Commentary | Between Loss and Anger: An Account of the Beirut Explosion
ITS’ own Amanda Löwenberg saw the destruction wrought by the Beirut explosion firsthand. This is her story.
It’s the Fourth of August. I’m in my friend’s family house in a village half an hour’s drive outside of Beirut where I have gone the night before after having been quarantined in my flat in Geitawi for ten days. This Tuesday I’ve been busy with online meetings and workshops all day and I’m tired. Around 5.30 pm I have a lie-down and scroll mindlessly through social media on my phone. A few minutes before 6 pm one of my closest friends sends me a video on WhatsApp, of a smoke pillar rising from a building in the Beirut port. It’s the view from her balcony in Mark Mikhael, directly facing the port. I don’t find it alarming, but I ask her ‘What’s going on?’. She replies with three messages a few minutes apart ‘Looks like a fire triggered explosions.’ ‘Dunno’ ‘Still going though, feels like Iran!’. Then the house where I’m sitting, 17 km in the mountains outside of the capital shakes. My phone is buzzing continuously as messages coming through are asking ‘what was that?’ ‘where did Israel strike?’ ‘are you ok?’. One minute it was a rocket in Bourj Hammoud. The next fireworks storage in the port. Then an Iranian shipment of weapons to Hezbollah that got attacked. I keep thinking about my friend who sent me the video. I text her, I call her. Nothing is going through. As we all feverishly try to get hold of all our friends and loved ones, videos of the explosion are being circulated and I’m starting to grasp the magnitude of what has happened. A voice in the back of my mind tells me that my friend is dead. I start asking people in Beirut to go look for her, but everybody is looking for somebody. I’m wondering if I will have to be the one to call her parents to tell them she is gone. It felt like hours, but I later checked my call history and it was only 40 minutes until I reached another friend who told me that he saw her on the street. Maybe she is alive, but maybe he was mistaken.
We drive back down to Beirut. Already when we reach the outskirts of the city, we see dented cars, broken glass and bent aluminum structures. A man in a white chef’s jacket is sitting by the side of the road bleeding from his head, the blood makes it look like he is wearing a red cape. Maybe she was badly injured and died after he saw her. Traffic is at a standstill. We get out of the car and run up the stairs by the highway, through the backstreets, to get to my house. In Geitawi it looks as though it’s been snowing, but it is all broken glass. Maybe he was too shocked to understand what was going on, maybe he didn’t actually see her. We reach my building and I run up the stairs, the shattered glass covering the floor causes each step to make a crunching sound. I dig for my keys in my bag as I reach the last flight of stairs but then I realize I don’t need keys because I no longer have doors. I grab my passport and cash, and for some reason my sneakers too.
We are rushing over to our friends’ house down the road, the road that runs between two of the city’s main hospitals. Passing Geitawi hospital, injured people are spilling out on the street, sitting on the sidewalk bleeding. The ambulances are lined up to enter the hospital and the sound of sirens constant, even though there is nowhere for them to go. The hospital is full, the doctors are operating on patients in the parking lot using the torch on their phones. As we run past the inferno, she calls me and finally I believe that she is alive.
I become obsessed with videos of the explosion. Of looking at all the injured and the dead and the suffering and the confusion. Even when I don’t check social media for more updates, which is almost constantly, I replay all the videos in my mind. I’m making a movie in my head; I try to edit all the videos I’ve seen together into one full-length film. I feel very little the first day, I just keep watching my movie and adding new morbid scenes when I find them. It is not until late afternoon 5 August when I make my way down to Mar Mikhael to help cleaning up the streets, that I wake up from my emotional coma. Suddenly I have a hard time breathing, I have a lump of tears stuck in my throat and a weight of sorrow on my chest. The neighborhood in which the youth of Lebanon got a chance to take a break from their worries of the future, from electricity cuts, from plans of emigration and just enjoy themselves, is deformed. The trees have changed shape. Cars are wrecked, buildings collapsed, restaurants where we use to eat gone, bars where we use to drink no longer recognizable.
‘It reminded me so much of the shelling in Syria when it happened’ my friend tells me, ‘all the birds flew away, and all the dogs started barking’. I think of all the people who have left their countries to look for safety and a new life here, and how everything was taken from them again. For a week I don’t have any appetite and I find it hard to talk. I don’t understand what others are saying, even in my mother tongue. Phone calls blend into each other and I can’t remember who I told what or sometimes even who I am speaking to while I’m blabbering down the line. I was not even in the city when it happened. It is not even my country. Why has it caused me to lose my languages?
On the Seventh of August, I finally get to see my friend who I thought was dead. We embrace and I cry for real for the first time, in her wrecked flat where we spent so many hours of cooking and gossiping and speculating about whether the economic situation actually can get worse and if there will be a new civil war. It still has walls, but the apartment across the hallway doesn’t: It has become a terrace. My friend is speaking in a strange voice, her eyes are empty, darting around the room. She is sitting on the floor with another friend who survived the blast, they are holding on to each other, shaking, and they barely look like people anymore. How will this whole city, this whole country, this whole generation ever recover from this trauma?
Those of us who are able go to the protests. The first day is violent, we are a bit on the side and see more and more people being carried out from the crowd. Some are bleeding from their eyes or heads, others probably just passed out from the tear gas. On the Eighth, over 700 people are injured. They are the same people who have been volunteering, sweeping the streets all day, and now they are being teargassed and shot at by the state, which so far had done nothing but play blame-games between political ranks. Two days later, my friends and I are running away from the army, through the fake-old alleys of the Downtown quarter. Nobody is interested in non-violence anymore, like they were committed to in the October protest; the people want revenge and they bring gallows and nooses to the protests.
On the Fourteenth, the day after the emergency law, which grants the army new powers to control the population, has been passed in parliament, I get woken up by aggressive banging and buzzing on my door. It’s 7 am. I open and three soldiers ask me if I’m alone, if I was sleeping and if there are other apartments above us in the building. I’m sure they’ve seen me running from them in the protests and that they have come to arrest me. But they leave and come back after an hour with an emergency food parcel and water. I think again about others in Beirut, those who had the army knock on their doors in the past, who had the army barge into their homes to abuse them and arrest them and how scary this must be for them. I think about all those who during the last ten days have poured out on the streets to clean up, repair, donate food, clothes and their blood to those affected and how this is the first effort from the government to contribute.
Foreign aid is flowing into the capital and the neighborhood I live in, once known for being host to mainly elderly Lebanese and Western expats, becomes host to a Qatari field hospital and Saudi-donated food distribution center. A bakery on my street becomes the field office for a major INGO and different people keep knocking on our doors to inspect damages and give us bread. Me and my friends talk about how this is how it started in Mali, how charities and aid are easy access points for foreign influence, for pushing agendas and ideologies.
The government steps down but it means next to nothing. An investigation is launched, but of course it is designed to avoid giving any responsibility to those who are actually responsible: the political class in Lebanon. Everything they do is empty promises and window dressing.
What we know until now is this: 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate was stored in Hangar 12 in the Beirut port, since 2013, when it arrived on the Moldovan flagged ‘Rohus’ cargo ship from Georgia. Supposedly, it was bound for Mozambique, even though Mozambique’s authorities have denied having any record of such a shipment being due for arrival. The captain was ordered to pick up additional cargo in Beirut, in order to fund the fee for passage through the Suez Canal. The new cargo proved too heavy for the vessel, but since the owner did not pay the port fees, the ship was confiscated along with its cargo by Lebanese authorities. In 2014, Rohus was deemed unseaworthy and the cargo was unloaded and placed in Hangar 12. The ship itself sank in the port in 2018 and the wreckage has been left there since.
Much is still unclear in terms of who was intended to make use of the ammonium nitrate, and for what purpose. That means that the responsibility for getting the chemicals to Beirut, is unknown. The intentions of getting the chemicals to Beirut are unknown. But regardless of this, the responsibility for the blast and its destruction is already obvious: It rests with the Lebanese government. They hold the responsibility for the explosion that is deemed to be one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in the history of mankind, the responsibility for over two hundred lost lives, thousands of wounded and for the hundreds of thousands now without a home. Unmeasurable phycological scars and emotional suffering have been cause by them. Loss of livelihood and will to live. It is their fault that teenage friends of 15-year-old Elias Khoury had to carry his casket to his grave. Because of them Karlen Karam had to bury her husband, her brother and her cousin on the same day. Their neglect, greed and incompetence meant that 3-year-old Alexandra Najjar didn’t even get to her first day in school. It’s their fault that Mehedi Hasan Roni has died in a foreign country and his family in Bangladesh never got to say goodbye.
They knew about the chemicals being stored in Hangar 12, and they were repeatedly alerted about the risk that this entailed by port customs officials. As late as in July, Lebanese security officials warned president Michel Aoun and then-Prime Minister Hassan Diab that the ammonium nitrate posed a security risk and could destroy the capital if it were to explode. They did nothing. Even after the fire had started in the port, caused by welders repairing one of the doors of the hangar, nothing was done. During the approximate 15 minutes it took for the fire to take hold until the second explosion, evacuations could have started, and some lives could have been saved. The fire fighters dispatched to distinguish the fire, who were told that it was only a storage of fireworks that had caught fire, need not have been sent to their death.
The corrupt political class will cling to their power, that much is certain. Apart from that, nobody knows where the country is headed. Chances are that the many foreign actors with interests in Lebanon will use this instability and uncertainty as an opportunity to gain influence, and that the rights and liberties of the people will be ignored yet again. Much can happen, and it can happen fast. To keep up with the developments, consider following these independent outlets:
Megaphone News:
Website: megaphone.news/
Instagram: @megaphonenews
Twitter: @megaphone_news
Daraj Media:
Website: daraj.com/en/
Instagram: @darajmediaenglish
Twitter: @Daraj_media
Or one of the following bright minds on Twitter:
@LunaSafwan
@timourazhari
@Nizhsn
@chehayebk
@LaraJBitar
As the news of Beirut is starting to fade away from international media, the financial support provided to the people will also start to wane. Needs are continuously pressing, especially considering that the blast is following an economic collapse and the effects of COVID-19. If you have the means, also consider donating to the following trustworthy organizations, which are working on emergency response as well as on meeting other needs in the long term:
Basmeh & Zeitooneh: https://www.basmeh-zeitooneh.org
Embrace Lebanon https://embracelebanon.org/
Impact Lebanon: https://www.impactlebanon.org/
Lebanese Red Cross: http://www.redcross.org.lb/
Edited by: Cameron Vaské
All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of The International Scholar or any other organization.
Banner photo credits:
Lebanon: the EU's response to the tragic explosions in Beirut by EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid, Flickr,
https://tinyurl.com/y3n862nf
