the world over, and even today, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, used clothes, and all manner of refuse pile up on street corners throughout the city. Many parts of Beirut don’t have 24/7 electricity, and water is in short supply; with an estimated 500,000 commuters driving into Beirut each day, traffic is a real issue. On the outskirts of Beirut there are close to 1.5 million Syrian refugees, whose presence is adding more pressure to highly strained infrastructure, and heightening tensions in the city. Itani claims he has solutions for these big issues. His plans include building a waste-to-energy plant using the most up-to-date and environmentally sound technology and easing the burden of commuter traffic by providing feeder buses into the city, building bike lanes across Beirut, and introducing elevated railway lines similar to those in Japan and Dubai. Itani also has the answers, he says, to Beirut’s electricity and water challenges: as of April, he was waiting on the Ministry of Power to approve a detailed plan that would deliver continuous electricity to all of Beirut in nine months. But in Lebanon, even the best-laid plans face the challenge of thick red tape. “Being mayor of Beirut is not like being mayor of New York, where you’re responsible for everything,” Itani says. “Even if I have the solutions for Beirut’s problems, which I do, I can’t implement them without negotiating with different ministries.” And then there are the people of Beirut themselves: Despite all that he’s done thus far, Itani has yet to convince a cynical, older generation of Beirutis-still weary from the war and distrustful of politicians-and a younger demographic born long after Beirut’s halcyon days, that he can find solutions to the bigger problems.

ITANI DID NOT WANT TO be mayor of Beirut. His first answer was “no, thank you” when he was approached directly by Lebanon’s current prime minister, Saad Hariri, to run in the 2016 municipal elections. He had said the same thing to Saad’s father, Rafic Hariri, when the latter approached Itani in 1999 to become president of the Council for Development and Reconstruction, a governmental organization that has played a major role in rebuilding Lebanon’s damaged infrastructure. Politics held no interest for Itani, a Beirut native who had enjoyed a long and prosperous career in the private sector—a career that began almost immediately after he finished his master’s in civil engineering at Penn State (he says he was drawn by the program’s strong international reputation) and returned to a war-torn Beirut in 1985. “A friend told me about a vacancy in Saudi Arabia for a transportation engineer for a consulting firm,” he says. “So I went to the newspaper archives and looked up the ad —that’s how you did things back then— found a phone number, and called it. The guy I spoke to said he had interviewed 70 people, but no one had a master’s from Penn State with a focus on transportation. He said, ‘Send me your passport so I can get your visa for Saudi Arabia-you’re hired.'” Within a week, Itani was in Riyadh, putting his education to use by designing highways and bridges, upgrading traffic signals, and modernizing roads in the Saudi capital. His talents were soon spotted by a Saudi prince, who hired Itani to help him select sites for gas stations (“we built around 70 in the kingdom,” he says) and later tasked him with bringing American fast food to Saudi Arabia. Itani inked deals with Pizza Hut and Wendy’s-he even spent time in Columbus, Ohio, the chain’s birthplace, flipping burgers and making fries, in an effort to learn every aspect of the business-and then Taco Bell and Popeye’s Chicken. After a stint in Dubai, he was asked by Wendy’s to become its regional director for Europe and the Middle East. He remained in Dubai and in that position until 1999, when a new offer from Pepsi-Cola came his way: The company wanted Itani as its vice president for the Middle East and North Africa, based in Beirut. He’d barely been in the job six months when the word came from Rafic Hariri-not once, but twice—asking that Itani become president of the Council for Reconstruction and Development. He couldn’t refuse the prime minister twice, and yet Itani insists that ultimately, it wasn’t about orders coming from the highest echelon of power that led him to say ‘yes’ to Hariri in 1999: He accepted the job because of his love for Beirut.

Unlike many other upper-class Lebanese families, the Itanis never left Beirut during the civil war. “Ours is an old family with very strong roots here,” Itani says. “My father had a real estate business, he was involved in agriculture, he owned gardens in the south of Lebanon—he would never leave Beirut.

I was a kid when the war broke out, and I remember fighting erupting at night. We’d be still in the house, wait for it to stop, then move to another room. Our house was bombed and destroyed—we were lucky, of course, that we had other houses in the mountains outside Beirut, and we could go there. But still, times were tough. We didn’t have gasoline; we didn’t have electricity. We used to study with candlelight.” Though Itani did leave Lebanon to study in the U.S. (he has an undergraduate degree in civil engineering from George Washington University) and after getting his master’s at Penn State to work in Saudi Arabia, he alway wanted to come home, says his daughter Lyne, a former investment banker in Dubai who’s recently moved back to Beirut.

“My father deeply loves Beirut and he instilled that love in us,” she says. “He didn’t want to become mayor, but he’s so keen to do things for the city, and to continue the legacy of Hariri.”

Hariri was assassinated in February 2005 when over 2,000 pounds of TNT were detonated near his motorcade, killing 21 people and injuring 200. Four Hezbollah members were indicted for the assassination and are currently being tried by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which has seats in Beirut and the Netherlands and will reportedly reveal its verdict some time this year. Itani first met Hariri years ago while working in Saudi Arabia, and the two enjoyed a close relationship. “The time I spent working for the Council of Reconstruction and Development were the best years, he says, animatedly describing the numerous projects in which he played a role, including rebuilding infrastructures in parts of Beirut that had been damaged during the civil war and later by Israeli bombs, and building new schools.

After Hariri’s assassination, Itani moved to Amman, Jordan, where until 2009 he was a part of the Abdali Project aimed at developing Amman’s new downtown. He then returned to Saudi Arabia and stayed there till 2014, when he returned to Beirut as general manager of Solidere, the company set up by Hariri in the early 1990s. And in 2015, Saad Hariri approached Itani with the request that he become mayor.

Although he was Hariri’s hand-picked candidate, Itani still put together a campaign, pounded the streets of Beirut (“I must have lost around 12 pounds in that time,” he jokes), and met people-rich, poor, old, young, Christians, Muslims, Druze-face-to-face, to convince them to vote for him. He won the May 2016 municipal elections with a two-thirds majority that secured him a six-year term as mayor.

Squarcio di una certa Beirut

IN MANY WAYS, ITANI IS the right man for the job. He is well connected in the right places and with the right parties-Middle Eastern and European banks; development funds from the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait; the Islamic Development Bank; private individuals of high net worth— as a result of the many years he spent in the private sector. In his time as president of the Council for Reconstruction and Development, he cultivated relationships with the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program. He knows how public/private partner- ships operate. He’s worked with architects and engineers from across the globe, and he’s up on the latest technologies and how they can be used to remedy Beirut’s infrastructure challenges. He admits to some disappointment with the slow progress on the bigger issues, despite the plans he’s put together and presented to various government entities in the three years since he took office, but he has not given up.

He’s still visiting ministers in their offices, cultivating investors, and walking around Beirut to talk to people, listen to them pick their bones of contention, and outline his ideas.

When asked what item remaining on his list he’d like to see come to fruition by the end of his term in 2022, Itani throws up his hands with a “Yalla, all of them—I can’t pick just one.” But if he really is forced to pick, he would choose the trash. “When I was elected, I promised people that we’d never repeat the scene where pallets of waste were put into the Beirut River for the world to see,” he says. “T appointed the UNDP and one of the best-known consultants from Denmark to find the best independent and environmentally sound solution for Beirut without relying on any other region of Lebanon. Both entities came up with the same result: Reduce the waste, reuse through recycling, and the remainder to be converted into energy.” On the front end, that means simple measures like eliminating plastic shopping bags (the municipality has produced reusable, environmentally friendly shopping bags to distribute across the city) and installing containers around Beirut for people to sort their trash from their recyclables at the source. Itani has also built underground bins into which trucks collecting rubbish from street corners can simply offload, and put in place an underground incineration system. The final stage of the process will convert the waste to energy using the same technology that’s been implemented in European cities like Geneva, Paris, Rome, and Monaco over the past 50 years. After a lengthy pre-selection process led by the UNDP, Itani has selected four consortia, each led by a global company with experience in waste-to-energy conversion, and they will shortly bid on a tender that the city is launching. The winner will design, build, finance, operate, and then transfer back to the city a conversion plant.

But there’s no telling when that plant will become a reality: Many Beirutis are opposed to the incineration and waste conversion plans, fearing a health hazard in the making—a source of frustration to Itani, who acknowledges, “We have a lot to do to prove to the public that we will deliver a state-of-the-art project that will be managed by qualified companies.” It’s safe to say that Itani will keep repeating the same, even as he moves forward on other projects, including introducing LED streetlights across

Beirut, automating the processes of the city so residents can pay their bills online, and the project dearest to his heart: developing the Corniche, Beirut’s seafront. On his laptop he has blue- prints of how he intends to extend the seafront promenade, build a bicycle lane by the water, and a pedestrian path lined with kiosks and cafes. He wants to plant trees, build a piazza and an amphitheater. “My dream is to have Andrea Bocelli play there,” he says. His plans beg the question: Will Itani seek a second term as mayor in the 2022 municipal elections? He hesitates, glances toward the open window behind him, and the sound of the muezzin’s call to the evening prayer.

“Every job I’ve done just came my way, and so did this one,” he says. “It is an honor to serve as mayor, and I suppose in the latter part of my professional life, part of me wanted to leave something behind that would carry my name. But no, I won’t run again. “Frankly,” he continues, “most of these things—the waste-to-energy plan, for example—I’m not going to be here when they’re done. But I think that I will be the one who will have found solutions for Beirut, and if there’s even one thing that people can point to in the future and say ‘Itani did that, then it will be my reward.”