A catastrophic year in Beirut

Source: Marten Bjork

Fires 

In mid-October 2019, Lebanon started to burn. Literally.

Hundreds of forest fires — the worst in decades — broke out in the western areas of the country, sweeping plumes of smoke towards Beirut and the old city of Sidon. The problem was not so much the fires, per se, but the government’s incapacity to properly quench them. Three Sikorsky S-70 firefighting helicopters hadn’t been maintained in years by the Ministry of Interior, so they were unusable. In the end, it was assistance from Cyprus, Jordan, Italy and Greece that helped put the fires out.

But in Lebanon, the wildfire-prone country where my maternal family resides, the solution should have come from Beirut, with the available equipment and materials stationed at the most at-risk areas, and a plan of action ready for immediate roll-out. Close to 3,000 acres of precious land were claimed — not to mention damages, personal injuries and a firefighter’s life. The origin of the fires did not fall on Beirut, but the inability to act appropriately did; namely, on its politicians.

This was crisis number one.

October protests 

The fires were symptomatic of “leaders’ corruption, dysfunction and indifference”, wrote famed author Joumana Haddad in The New York Times. But by the end of the month, it wasn’t just about the blazes. An absurd proposition to place a tax on tobacco, petrol, and especially WhatsApp voice calls – of $6 per month – led to thousands of people taking to the streets, culminating in the thawra, or the ‘revolution’, the largest anti-government protest in over a decade, led by grassroots activists.

When I went to Beirut for Christmas and met some of the revolution’s leaders, one of them explained the significance of the WhatsApp tax proposition: “Free WhatsApp is what connects us. If you take that away from us you are limiting our ability to speak, our capacity to communicate with each other. You are taking the only thing we have left.” This was just the latest insult to a population crippled by a debt to GDP ratio of 150% (the third highest in the world), youth unemployment of 37% and more than one in four people living below the poverty line. And so both rich and poor, young and old, Muslims and Christians, demonstrated for days and weeks, eventually congregating around dozens of tents erected in Martyr’s Square. Some of the protests turned violent, resulting in shattered windows and graffiti splashed on walls, including on those of the UN’s regional headquarters in Riyadh el-Solh, where I worked.

This was crisis number two. 

Devaluation of the Lebanese Lira 

When I left Lebanon in August 2019, the conversion rate from dollars to liras had been stable for years, at $1 = 1,500 LL. It really did not matter what currency one paid in, although in hindsight the Central Bank’s conversion rate — which some have accused of creating a Ponzi scheme — was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. When I returned in late December, the Lebanese Lira had devalued to around 2,000 LL to the dollar, and people were already very concerned.

Now, $1 is worth close to 8,000 LL in the black market. No transfers abroad are allowed, while citizens wanting to get cash out in dollars are limited to $100 per week. People’s salaries are being paid in liras, resulting in pay cuts of more than half of their original value. Basic foodstuffs and commodities have become more expensive. No one is hiring, worsening overall unemployment, which before the currency crisis already stood at 25%. One Forbes article has called it the “worst economic crisis in modern history.” Residents there agree.

Back in May, one aunt told me over the phone that “this is worse than the Civil War [1975-1990]. At least during that time the banks were working, even if bombs were falling. Now there is nothing left. People are dying of hunger.” To get a sense of how badly things are going, last month Lebanon’s most prestigious hospital, the American University of Beirut Medical Centre, fired around 850 employees in the nursing and administrative departments citing financial difficulties. In the middle of a global pandemic. 

This was crisis number three.

Covid-19 and the humanitarian crisis

With eyes on Iran and developments in other Mediterranean countries, the government reacted surprisingly quickly. By the end of March, and with fewer than 400 cases, the country was in partial lockdown. Additional curfews followed as cases grew. Compared to how things have developed elsewhere, Lebanon has done well, with around 7,000 cases and less than 100 deaths to date. But this success hangs by a thread. It is sustained by international organisations and a handful of civil societies that are at the frontlines in those places the government does not go: refugee camps and other poor neighbourhoods like the Shatila camps, areas bereft of any governmental medical assistance that have long been in dire need of humanitarian aid. 

In the spring I spoke to Dr. Kamel Mohanna, founder of Amel Association International, a leading, non-sectarian Lebanese NGO created in 1979 that has since operated field hospitals, maternity wards and development centres all over the country. Dr. Kamel explained how Amel is detecting Covid-19 cases and organising spaces for isolation in collaboration with the UNHCR, private hospitals in the Beqaa region and some public ones in Beirut. Amel’s mobile health units (MHUs) regularly organise visits in the most at-risk areas of the city to identify suspicious cases, then physicians take swabs and personally transport them back to the University of St. Joseph Hospital. “When you work in the humanitarian sector, you prepare yourself for the worst,” Dr. Kamel noted. “Up until now we have succeeded in managing this virus. Our worry is an explosion in cases.”

That has not happened – yet. 

According to the UNHCR, Beirut is home to almost one quarter of the 800,000 registered Syrian refugees in the country, in addition to most of the 200,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. The country hosts around 1.5 million Syrian refugees and has the most refugees per capita in the world, a title it has held consistently since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. In addition, it hosts over 250,000 migrant domestic workers; most of them women who often live in poverty, if not residing with their employees. A coronavirus outbreak in any one of these neighbourhoods could be disastrous. If Covid-19 has been an ugly reminder of the inequalities embedded in societies all over the world, nowhere will this become more obvious than in Lebanon. For if and when the pandemic gets out of hand, it will become the crisis of the neglected, urban poor. 

This was crisis number four.

August Explosions

The second explosion that rocked the capital last week was the third greatest explosion recorded in human history after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, felt all the way in Cyprus. The blast of 2,750 unsecured tons of ammonium nitrate has caused the known deaths of more than 170 people, injured 6,000 others, destroyed or damaged 300,000 households and generated an estimated 5 to 10 billion dollars in damages. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for, while thousands more are currently displaced. The loss of life is incomprehensible. The task ahead to re-build and recover is insurmountable.

Beyond the feelings of shock and disbelief, people are understandably furious; it appears officials knew about the explosive material stored next to residential areas six years earlier, and did nothing about it. To add insult to injury the explosion hit hardest in the strongest economic areas of the city – Gemmayzeh, Achrafiyeh and Downtown Beirut, home to the trendy bars and restaurants, the luxury shops and malls, the areas tourists go to when they only have three days to visit. These neighbourhoods are either partially or completely destroyed, cemented in ash. With the port gone, questions remain as to how the country can offer its people basic commodities like oil and grain; 80% of its products are imported. 

This was the final crisis.

Beirut’s catastrophic year 

In the words of a dear cousin of mine, ma fi balad: “there is no country left”. I interpret this in the same way I look at the apocalyptic explosion that mushroomed out of the capital’s port: the latest blow, just the very tip of a melting iceberg that has been drowning under the weight of political chaos, corruption and sectarianism in this small, beautiful country. 

These crises can be as seen as symptomatic of the disconnect between the country’s leaders and its people, the rift between the ruling elite and the working middle class, the complete disregard for the urban poor. These fractures have all led to the kind of non-inclusive politics and extractive economic systems that feature centre stage in Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s opus Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. This is not to say that other issues have not factored into these crises, such as the realities of geo-politics, the historical remnants of French colonial rule, or the relative scarcity of natural resources. But the fact that the ‘Paris of the Middle East’ still suffers from daily electricity shortages has little to do with any of these. 

When French President Emmanuel Macron visited the capital last week and proposed “a new political pact” for the country, I was initially sceptical, reminiscent as those words were of colonial ideas of wealthier nations coming to the aid of other ‘helpless’ ones. But in a country that has been marred in a myriad of crises —mostly of its leaders’ making — and in a city that has lived through one of its most catastrophic years, Macron’s words may be the healing balm its people need.  With the government now dissolved, new protests in the streets and with renewed acts of solidarity that are so unique to the Lebanese people, perhaps some of these wrongs may finally be corrected.

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Alexia Faus Onbargi is the Europe and MENA Coordinator at Oxford Urbanists. Originally from Barcelona, she is studying towards an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Oxford, and is a fellow of the ‘La Caixa’ Foundation (2019-2021). She has been published by the United Nations in Beirut, the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, and the Cambridge-based publication Manara Magazine.