Beirut erstickt im Müll
BEIRUT, Lebanon — On a normal weekend night, the revelers at Floyd the Dog bar spill onto the sidewalk, drinks in hand, to smoke cigarettes in the warm air.
But on a recent Saturday night, the few patrons at the bar remained inside with the windows shut; a fan whirred, trying to keep the stinky air outside from flowing in. Across the street a gargantuan pile of trash overwhelmed three huge bins, and after baking in the sun, its fumes had reversed the bar’s fortunes.
Ibrahim Kadi, a bartender, said business had been “a disaster.”
Lebanon is suffering from a garbage crisis that has left huge mounds of trash piling up across Beirut and elsewhere. Many Lebanese see it as a new, more pungent manifestation of the country’s impotent government.
“This is a very important indication of how dysfunctional the government is and how incapable it is of dealing with the basic demands of the population,” said Mario Abou Zeid, a research analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
Across the city, trash piles have consumed sidewalks and engulfed parked cars, leaving pedestrians holding their noses and retching as the sweet aromas of rotting food waft through residential areas. Parking and gas station attendants forced to work outside have donned medical masks to reduce the smell, and other residents have fled the city.
Mr. Abou Zeid said the trash crisis did not bode well for the government’s ability to deal with the country’s other problems.
“If on such local matters they can’t even function and agree, how can they agree on the bigger issues?” Mr. Zeid said.
The civil war in neighboring Syria and the more than 1.2 million refugees who have fled to Lebanon are taxing the economy and the government’s ability to provide services.
Political divisions have left the country without a president for 14 months, and the current Parliament extended its own mandate last year, essentially re- electing itself after failing to agree on a law to govern new elections.
Dysfunctional politics are nothing new in Lebanon, a country with 4.2 million people before the Syrian civil war. Since Lebanon’s own civil war that ended in 1990, a constellation of mostly sectarian po- litical parties have tried to govern through consensus — a commodity often in short supply.
For nearly two decades, garbage from Beirut and much of central Lebanon was sent to a landfill near Naimeh, south of the capital, which has since taken in many times its intended capacity.
Last year, to protest a new extension of the dumping contract, families from the communities around the landfill blocked the access road, causing trash to pile up in Beirut.
The demonstrators opened the road about a week later, after the government assured them it would use the next year to find an alternative. It did not. So on July 17, the protesters returned, saying they had lost faith in the government and vowing to remain until a solution could be found.
The mounds of stewing garbage, and public frustration, have only grown.
“To allow this to happen in Beirut, a very congested city, is beyond comprehension,” said Karim ElJisr, a regional director for the environmental consulting firm Ecodit.
On July 27, the government announced steps aimed at ending the crisis, including the pickup of garbage in Beirut, its distribution to unnamed sites and financial support for areas that receive the garbage.
A few hundred protesters rallied downtown recently, some hurling bags of garbage over the barbedwire-topped fence erected to protect the government headquarters. Many Lebanese have taken to social media to share pictures of their trash piles, post selfies with trash men or mock the country’s politicians.
Floyd the Dog and local businesses had hired a man with a small tractor to clean the street, but the fumes had made him sick before he finished the job, said Mr. Kadi, the bartender. He had little faith that Lebanon’s politicians would do much better in finding a lasting solution.
“They’ll never solve it,” he said. “They’ll just put a Band-Aid on the wound, even if it’s critical.”