Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister killed by a car bomb in Beirut on Monday, believed the Lebanese could recover from civil war and foreign invasion through emulating their forebears, the Phoenicians, the great traders of the ancient world.

Doing business, Mr Hariri believed, would make the Lebanese forget their sectarian differences, and the five governments he led after 1992 set out to encourage investment in Lebanon's lightly regulated free-market economy.