BOSTON — The massive explosion in Beirut that devastated many parts of the city is a tale with three distinct but linked parts, about the past, the present, and the future. The past is about how this could happen, given that for the last six years the government knew about that the thousands of kilos of dangerous ammonium nitrate stored in the port, and did nothing about it.
The present is about how the immediate reconstruction and humanitarian aid processes will impact on the current government that has very little domestic or international credibility.
The third, and most important in the long run, is about whether in future the Lebanese people’s heightened anger with their government, for subjecting them to yet another massive source of sustained suffering, will translate into political action that removes the government and starts to reform the entire political-economic structures of the country.
These three dimensions also relate to the lives of several hundred million civilians across the Arab region, who suffer the consequences of their own cruel regimes, of which Lebanon is only the most dramatic, painful, and recent example. Lebanon is instructive because it is one of a handful of Arab countries where tens of thousands of citizens are out in the streets almost daily demonstrating peacefully against their governments for what they see as their mistreatment by those governments.
The Beirut port explosion is a consequence of the cumulative incompetence, corruption, lassitude, amateurism, and uncaring attitude by successive Lebanese governments, going back two decades, which has brought the Lebanese people to a point of majority pauperization and desperation. Ordinary citizens don’t have enough clean water. They don’t have electricity. They don’t have good new jobs. They don’t have reasonably priced food. They cannot get their own money from the banks. Education quality is declining. Trash is not properly collected or disposed of. Environmental conditions deteriorate across the land. Their currency has collapsed. The future is bleak for all, other than the very wealthy.
Every dimension of life in Lebanon has declined, steadily and uninterruptedly, for the last 20 years. But perhaps the worst aspect of this, in the citizen’s eyes, is that the government does not seem to care, or to do anything to fix the situation, as in most Arab countries. The Beirut port explosion is the most catastrophic example of how an uncaring, inattentive, and criminally negligent government operates, because the ruling oligarchic power structure circles the wagons and protects itself against angrier and angrier citizens in the street.
Because nobody in power did anything about the ammonium nitrate in Beirut port, as has been the case with water, garbage, electricity, and the economy, the political aftershocks are likely to be the most significant dimension of this incident. These will happen only after some time, as the country absorbs the psychological and physical shocks of the explosion, and deals with the massive humanitarian suffering.
The Lebanese people — like the Algerians, Sudanese, Iraqis, and others — are actively focused on understanding how they can demonstrate and mobilize politically in order to achieve a common goal: to recreate a legitimate, credible, effective, and humanistic government system that treats its own citizens as human beings and not as animals without rights, without feelings, without voice.
This populist force across the entire region has been out in the streets demonstrating now for a decade. Since the 2010-11 uprisings, Arab men and women have signaled the intensity of the political deficiencies and the populist quest for dignity in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Sudan, Algeria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Mauritania, and Lebanon.
A core problem that must be resolved is how to overcome the mistrust of power that defines all Arab countries experiencing uprisings. The Lebanese people certainly don’t trust their government anymore, because they’ve suffered the physical and emotional consequences of its cruelty and deficiencies over the last 20 years. That’s why most Lebanese demand an independent international investigation to find out how the port explosion happened and who should be held accountable.
Similarly, many also ask that international humanitarian aid should not go to the Lebanese government, but rather to non-governmental organizations or international groups who can be trusted not to steal the money. When the minister of justice went to inspect one badly damaged area today, she was hounded out of the neighborhood with shouts of “resign!” and “revolution”!
These are signs from the Lebanese citizens of why, when they march in protests, they call for the departure of all the governing elite, not just one or two bad apples. This is similarly the case in the protests in Iraq and Algeria, where disgruntled, and dehumanized citizens, demand the removal of the entire governing elite, and its replacement with a more participatory, accountable, and rule-of-law-based system.
This is the critical issue now in Lebanon — the transition from the humanitarian catastrophe of the explosion to a political reconfiguration of the political system. Yet, Arab citizens marching in the streets largely have not been able to remove their governments by popular will in the last 30 years. So the region continues to be ruled by autocratic, authoritarian, and increasingly militarized regimes, whose policies have led to around 75% of all Arabs being poor or vulnerable.
The explosion destroyed much of Beirut. It might soon destroy the old, heartless, political system that allowed it to happen.
Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri
Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 07 August 2020
Word Count: 888
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