A year after the massive explosion in Beirut, protesters took to the streets on Wednesday on the blast’s anniversary. They want answers.
However, answers will not be forthcoming.
In Lebanon, the state has largely broken down. There are no laws or rules for the powerful. There is no accountability.
We’ve seen this before in Lebanon. In February 2005, its prime minister, Rafik Hariri, was killed in Beirut in a targeted assassination using a massive bomb that killed 21 others. No one was charged. It took a UN-backed tribunal until 2020 to charge and convict one person for the attack.
“Salim Ayyash participated in an act of terrorism that caused mass murder,” said presiding Judge David Re. “His role... was vital to the success of the attack.”
Ayyash, a member of Hezbollah, was never arrested and will serve no time, despite the sentence.
Basic details about the massive explosion are still not known. Like with the murder of Hariri, we will probably never know, and anyone who gets too close to knowing will be killed.
More than 200 people were killed, but no one is at fault. Not the owners of the ammonium nitrate that was left at the port, not the authorities who oversaw its storage and the detention of the material, and not the people who it was destined for or the group that had access to the warehouses and took some of the material.
We know that some of the ammonium nitrate was being taken because an FBI report says that the amount that actually exploded last year was about one-fifth of what had been off-loaded from a ship in 2013, and was supposed to be stored at the harbor.
“As the first anniversary approaches on August 4, major questions remain unanswered, including how a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate – which can be used to make fertilizer or bombs – was left unsafely stored in a capital city for years,” Reuters notes.
The blast was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded, reports say.
The “fertilizer” cover is often used to try to explain how all this dangerous material was being stored at the port. But ammonium nitrate is used in explosives. It is not exactly a secret. The recent Netflix show Big Timber has a scene in which 80 lbs. (36 kg.) of ammonium nitrate is used to help blast a road.
“The FBI’s October 7, 2020, report, which was seen by Reuters this week, estimates around 552 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded that day, much less than the 2,754 tons that arrived on a Russian-leased cargo ship in 2013,” a recent report says.
Reports have pointed fingers at government officials for responsibility in this mass killing. But the officials won’t be charged, because there is no mechanism to charge them in Lebanon.
There are also questions about whether the dangerous material was really destined for Mozambique, as reports claimed, or whether it was destined for Lebanon and Syria, for use by groups like Hezbollah.
Was the “Mozambique” destination sort of like the “fertilizer” description, a way of covering up what was happening?
Many voices around the world are mourning a year after the mass killing. “A year after the terrible port explosion in the capital, Beirut, I appeal to the international community to offer Lebanon concrete assistance in undertaking a journey of ‘resurrection,’ so that Lebanon may once more be a message of peace and fraternity,” the pope wrote.
Many of the people who took to the streets in Lebanon on the year anniversary chanted against the role of Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Posters put up in the city note that “you’ve lost your humanity,” although it is unclear who “you” is.
Tragic stories have emerged of the human toll, such as a man who continues to talk to a woman lost in the disaster.
Demonstrators in Beirut on Wednesday night were met with tear gas, and some were injured. They called for parliament to be dissolved.
Trey Yingst, reporting for Fox News in Beirut, described the clashes with the police. He said the protesters demanded that laws protecting those in power be removed so that people could be held accountable. He told viewers there was a massive demonstration.
Meanwhile, in southern Lebanon, a group, likely given a green light by Hezbollah, fired rockets into Israel, leading to Israeli responses that included artillery and an airstrike.
It is not clear whether the rocket attack is linked to attempts to distract from the protests in Beirut, or is linked to an attack on a ship off Oman last week, but the overall picture is clear: Lebanon has little control over what happens inside its borders.
HEZBOLLAH CONTROLS much of Lebanon. Hezbollah is so powerful today, and Lebanon so weak and impoverished by economic crises and other problems, that Lebanon has become a province within Hezbollahstan.
What that means is that when we speak of Lebanon and its inability to hold anyone accountable, this is largely a result of having the state hollowed out by Iran over the years. Countries that once had a larger role in Lebanon, such as Saudi Arabia and France, have pulled back. Lebanon’s corrupt and sectarian elite moved its money abroad. The country is tens of billions in debt. Hezbollah has slowly swallowed up industries, and Hezbollah conducts foreign policy, sending forces to fight in Syria, for instance. The situation only gets worse by the day.
Twenty years ago Israel left southern Lebanon. Hezbollah had used the excuse of Israel’s “occupation” to claim it needed to keep weapons after the Taif Agreement ended the Lebanese Civil War in 1989. The agreement was supposed to empower Sunnis and Shi’ites at the expense, a bit, of the Christians in Lebanon, such that the Christian-held presidency was weakened. But it didn’t matter, because in the long run Hezbollah remained, and launched a war on Israel in 2006. In 2008 Hezbollah flooded the streets of Beirut during clashes with the opposition. The protesters, who in the wake of the Hariri killing briefly enjoyed success, were pushed aside. Hezbollah next obtained a stranglehold over the presidency, putting Michel Aoun in power.
The ammonium nitrate and bankruptcy of Lebanon were only the end result of this process. Lebanon still lacks a government. Saad Hariri abandoned efforts to form a government three weeks ago. France and other countries that have sought to prop up Lebanon and keep things moving forward have been frustrated.
Natural disasters and mistakes happen. The explosion could be compared to the collapse of the condo tower in Miami in the US. But the major difference is that in Lebanon, there is a sense of more nefarious channels at work.
Consider the murders of prominent critics of Hezbollah and other intellectuals and politicians in 2005 and after. The author Samir Kassir, for instance, was killed. Lokman Slim was killed in February. That’s how Hezbollah does things. Maj. Wissam Eid of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces Information Branch, who helped identify the Hezbollah phone network used in the murder of Hariri, was killed by a bomb in 2008.
It was the attempts to curtail Hezbollah’s phone network that led to clashes in Beirut in 2008, in which Hezbollah showed its true power and control of the country. Hezbollah had installed a private noncommercial fiber-optic land-line telephone network to provide secure communications for its members. Imagine a political party in any other country that also has an armed militia and has its own phone company only for its members. That is what Hezbollah has.
The international community has largely ignored the role of Hezbollah, sometimes not even mentioning it in reports on Lebanon, because to acknowledge its true power, the degree to which it is more powerful than the state, and Lebanon a subcontractor of Hezbollah, an appendage, is to admit that largesse provided to Lebanon largely exists to prop up Iran’s proxy and help it play a role in Syria and Iraq.
Lebanon is like an offshore subsidiary of Iran, and the pretense that Lebanon exists as a country is helpful to Iran because it can use it to get around sanctions, to move weapons, to threaten Israel, and to launder money and even drugs.
It is no surprise to see the Syrian regime, for instance, often linked to trade in drugs such as Captagon pills. Hezbollah also runs drugs in South America and in Africa, and conducts other illicit trade. Hezbollah’s drug trade is so large and important to Iran that during the lead-up to the 2015 Iran deal, reports later concluded that due to the Obama administration’s “determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking.”
It is not a stretch to draw a direct line from the drug trafficking to the ammonium nitrate and the 218 killed last year in Beirut.