Beirut – When the Pain Gets Personal

It was 1959 when my mom, working at the US Department of State in Washington, DC, married an American career foreign service officer. His next post was in a distant, exotic land that I knew nothing about: Beirut, Lebanon. I turned 13 on the nasty Atlantic crossing, so stormy that my bunk had to be rolled up slightly to keep me from rolling onto the floor. Until we hit Cadiz, Spain, I was mostly very seasick. The Mediterranean crossing was much more tolerable, with fascinating stops in Cadiz, Barcelona, Marseilles and Naples before the small ocean liner finally pulled into Beirut harbor. I had never been outside the United States before. The smells of bread baking, the cries of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, and my mother’s admonition that everything in Lebanon was a negotiation, made a strange land appear even stranger. 

Lebanon had a substantial Christian population (Maronite Catholics), Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a Druze community and even a small Jewish section downtown. That was then. January 1960. Arabic, French and a sprinkling of English punctuated one of the most beautiful cities on the Mediterranean. Old buildings with red tiled roofs sat side-by-side with modern apartment buildings, shopping centers and a state-of-the-art local cinema. My new school was located on the Corniche, a perfectly landscaped road in the south side of the city with magnificent vistas, particularly the famous Pidgeon Rocks reminiscent of Cabo, Mexico. Snow capped mountains hovered in the background. I fell in love with that city and its people. 

I have never been treated better by any peoples on earth than I was by the friendly, accommodating and generous people of Lebanon. When my Explorer post opted for camping in the hills, even the poorest homes opened their doors, inviting us in for a meal or at least that thick coffee so typical of the region. Lebanon was also modern, progressive; there was virtually no real poverty… laughter was everywhere. Such a stark contrast to neighboring Syria, where dour met drab, when repression dwelled with hopelessness. 

When I left for college in 1964, I was as sad as I was excited. I actually thought I might have to move back to Lebanon someday, another American ex-pat comfortable in a Lebanese lifestyle. But over the years, Lebanon unraveled. Heavy and unsubtle pressure from Syria ultimately resulted in a civil war where right-wing Christians and various Muslim factions squared off. Explosions and assassinations became common. Lebanon has a strange form of government where different leadership positions must be filled by followers of defined faiths. Confessionalism. President had to be a Christian. Prime minister Sunni. Speaker of the House Shiite. Etc. Factionalism defined this fragile nation. 

Iran backed a nascent Hezbollah (Shiite) movement that eventually became the predominant party. Rich Christian Lebanese abandoned the country in droves, becoming major regional players, mostly in the Emirates, and also relocating in Paris, all across the US and even in Latin America. Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim, is Lebanese. Even wealthier Sunnis fled. The war raged on and off for over a decade. Lebanon began to collapse. Recently, the country could not even hold an election for President, and uncollected garbage lined 11 miles of highway. The ISIS/Syrian civil war refugees pouring out of Syria slowly became 20% of the population. Social services imploded. The currency collapsed into untenable inflation. Was Lebanon over? 

Rumors tell us that a Russian ship, carrying a huge shipment of ammonium nitrate, was unwilling to pay port fee. The ship and the cargo were seized by authorities. “According to the Lebanese government, about 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer was stored in a warehouse on the Beirut waterfront and caught fire, later exploding. The fertilizer arrived in the city more than six years ago aboard a Russian-owned cargo ship that made an unscheduled stop in the city. Lebanese port officials said they made several requests to the courts to have the stockpile removed, but got no response… 

“Ammonium nitrate is used in fertilizer and in the mining industry as an explosive to blast rock and move mounds of earth. It has some military applications as well… It has been the cause of previous industrial accidents, and an ingredient in acts of terrorism as well. It was used by white supremacists to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Okla. in 1995.” New York Times, August 6th. Everybody knew that warehouse was a mega-accident waiting to happen, but Lebanon did not have the resources to deal with that risk. 

Whether the fire in a neighboring warehouse was ignited by terrorists or was just an accidental fire, when those flames hit the Beirut port warehouse where the ammonium nitrate was stored, the resulting explosion (August 4th) mirrored our vision of a nuclear bomb detonating. Short of all out war, it’s hard to believe that anything worse could have hit this beleaguered nation. 

Abby Sewell, writing for the August 6th Los Angeles Times, describes the devastation and the events that preceded it: “Beirut had begun to resemble the scene of a dystopian film. Thanks to a deepening economic and currency crisis that has led to shortages of essential items including fuel, the streetlights were off. 

“With government-provided electricity coming sometimes only a couple of hours a day, diesel generators were running nearly nonstop, coating the city in a perpetual haze of smog. The number of beggars on the street — many of them children — had multiplied… The only thing that could make the situation worse, many thought, was another war. 

“But the blast that came, in the end, was, according to all official accounts, neither a terrorist attack nor an Israeli strike. Rather, it was the result of an apparently accidental fire that detonated a stockpile of confiscated ammonium nitrate that had been stored in a hangar in the Beirut port for years — the result, as many saw it, of the same negligence by those in power that had led to the economic crash. 

“‘Now came this massive crisis — because everything else that happened before it wasn’t enough. Our state is doing everything it can to kill us,’ said Gisele Nader, a volunteer with Dafa Campaign, an initiative that was distributing food, water, clothing and other necessities Wednesday [8/5] to families whose homes were damaged in the blast… ‘I was here throughout the war, but I’ve never seen the country so damaged,’ Nader said. 

“And thanks to the preexisting economic crisis, it may now be much harder for Lebanon to bounce back from the after-effects of the explosion, which killed more than 100 people, injured an estimated 4,000, left as many as 300,000 people homeless and caused an estimated $3 billion in damage… As of Wednesday, civil defense volunteers were still combing through rubble looking for the bodies of the missing, while family members were desperately making the rounds of hospitals and posting pictures on an Instagram page set up to help Beirutis find missing loved ones. 

“‘If this incident, this criminal incident, happened many years back I would tell you, it’s problematic, but we can survive,’ said Jad Chaaban, a Lebanese economist and activist. ‘But right now, this is a question of Beirut becoming a failed city and a completely broken city if people do not mobilize very quickly and support it.’ 

“The fact that the destruction comes on top of a currency crisis means that many property owners will probably not be able to access the dollars needed to pay for imported reconstruction supplies. Since September, the price of the dollar has risen from its officially fixed rate of around 1,500 lira to a black-market rate that is currently around 8,000. 

“As a result, many Beirut residents are now facing the prospect of months sleeping in apartments with broken windows. Tony Naqour, an insurance office employee who lives in the heavily damaged area of Gemmayze, a largely Christian neighborhood filled with trendy bars and restaurants that was one of the areas hardest hit by the explosion, had joined some young men from the area to help clean the rubble from a neighborhood soccer club Wednesday… 

“While the international aid will help offset the costs of responding to the disaster, Chaaban said, it will not be enough to help the country out of its underlying economic problems. Lebanon has sought $10 billion in assistance from the International Monetary Fund, but talks have stalled, and other potential donors have been reluctant to offer aid without an IMF deal or concrete movement on economic reforms… Chaaban said that while the new aid is welcome, ‘whatever aid we get now is new aid on things that are newly destroyed. This will not help us get back our electricity, our environment, our basic infrastructure, for which we needed support in the beginning.’ 

“For many Lebanese, it’s hard to see a way out of the morass. Asked how he sees the future of the country, Naqour demurred… ‘I can’t tell you what’s the future ahead of us,’ he said, turning to the other men around him, at work sorting through debris. ‘What do you think, guys? What’s the future of the country? Does anyone have an answer?’… No one did.” 

For all the hopelessness, Lebanese humanity rose fast. All that factionalism seemed to vaporize as individuals leapt to help others, opening their homes, providing what food they could… without asking about political or religious affiliation. There is so much need, so much pain in the world, it’s hard to know where to begin to help right the wrongs. Local Lebanese Americans are organizing aid, but given the current trend towards American isolationism, don’t expect much from the Trump administration… except perhaps to find people to blame. Individual Americans can still help!

            I’m Peter Dekom, and Beirut was my home for almost four years… and when I learned about this tragedy, I cried.