Beirut burns again as furious crowds demand revolution
CHAOTIC scenes returned to Beirut last night as violent clashes broke out between police and antigovernment protesters demanding revolution in the wake of Tuesday’s devastating explosion that killed 158 people and destroyed t he city’s port.
The groups exchanged tear gas and petrol bombs as night fell, with the army being drafted in to take control of Martyrs’ Square in the city centre.
The blast at the port has been seen as a direct consequence of the incompetence and corruption that have come to define Lebanon’s ruling class.
About 5,000 people had earlier gathered in the central square to vent their fury at the government.
A large deployment of police tried to contain them as they chanted ‘the people want the fall of t he regime’, and advanced towards parliament.
Cardboard cut- outs of militant group Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and Speaker of the Parliament Nabih Berri were hung in mock gallows.
‘There is hatred and there is blood between us and our authorities,’ said Najib Farah, a 35-year-old protester in central Beirut. ‘The people want revenge.’
As this protest was going on, a f ew hundred yards down t he road, a group of retired Lebanese army officers stormed the foreign ministry in central Beirut and declared it the ‘headquarters of the revolution’.
They burnt a framed portrait of President Michel Aoun. The takeover, which was broadcast live on the city’s TV stations, lasted for three hours before the Lebanese army was brought in to drive the protesters out. The Lebanese Red Cross said at least 110 people had been hurt in the clashes, with 32 taken to hospital.
Earlier in the day thousands of young men and women moved back into a camp which had become the headquarters of a months-long antigovernment protest, some of them carrying portraits of blast victims and a banner bearing the names of the dead.
They pinned the blame for Tuesday’s mega-blast, in a port warehouse packed with ammonium nitrate fertiliser, on leaders they say deserve nothing less than the fate of the 158 people who died as a result. ‘My government murdered my people,’ read one sign.
‘You were corrupt, now you are criminals,’ read another. The protests came after a morning of funerals of victims of the blast.
As well as those killed, 6,000 were wounded and an estimated 300,000 left homeless.
In a TV address, Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab said people had a ‘right to be angry’ and promised early parliamentary elections.
The explosion on Tuesday, which at 2.75 kilotons was almost one fifth of the power of the Hiroshima nuclear blast, has plunged an already unstable Lebanon into a deeper economic and political crisis. Beirut’s mayor Jamal Itani put the cost of the damage at up to £11.5 billion.
Ammonium nitrate is a fertiliser but is used by terrorists to make explosives. It is thought to have arrived in 2013 aboard the MV Rhosus, owned by a Russian businessman, before being impounded.