A blast six years in the making

‘We’re keeping you in our thoughts and we stand ready to assist in any way we can,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said following Tuesday’s horrific blast in Beirut that killed more than 100 people, injured more than 7,000 and left 300,000 people homeless.

“We stand with the people of Lebanon and the diaspora during this difficult time,” Foreign Affairs Minister François- Philippe Champagne added, “and we are ready to assist however we can.”

This is all well and good, so long as Canada doesn’t start pouring any money into the incompetent cabal of warlords, oligarchs and kleptocrats who run the constitutionally sectarian government of Lebanon. Canada should step up, in a big way, but our aid should go straight to the Lebanese Red Cross, or any number of the many reputable non- governmental organizations that were pleading for help in alleviating Lebanon’s misery long before Tuesday’s catastrophe.

For starters, Foreign Affairs might contribute to Impact Lebanon, an organization that raised $5 million in a crowdfunding effort within 24 hours of the blast. Anything would be better than to pour more money into the corrupt, inept and bankrupt Hezbollah- backed government of Prime Minister Hassan Diab, who’s been running the show for the useless President Michel Aoun since January.

The day before the blast, Lebanon’s foreign minister, Nassif Hitti, resigned, warning that Lebanon was on the verge of becoming a “failed state.” In the throes of an Arab Springlike revolt since last autumn, Aoun’s government responded by digging itself deeper in the abyss. And after what happened on Tuesday — an ammonium nitrate time bomb had been left to tick away for six years, despite repeated warnings — it’s hard to imagine that the Lebanese people will manage to contain their rage.

For months before the coronavirus pandemic added plague and death to the country’s agony, trash was piling up in the streets, the electrical supply in parts of Beirut was available for only four hours a day, unemployment had shot up to 35 per cent, the cost of food had gone through the roof and the Lebanese lira was reduced to a fifth of its value against the American dollar.

Lebanon had become another Venezuela, even before the country defaulted on its debts in March. Talks with the International Monetary Fund have gone nowhere. Lebanon’s national debt now stands at $ 92 billion — 170 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product — and Transparency International ranks the country at 137 out of 180 countries on its corruption index.

There’s no evidence that Aoun’s government is willing or able to sustain the maelstrom of popular fury that awaits. Hezbollah’s noose around Lebanon’s neck is only part of the country’s desperate predicament. But it’s a big part.

On Friday, the United Nations’ Special Tribunal for Lebanon is expected to deliver its judgment in the case against four Hezbollah operatives accused in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005. Hezbollah refuses to co- operate with the tribunal, while Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah continues to direct the terrorist organization’s operations from Lebanon. And Hezbollah continues to serve as the primary shock troops for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

To Western intelligence agencies, ammonium nitrate, a commonly used fertilizer but also a commonly used ingredient in improvised explosive devices, is practically synonymous with Hezbollah. And Beirut’s port, as Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council last year, has become “Hezbollah’s port.”

Khomeinist Iran has been smuggling dual-use materials into Lebanon for years to advance Hezbollah’s missile and bomb capabilities, the Israelis say. “The Iranian regime is transferring weapons in various ways. They use commercial companies, mainly from Europe, to support Hezbollah and develop its missile program. Unfortunately, the Port of Beirut has become Hezbollah’s port,” Danon alleged.

Diab’s government has pledged a full investigation of Tuesday’s explosion and the government is anxious to prosecute the officials who are responsible for allowing a warehouse full of ammonium nitrate to be situated, for several years, so dangerously close to Beirut’s densely populated downtown area.

It took Timothy Mcveigh only two tons of ammonium nitrate to destroy more than a dozen buildings and kill 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. The stockpile of ammonium nitrate that exploded in Hangar 12 at the Port of Beirut on Tuesday amounted to 2,750 tons.

There’s not much of a mystery to solve. Senior Lebanese officials were warned, a half- dozen times over the past six years, that the stockpile of ammonium nitrate presented a grave danger to the workers at the port, and to the people of Beirut.

Hezbollah has carried out several terrorist attacks with bombs that combine ammonium nitrate with fuel oil. Ammonium nitrate is a favourite of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and in 2015, in Lanarca, Cyprus, Lebanese- Canadian Hussein Bassam Abdallah was arrested for possessing eight tons of ammonium nitrate. Abdallah pleaded guilty of plotting on Hezbollah’s behalf to carry out terrorist attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets in Cyprus. That same year, British intelligence reportedly uncovered a Hezbollah plot behind a three-ton stockpile of ammonium nitrate in suburban London.

Just how all that ammonium nitrate ended up in Hangar 12 involves the Moldavian- registered rust-bucket freighter MV Rhosus. On Sept. 23, 2013, the ship left the Black Sea port of Batumi, Georgia, with a cargo of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, bound for the port of Biera, Mozambique. A few days later, after transiting the Bosporus Strait, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles, the ship ran into trouble in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Lebanon.

Upon inspection of the ship in Beirut, the Lebanese Port State Control forbade the ship’s captain from sailing. The Ukrainian crew was allowed to return home, but the ship’s captain and three senior crewmen were obliged to remain on board, where they soon ran out of food and fuel. Beset by creditors, the ship’s owner, Igor Grechushkin, a Russian national living the high life in Cyprus, abandoned his ship and its officers.

The Beirut law firm of El Baroudi & Associates managed to convince a Lebanese judge that the ship’s officers should be permitted to leave because they were sitting on a ticking time bomb. The ship’s cargo was transferred a few weeks later to Hangar 12. Before Tuesday’s explosion, it had been waiting to go off for six years, and senior Lebanese officials knew it. Customs authorities had warned them in writing at least six times that the port, and the city, was in grave peril of being blasted to smithereens.

And that’s what happened on Tuesday. The Lebanese people are going to need a lot of help from the rest of the us to get through all this. The last thing the international community should do is to pour any more money into the insanely corrupt and incompetent government that persists in tormenting them.

the port of beirut has become hezbollah’s port.