A year after the Beirut port blast, Lebanon's struggle and surrender


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August 03, 2021

Most Americans of a certain generation could remember where they were on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated. August 4, 2020, holds a similar place in Lebanon’s national psyche. The horrific explosion in Beirut port that killed more than 200 people, injured around 6,000 and rendered some 300,000 people homeless, was an incomparable trauma in a country already facing much pain.

Now, a year later, the victims of that outrage are nowhere nearer to knowing who was responsible. The inquiry has hit a wall. The two judges who headed the official investigation in succession have faced a political leadership that has tried to derail their efforts, refusing to lift the immunity of politicians and security officials whom the current investigator Tareq Bitar wants to question.

The port explosion confirmed in the bluntest way that Lebanon’s politicians are slowly killing their own people

Some leading politicians have since backtracked, calling for a lifting of immunity for all those on Mr Bitar’s list. But to most Lebanese, these are shallow statements to curry public favour, as they know well that that the truth is unlikely to ever come out.

There have been many theories of what happened. One of them, from the late Lokman Slim, a Shiite opposition figure who was assassinated in February, was that the ammonium nitrate that exploded was kept at the port for the Syrian government to prepare its barrel bombs at home. This was likely done with the complicity of Hezbollah and Russia. While this remains unproven, there is a suspicion locally that the hangar in which the compound ignited was under Hezbollah’s control.

Whatever the truth, the Lebanese authorities’ reluctance to allow the investigation to move forward has only reinforced a general suspicion that the country’s politicians and parties are hiding something. Certainly, many of them knew the ammonium nitrate had been stored at the port as of September 2013, and did nothing to push for its removal. This includes Lebanon's President Michel Aoun and the caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab.

For the families of the victims of the blast, the indifference of officials has been one more insult for a population already facing widespread poverty and an avoidable national collapse. The country’s political leadership is widely recognised as incompetent, except in the ways of crime. However, the port blast took this to another level of horror. Essentially, the authorities paid no attention to the fact that a time bomb was located near residential areas.

An FBI report dated October 7, 2020 but recently reported by Reuters, showed how close the Lebanese came to a holocaust. The report noted that of the 2,754 tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the port, only 552 tons had exploded. The word “only” may sound laughable in light of the severe damage, but given that the initial amount was over five times what blew up, the word is apt. Had the full complement of ammonium nitrate detonated, much of Beirut would have been flattened. The number of deaths would probably have been in the tens of thousands of people, if not the hundreds of thousands.

A year on from this disgrace, it remains difficult to understand why the Lebanese are not angrier. It seems amply clear that justice will not be served and that the innocents who died or who were injured on that day, whose houses were destroyed and whose lives were shattered, will never get compensation. In any normal country, a politician could not hope to go home after such a tragedy.

Sketches of victims of last year's port explosion in downtown Beirut. EPA
Sketches of victims of last year's port explosion in downtown Beirut. EPA


Yet, in Lebanon, even as the situation has continued to deteriorate to levels hitherto unseen in the country, even during the civil war, the population has remained relatively passive. Perhaps their fault is having lived for so long in a dysfunctional country that they are prepared to adapt to the worst.

Increasingly, however, the paralysing, mercenary disputes of the political class are causing death. Patients, including children, are dying because hospitals no longer have medicines to treat them. The absence of electricity means that people who require oxygen machines to survive cannot keep them on for long. A doctor recently reported that there were no pacemakers left in Lebanon.

The port explosion confirmed in the bluntest way that Lebanon’s politicians are slowly killing their own people, if not by action then by omission. In the face of such a pernicious reality, is adaptability even acceptable? Some people argue that those in power hold all the cards – the security forces, armed thugs and the repressive powers of the state. But in October 2019, they were all overwhelmed by a peaceful popular uprising that transcended sects and frightened the politicians.

Wishing for a revival of this movement may be too ambitious. But a year after the port explosion there is a sense that the Lebanese just don’t have it in them. They’re good at examining their predicament, but only once in a while do they rise up to try to resolve their problems – before soon abandoning everything. Those who lost family members on August 4 are alone in not surrendering, but all the signs are that their struggle will remain a long and lonely one.

Wounded people are evacuated as smoke rises from the massive explosion in Beirut, August 4, 2020. AP
Wounded people are evacuated as smoke rises from the massive explosion in Beirut, August 4, 2020. AP

Listen to the latest podcast on the Beirut blast here


 

 

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Abu Dhabi traffic facts

Drivers in Abu Dhabi spend 10 per cent longer in congested conditions than they would on a free-flowing road

The highest volume of traffic on the roads is found between 7am and 8am on a Sunday.

Travelling before 7am on a Sunday could save up to four hours per year on a 30-minute commute.

The day was the least congestion in Abu Dhabi in 2019 was Tuesday, August 13.

The highest levels of traffic were found on Sunday, November 10.

Drivers in Abu Dhabi lost 41 hours spent in traffic jams in rush hour during 2019

 

ELIO

Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Brad Garrett

Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina

Rating: 4/5

Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

Sole survivors
  • Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
  • George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
  • Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
  • Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
Updated: August 03, 2021, 2:06 PM`