Tales from the sea
The real fight for Dalieh isn’t about poor fishers
It was 5 a.m. on Saturday May 2 when around 150 police officers descended on Dalieh. “I was there when they came,” Mohammad Itani tells Executive, speaking from outside the pile of rubble that previously housed him and his relatives. “They came at 5 a.m. with Caterpillars [bulldozers] and got us all out of our houses ... they handcuffed some of us, including my nephew’s wife.”
He pauses to beat back the mosquitoes that had gathered in anticipation of dusk in the hot early evening air.
“Everyone’s houses were bulldozed, all of [them]. But we are still living here for the moment, in cars, boats and caves,” he says defiantly. “The officer in charge said they had been told by a high ranking guy in the Hariri family to demolish everything with everyone in there.”
In this context, the ‘Hariri family’ refers to former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s widow and five of his children who collectively own a holding company called Irad Investment, which in turn owns or part owns companies that have bought half the land in Dalieh. They, along with GroupMed Holding, own shares in all of the 14 private plots of land that make up Dalieh, and there have long been suspicions that plans are afoot to build a luxury tourism complex on the shrub covered promontory that abuts the city’s national symbol, Pigeon Rocks, on Beirut’s western coast. To this end, several attempts have been made since early 2012 to clear the land of its occupants, previously around 200 fishers and their families.
It’s not clear who exactly asked for the demolition to take place, although a spokesperson for the ISF, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak on the subject, says it was “normal” and that the police were just “doing their job.”
Regardless, question marks remain over the legality of the operation. The ISF spokesperson was not able to provide any proof of a court approved permit for the operation and Executive was not able to obtain one from the Justice Ministry, although this does not necessarily mean it does not exist. Further, Beirut Governor Ziad Chebib — the person who typically must sign off on city demolitions — tells Executive, “No one asked me. They didn’t ask for permission.” Despite being a lawyer and judge, he says he is unsure whether permission would be necessary if the homes were illegal in the first place.
The events of May 2 have served to reinforce a simplistic narrative of an unwinnable battle between the helpless fishers of Dalieh and ‘evil developers’ bent on robbing Beirut of one of its last communal, free spaces. In fact, the fight for Dalieh is far more complicated, and the case of the fishers’ bulldozed houses — while highly irregular and disturbing — is a red herring; the real front lines are elsewhere.
‘EVIL DEVELOPERS’
Legally, the Hariri claim to develop Dalieh is pretty strong. Public records show that they own more than 95 per-