‘Descent into the abyss’
Six months on from the Beirut blast that killed hundreds, Lebanon is now on the brink of collapse,
Haloed by the lights from their mobile phones, the medical staff at St George University Hospital picked through the dead to carry injured patients and colleagues on bed sheets through the ravaged remains of the nine-storey building.
Outside, a tidal wave of wounded coming out of the building crashed into the wave of wounded coming in from the surrounding neighbourhoods. In the middle, dazed medics, still stained with blood, set up a makeshift triage centre in the car park to treat both.
Just moments beforehand on that night exactly six months ago one of the largest non-nuclear explosions of our time raged through central Beirut. Several thousand tonnes of poorly-stored explosives in the city’s port had ignited, sending a ring of pressure across the city that clawed fronts of buildings, ripped open roofs, and in the hospital, destroyed operating theatres, wards and intensive care units.
In the middle of the nightmare, Rolla Farah, a chief nurse at St George, was given the impossible task of trying to safely evacuate the wounded coronavirus patients without infecting everyone around them. “We had to wait for special ambulances to transfer them in the middle of that. You can’t imagine,” she says. Half a year on from the devastating explosion which killed more than 200 people, injured several thousand more and destroyed nearly a quarter of a million homes, St George hospital, and its staff like Farah, are once again on the frontline of the latest mess of disasters to confront Lebanon.
The country is careering towards total collapse as it buckles under the weight of a tripled-headed crisis: the aftermath of the blast which has left swathes of the capital in rubble, an unprecedented surge in coronavirus cases overwhelming the healthcare system and a financial crash that has pushed more than half the country of 7 million people under the poverty line.
The international community has promised to support Lebanon whose rupture could ignite the tinderbox region. The tiny Mediterranean country is also home to nearly 2 million vulnerable Syrians and Palestinian refugees who are already struggling in extreme poverty.
Its economy is inextricably intertwined tied to the economy of neighbouring war-torn Syria, which heavily relies on the Lebanese banking sector. And there are no signs of any of the extreme pressures easing up for Lebanon.
The country’s caretaker government has had to impose a three and half week round-the-clock curfew – one of the world’s toughest lockdowns – to try and stem the spread of Covid-19. But the absence of robust financial support programmes has sparked nationwide hunger demonstrations and in Lebanon’s poorest city, Tripoli, there have been bloody clashes between protesters and security forces.
Furious citizens are also still demanding answers about the causes of the blast. An investigation into the explosion which changed and shattered so many lives has stalled since the country’s prime minister was charged with criminal negligence in December.
With no end to the relentless misery in sight, the country has been pushed to the very brink. And so those at St George say they are once again left to bear the burden as the country lurches from “crisis to crisis”. Despite only being partially repaired from the explosion and struggling amid shortages of foreign currency needed to purchase supplies, the hospital is now a main coronavirus treatment facility. It is overflowing.
Since lockdown measures were controversially lifted during the Christmas season, Lebanon’s daily Covid-19 caseload has broken the country’s records. Now 300,000 people have been infected and more than 3,000 have died. The mortality rate from virus cases is climbing.
The staff of St George describe treating Covid-19 patients in their cars, on chairs in the waiting room and even on the pavements as they lack space to give people beds. The Red Cross said on Wednesday that Lebanon’s Covid-bed occupancy rate was more than 100 per cent.
“We are at full capacity at the moment. Our non-Covid emergency room is now taking Covid-patients that are critical since there is nowhere else to put them,” says Farah while bits of the ceiling damaged in the explosion hang limp above her. “A third of the nursing staff are Covid-positive. We are really understaffed, working overtime and exhausted.”
Little hope of justice
Heavily pregnant, Sarah Copland was feeding her two-year-old son Isaac in his high chair, when at a few minutes past 6pm on 4 August she heard an unusual boom coming from the direction of Beirut port.
The United Nations officer from Australia, rushed to the window to check what was going on outside but saw nothing. She was walking back to her son, when the explosion ripped her off her feet and threw her to the ground.
“My husband came running in, we grabbed Isaac from his high chair. We didn’t know if it was a terrorist attack, or if the city was being bombed,” she says.
It was then they realised their son had been speared in the chest by a piece of shattered glass from their sliding door. “When we got to the bathroom, we saw how injured he was and ran outside to find help. It was unreal. There were people lying in the street, there was glass and devastation everywhere,” she adds.
From that minute on she says “it didn’t feel real, it felt like a movie”. Isaac, a bubbly and much-beloved toddler, died hours later, becoming one of the youngest of 211 victims of the Beirut explosion.
Copland, herself injured, would spend days in hospital in Beirut before being evacuated home to Perth. She later miraculously gave birth to her second son, Ethan. But six months on the family is still struggling to come to terms with their grief and fears the disaster will be forgotten by the world.
“It is the hardest thing that I have ever gone through in my life, I know I will never get over what happened,” she says, her voice cracking with emotion. “I just feel for so many people stuck in Lebanon. They don’t even get a chance to recover from one crisis before facing another crisis.”
She said she is concerned that attention turned quickly away from the Lebanese capital, despite the fact that so many people, including her own baby, died. “It is important the world continues to remember what happened in Beirut.”
That feeling of grief is keenly felt across the devastated capital where many are also angry at the lack of answers and justice.
Afif Merhej, 41, says his brother Kaiser, 36, a security officer in the port had “no idea what he was walking into” when he started his night shift that fateful evening.
The father-of-two’s last message was to a friend to say he had been called to investigate a fire which had broken out on hangar 12, a warehouse the authorities knew held thousands of tonnes of dangerous explosive materials.
However, Kaiser had no idea and said he thought it housed fireworks. Six months on, the grieving family are bitterly disappointed in the progress of the investigation and fear politics may hinder any attempts to reach the truth. “I want everyone responsible to be charged and for the judge not to miss out on a single person,” Afif tells The Independent on the verge of tears.
Fury at the lack of answers, and the government’s poor response to the aftermath of the explosion, which saw citizens man the clean-up operation, led to nationwide protests last year that resulted in the entire cabinet resigning. Six months on, Lebanon’s ruling parties still cannot agree on the formation of a new government, which has left the country in political limbo and hindered the delivery of foreign aid. The investigation into the blast has been stalled since 17 December.
On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch called for an independent international investigation into the blast warning the domestic probe has been hampered by serious process violations and attempts by political leaders to stop it.
According to testimonies and documents seen by The Independent, port and customs officials, senior members of the security services, the prime minister, several current and former ministers and the president of the country knew about the dangerous stockpile of ammonium nitrate in the port but did
nothing about it.
The paper trail stretches back to 2014 when the materials, which are used to make fertilisers and bombs, first arrived in Beirut aboard a Moldavian-flagged ship. It shows Lebanese officials repeatedly warning about the dangers of the explosive materials.
Up until two months ago only 37 low-to mid-level security, port and customs officials had been charged, sparking mounting criticism of investigating judge, Fadi Sawwan, for not holding senior political figures to account. But then on 11 December Sawwan took the extraordinary step of charging caretaker prime minister Diab, former finance minister Ali Hassan Khalil, as well as Ghazi Zeiter and Youssef Fenianos, both former ministers of public works.
The move to charge the ministers sparked fury from the country’s myriad and powerful political factions including condemnation from Hezbollah.
Since then all of the three have refused to appear for questioning and maintain their innocence. Diab has called it “diabolical” to single him out for charges. The caretaker interior minister said that he would not ask the security forces to arrest them, even if the judiciary issued arrest warrants.
In January the court of cassation ruled Sawwan can resume his investigation while it reviews calls to replace him.
For the victims of the blast, the paused investigation just means more heartbreaking questions left unanswered.
‘We are starving to death’
Omar Tayba, 29 was not exactly destitute. But after failing to hold onto several part time jobs and following an unsuccessful stint trying to find work in Turkey, he snapped. The tidal wave of rage that boiled in Beirut rolled out of the capital across the country taking hold in Lebanon’s poorest city Tripoli, 80km to the north, where Tayba lived.
For the last few weeks, a haze of teargas and the stutter of gunfire has covered Tripoli’s main protest square, as rallies have descended into clashes between protesters and phalanxes of soldiers.
Last Wednesday Omar headed out to join them and never came back. “My son got involved in the protests because he was angry,” his father Farouk tells The Independent from his impoverished Tripoli neighbourhood. “He had tried to find a way to sustain himself but with the economic situation it’s hard to find a future.”
Lebanon has long been in the grips of an unprecedented financial crisis anchored in decades of chronic mismanagement and corruption.