Beirut explosion: The last bloody straw for a crumbling nation

The deadly Beirut blast might force its corrupt leaders to accept reform.

What’s left of a destroyed silo at the site of the explosion on the Beirut docks. Picture: AFP

This week’s Beirut blast levelled large parts of the port, devastated the city’s historic Christian quarter, carved a huge crater into the waterfront and sank a 7500-tonne cruise ship in the harbour. A massive shockwave, made visible by early evening humidity, was felt 250km away in Cyprus, knocking people to their knees in the Lebanon mountains as a mushroom cloud rose over the city.

Unsurprisingly, some in the blast area believed they were under atomic attack. If initial assessments prove accurate, the 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate involved would make this one of the largest conventional explosions in history, with a potential yield of 1.8 kilotons — well within the range of modern low-yield tactical nuclear weapons.

The two other largest non-nuclear blasts in history, the 1917 Halifax disaster in Canada and the 1947 Texas City explosion, both also involved ships in port and flattened large urban areas while killing hundreds. The Texas blast was caused by a burning cargo ship carrying 2100 tonnes of the same chemical — ammonium nitrate — as in the Beirut explosion, and generated eerily similar effects. A deadly 2015 blast in the Chinese port of Tianjin also involved hundreds of tonnes of ammonium nitrate, raising questions about zoning and safety in storage facilities that are often close to urban central business districts and residential areas. In Beirut, the dockside hangar holding the ammonium nitrate was right next door to a grain silo that stored almost all of Lebanon’s grain supply. That silo is now almost totally destroyed, even as worldwide rice and wheat prices continue to climb in the midst of shortages caused by COVID-19.

Despite initial suspicions, there is no evidence so far of terrorism or foreign military involvement in this incident; it seems rather to have been a tragic accident arising from a deadly mix of inefficiency and corruption. According to Lebanese and Cypriot sources, a Russian businessman in Cyprus tried to transport the huge shipment of ammonium nitrate from Georgia to an explosives factory in Mozambique in 2013. The leaky cargo ship carrying the shipment was impounded in Beirut due to unpaid fees, the businessman declared bankruptcy and abandoned the ship, and the deadly cargo was eventually transferred to a quayside hangar. It sat there for years, in administrative limbo, before detonating this week.

Several port officials, whose repeated pleas to move the cargo to safer sites were ignored by Lebanese authorities, have now been placed under house arrest by those same authorities. Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab has vowed to hold accountable anyone responsible for the tragedy. But, given that Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah controls Beirut’s port and airport, acts as a state within a state and ignores the elected government as it sees fit, few expect much accountability.

The Hezbollah angle adds complexity to the picture: the group is known to use the Port of Beirut for smuggling explosives and rockets, and has long sought to acquire stockpiles of ammonium nitrate, a key ingredient in improvised explosives. There is no evidence of Hezbollah involvement in the blast, but some Lebanese have questioned whether Hezbollah’s control of the port may have prevented UN maritime forces, responsible for searching shipping, from intervening in the unsafe storage arrangement. Still, anyone who knows Beirut recognises that corruption, incompetence and overlapping smuggling networks along the waterfront are the likeliest explanation for what happened here.

The tragedy triggered an outpouring of grief and rage across Lebanon, which was already experiencing mass unrest, a political crisis and huge street protests amid a coronavirus outbreak. Lebanon, in fact, is in the midst of its worst economic and financial emergency in a generation: foreign minister Nassif Hitti resigned the day before the blast, warning the country risked becoming a failed state. The government of Hassan Diab, which came into office just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Lebanon and has been struggling with a public health crisis, a collapsing economy and mass street protests, may well fall as a result. One key critique of his government has been that it is beholden to Lebanon’s “old guard” of financial, political and business elites — the same sclerotic establishment many Beirutis now blame for the destruction of so much of their beautiful city.

Like all Lebanese governments in recent memory, Diab’s administration has been burdened by the influence of Hezbollah, which controls the health ministry and key civil service appointments along with the port, the airport, vast areas of Beirut’s southern suburbs and rural districts across the country’s east and south. Independently of the Lebanese state, the group runs its own parallel security forces, police and intelligence service, administrative structure, media outlets and surveillance networks, including an extensive closed-circuit television and fibre-optic communications network funded with Iranian money. Hezbollah and Israel have been facing off across the country’s southern border in an increasingly intense confrontation over recent months, leading to a heavy cross-border exchange of fire just a few weeks ago. Though both sides backed down from the confrontation, security analysts have been warning of increased regional war risk for months.

A fireman helps a wounded man away from the blast site. Picture: AFP

This blast may or may not undermine Hezbollah’s credibility outside Beirut — the Lebanese street is more likely to blame incompetent bureaucrats and corrupt business leaders for the disaster. But more broadly, Hezbollah has been losing support inside Lebanon for years, since its decision in 2015 to intervene in the Syrian civil war. After portraying itself for decades as the defender of all Lebanese — regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation — against Israel, Hezbollah in 2015 revealed itself as what its critics always claimed it to be: the lapdog of its Iranian Revolutionary Guard paymasters and a loyal supporter of Tehran’s regional ambitions. Far from defending Lebanon, the group has instead sent thousands of fighters to Syria, losing hundreds killed and wounded supporting the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian and Russian forces that have deployed to fight on his side in the civil war.

The Assad regime has now almost completely won that war: the northern Syrian province of Idlib, which abuts Turkey, is the last remaining region to hold out against government forces and their Iranian, Russian and Hezbollah allies. Sources inside Idlib have been warning of increasing jihadist control in the province, and of impending humanitarian disaster as rebels from across the country flocked to Idlib and the regime made moves towards a final offensive. After five months of uneasy ceasefire following an agreement between Russia and Turkey (which controls part of the province after a large-scale military incursion in 2018), regime forces began building up on Idlib’s southern edge several weeks ago, bombarding the rebel enclave with artillery, while Russian jets have mounted multiple airstrikes there in recent days.

While Lebanon does not directly adjoin Idlib, Hezbollah fighters have been involved in all major regime offensives since 2015, and are highly likely to participate in this one too, if it goes ahead. For Lebanese at home, this is all part of a darkening regional and domestic picture: rising inflation, almost a third of the population now below the poverty line, 25 per cent unemployment, a government incapable of protecting people from the pandemic or dealing with institutionalised corruption and inequality, and now the increased risk of being drawn into a regional war with Israel or sucked further into the Syrian conflict. The fact that Hezbollah, rather than the elected Lebanese government, has driven this increased risk only adds to feelings that the group does not have Lebanon’s best interests at heart.

The blast has brought a rush of international sympathy and support for Lebanon, including from Israel, which has offered assistance through UN channels. French President Emmanuel Macron toured the blast site on Thursday, the first world leader to do so. He called for an international investigation and promised humanitarian assistance and help rebuilding the damaged city. A medical rescue team from Poland, along with American, Italian, Russian, Iranian and other international aid shipments and assistance teams have also arrived. For its part, Australia is sending $2m of aid, directed through relief organisations rather than the Lebanese government.

Lebanon has declared a two-week state of emergency, as rescue and recovery operations take place, the clean-up continues and Beirut residents search for missing loved ones or pick through the ruins of their homes. With at least 150 killed, 5000 wounded and more than 300,000 rendered homeless by the blast, according to Beirut Governor Marwan Abboud, that clean-up is likely to take some time.

It may also represent a turning point, a shock that forces key players to confront Lebanon’s problems, and an opportunity to initiate much-needed reforms and arrest the country’s slide into crisis. The International Monetary Fund on Friday called on Lebanon to “break the impasse” and agree to political and economic change in the wake of the explosion — the IMF’s representatives have been in intense negotiations with the government since May, with little progress. Lebanon has been seeking $30bn in recovery funds, but negotiations with the international community have stalled for weeks as different factions within the government failed to agree on the way forward. This week’s disaster, plus the possibility of international reconstruction assistance, may be the shock that helps unlock those negotiations. Macron emphasised that point during his visit, calling for structural reforms along with his offer of reconstruction money, and promising France would support a “new political pact” in the country.

However reassuring this might sound to outsiders, for many Hezbollah supporters, and others in Lebanon, this language can sound like a return to colonial-era rhetoric, with its echo of Lebanon’s 1943 National Pact, an agreement put in place under French tutelage and widely seen by Lebanese Shia as slanted in favour of Christian and Sunni elites. Unhappiness with the pact eventually gave rise to ethnic and religious militias, the emergence of organised Shia militancy in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Lebanese civil war and ultimately the creation of Hezbollah in 1982.

Almost everyone in Lebanon recognises the need for change, while disagreeing violently on what form it should take. In this context, any suggestion of French-led international intervention to impose reform would be an extremely hard pill to swallow, especially for Hezbollah, with de facto control over much of the country. But the Lebanese people have been signalling for many months, through mass protests on the streets of the capital and elsewhere, that they have had enough of corruption, incompetence and foreign meddling in their country — including by Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah — and the destruction of much of beautiful downtown Beirut will only make matters worse. Thus, in the wake of this week’s explosion, if they want to avoid an even worse calamity, Lebanese elites, including Hezbollah’s leadership, really have only two options: reform or collapse.