On once-sparkling shores, a dump
There was once a nice sea view at the Al Jazira beach club, and umbrellas of palm fronds sticking from the sand are reminders of nicer days. Nowadays, the place is surrounded by an ever-growing garbage dump.
“It used to be a beach,” said Hassan, a Syrian man who works as a caretaker at the club and insisted on being identified only by his first name because of a lawsuit concerning the city. “There was sea. There were rocks. I used to fish.”
There is no end, it seems, to Lebanon’s trash crisis, a potent symbol of the dysfunctional, sect-based politics that defines this tiny country. When trash piles built up across this city two years ago, enveloping Beirut in a nasty stench, they spawned a protest movement, called “You Stink,” against the political class.
Now, the latest episode of the crisis has become a uniquely Lebanese story, entwining bird migration, civil aviation, mysterious gunmen and the long story of Lebanon’s struggle to become a functioning state that can at least take care of its trash, more than 25 years after emerging from a long civil war.
Last year, as a Band-Aid solution to the garbage crisis, the municipality opened the Costa Brava landfill on the shoreline, not far from Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. And so, for many visitors to Beirut, a city whose shabby-chic architecture, great cuisine and French colonial influences is otherwise enchanting, the first thing to greet them was a strong whiff of garbage.
The landfill also attracted birds — lots of them. “In other words,” wrote one local blogger, “a giant free Lebanese restaurant for birds.”
More seriously, this posed a problem to civil aviation. When an airliner with Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines hit a bird this month — an episode that recalled Capt. Chesley Sullenberger’s crash landing in the Hudson River — Lebanon’s trash problem suddenly became a matter of aviation safety.
Almost immediately, gunmen showed up on the coastline, apparently deployed by the government to shoot the birds out of the sky, raising the ire of environmental activists, not to mention the fishermen.
Activists have said that the killing of the birds was in violation of the Barcelona Convention, which aims to protect wildlife in Mediterranean coastal regions.
The garbage problem has long been a symbol of a failure of Lebanese politics, one that activists say has its roots in the time shortly after the country’s civil war, which ended in 1990. Soon after the war ended, the government set up a trash collection company, called Sukleen, that was connected to political parties and over the years became a vehicle for corruption, say activists.
Habib Battah, founder of the news website Beirut Report, who has written about the Costa Brava landfill, said the problems with garbage went back to the decision at the end of the war to privatize trash collection. He said that Lebanon offered a lesson to other postwar societies on the dangers of rushing into privatization too fast, and that he often wished he could bring free-market libertarians to Lebanon for a field trip to see what can happen in the absence of strong government regulations.
“Basically, when you do that, people in power get richer,” he said.