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Funerals and Fury in Beirut as Scale of Devastation Comes Into Focus As French President Visits Beirut, Lebanese Ask Where Their Leaders Are
(about 8 hours later)
Lebanon began an official period of national mourning on Thursday, two days after a powerful explosion in Beirut flattened whole neighborhoods in the bustling metropolis, even as rescue crews from around the world began arriving to help in the search for survivors. BEIRUT, Lebanon — Visiting a neighborhood ravaged by this week’s giant explosion in Beirut’s port, the president looked residents in the eye, vowed to send food and pursue a new political initiative, expressed sorrow for the lives lost and shoved aside a bodyguard to give a woman a hug.
The official death toll rose to 137, and with more than 5,000 people injured and miles of debris still covering the area around the epicenter of the blast at the Port of Beirut, officials said it would take time to determine the true number of victims. The only hitch was that he was the president of France, not Lebanon.
Lebanese Army bulldozers plowed through the wreckage, trying to clear roads so that emergency workers could reach the hardest-hit areas. Residents of the capital, widely known for resilience forged during years of civil war, fanned out across the city to sort through the wreckage and start what promises to be a herculean task of rebuilding. Less than 48 hours after the blast that shook Lebanon’s capital, killed at least 145 people and left entire neighborhoods virtually uninhabitable, President Emmanuel Macron of France on Thursday did what no senior Lebanese politician has: He came to see the suffering firsthand.
As international aid workers flooded into the country, President Emmanuel Macron of France visited downtown Beirut on Thursday, where he promised to provide assistance, including “several tons of medical equipment,” and received a warm welcome from opponents of the government. The distinction was not lost on the Lebanese. As they clean the rubble from their streets and homes, bury their dead and ponder where the billions needed to fix their capital will come, they have seen few signs that their political leaders will help in their time of need.
“I want to meet with all Lebanese political forces for very frank discussions,” said Mr. Macron, whose country is Lebanon’s former colonial ruler, when he arrived. “Because beyond the explosion, we know that the crisis here is severe. It implies a historic responsibility for the current leaders.” “I don’t want France to send money to these corrupt people,” said Khalil Honein, sitting outside his damaged auto parts store near where Mr. Macron had walked. “Let him take all these politicians with him, or let him be our president!”
Rima Tarabay, who lives near the port, captured the public’s exhaustion with a government riven by factions, plagued by corruption and marked by incompetence. As the toll from Tuesday’s blast — and the indications of governmental neglect that led to it — become increasingly clear, the recovery effort has been largely shouldered by Lebanese citizens, while countries across the globe have chipped in.
“The Lebanese are in the streets, showing great solidarity, and the authorities are just absent,” she said. “It’s impressive on the one hand, desolating on the other.” On Thursday alone, Cyprus, the neighboring island nation where many felt the blast, sent doctors. Denmark sent cash. Italy, Jordan and China sent medics and medical equipment. The United Nations announced that it was releasing $9 million to aid Beirut’s hospitals, three of which were blown out of commission by the explosion.
Residents were joined by crews of workers from across the region, filling truck after truck with remnants of people’s lives blasted from their homes out onto the street like so much flotsam. It was unclear how much those contributions would address the tremendous needs left by the explosion, which registered as a minor earthquake in neighboring countries, displaced more than 250,000 people from their homes and came on the heels of a financial crisis that had sent many Lebanese sliding toward poverty before the blast hit. Beirut’s governor estimated the damage at $3 billion.
With more than 250,000 people displaced from their homes, local leaders said they were scrambling to meet their needs. Several of the city’s main hospitals are no longer usable, and health officials said they were running out of supplies to treat the wounded. In many of the hardest hit areas, foreign crews joined armies of Lebanese volunteers to distribute food and help people clear the glass and rubble from their homes and streets.
The port was a crucial hub, with 60 percent of the nation’s imports flowing through it, in a city that is Lebanon’s economic engine. Port operations are now paralyzed, and the nation’s grain supply was wiped out in the blast, raising concerns about food security in the country of 6.8 million people. “It’s an individual initiative,” said Joelle Debs, a member of a volunteer group that was distributing sandwiches and wielding shovels and brooms. “We’re not expecting much from the government or the municipality.”
The calamity has compounded an already dire financial and political crisis, with soaring inflation and widespread unemployment. The World Bank estimated in November that poverty in Lebanon was expected to rise from 30 to 50 percent this year — and that was before the coronavirus pandemic took a devastating toll on the economy. At times, the cleanup crews would erupt with anger at the government they blamed for destroying the neighborhood, chanting, “Revolution! Revolution!” or shouting profanities about President Michel Aoun.
The government estimates the physical damage from the blast to be $10 billion to $15 billion, and it is unclear how willing the international community will be to give financial aid to a Lebanese government known for dysfunction. A fight broke out in front of the Lebanese Red Cross building in Gemmayzeh, a heavily damaged area, after someone insulted Mr. Aoun and fans of the president pushed back. Soon, a Red Cross tent had been torn down, one man’s head was bleeding and onlookers intervened to stop several men from rushing into the fray with shovels.
Prime Minister Hassan Diab has promised a full investigation into the blast, which officials said was caused by highly explosive materials stored at the port, and vowed to hold those responsible to account. Other volunteers teared up at the partisanship on display, which many Lebanese blame for their government’s perpetual inability to get anything done.
But his words did little to calm the swelling public anger as it was revealed that government officials had been aware for years of the danger posed by more than 2,000 tons of combustible ammonium nitrate stored at the port. “We’ll never have a country,” one said.
A group of doctors who were instrumental in antigovernment demonstrations last year organized a protest for Thursday afternoon at St. Joseph’s Hospital in central Beirut. “We already don’t have a country,” another answered.
“If we do not move today, please let’s shut up forever,” the organizers wrote on a flier promoting the action, according to a local report. They said the government had left people with two choices: “Die slowly (hunger and disease)” or “die acutely (blast injury).” Anger at the country’s ruling class has been rising since last fall, when protests broke out in Beirut and other cities calling for its ouster because of years of mismanagement and corruption.
Ramez al-Qadi, a prominent television anchor, tweeted: “Either they keep killing us or we kill them.” A trending hashtag on Twitter in Lebanon on Wednesday was translated as “hang up the nooses.” Since then, a financial crisis has sent the Lebanese currency into a steep dive and shaken the economy, increasing unemployment. Lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus increased the economic pain.
Images of the damage captured the scale of the devastation, with a smoking crater stretching more that 700 feet and the blast’s shock wave damaging buildings over a radius of nearly three miles. It registered as a 3.3-magnitude earthquake, and its power was captured in scores of videos. Then Tuesday’s explosion hit, followed by indications that it was caused by the accidental combustion of 2,750 tons of explosive chemicals that had been stored in the port since 2014, despite multiple warnings from port officials that they were dangerous.
Behind each shattered window and battered building was a human story. Prime Minister Hassan Diab has vowed to hold accountable anyone found responsible for the blast after an investigation, but the government has released few details on its findings so far.
Funerals for those killed in the explosion began on Thursday, with small groups of mourners gathering across the city to bury the dead. On Thursday, the central bank said it had frozen the accounts of the heads of the Beirut port and the Lebanese customs authority and five others, presumably in connection with the investigation.
But many Lebanese doubt that real accountability will be achieved in a country where top politicians, enriched through corruption, live in guarded enclaves and are usually seen in public only when their armored convoys of black SUVs with tinted windows zoom through traffic.
None of them have set foot in the neighborhoods most damaged in the blast, but some have been caught up in public anger elsewhere.
On Wednesday, protesters rushed the convoy of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose bodyguards tackled a woman who kicked one of the vehicles.
The conspicuous absence of political leaders drew a sharp contrast to Mr. Macron’s presence.
Wearing a skinny black tie with his sleeves rolled up, Mr. Macron toured the blast site and waded into the crowd that had gathered in a hard hit neighborhood to see him.
At times pulling down the surgical mask he wore to protect against the coronavirus, he chatted with residents, waved to groups watching from balconies and gave fist bumps to people filming him with their phones.
“I see the emotion on your face, the sadness, the pain,” he told one group, speaking of the deep historic ties between their countries, which go back to when Lebanon was a French colony. “This is why I’m here.”
He vowed to marshal aid for the displaced, and promised that it would “not go to corrupt hands,” an indirect dig at Lebanon’s politicians.
Bystanders shouted insults at Mr. Aoun and chanted for the toppling of the government. Mr. Macron said he planned to talk to the country’s leaders about “a new political pact.”
“What is also needed here is political change,” he said. “This explosion should be the start of a new era.”
Before leaving Lebanon, Mr. Macron said he had presented Lebanese leaders with a list of urgent reforms that needed to be carried out to unlock billions of dollars in international funds.
He said that France would organize an international donors conference and ensure transparency to make sure that aid reached the people instead of being siphoned off by the country’s power brokers.
Lebanon had failed to make progress on the reforms required to release the last batch of promised international funds, and some commentators wondered how much Mr. Macron’s stroll in Beirut had been intended for domestic consumption in France.
But many Lebanese were charmed by his retail politics, especially compared to what they saw from their own politicians. An online petition made the rounds imploring him to “place Lebanon under French mandate for the next 10 years.”
“We’re asking for the president of France to take over Lebanon,” said a cleanup volunteer who had just signed it, Jana Harb, 17. “Just throw away the government. There’s no future here for us if the current politicians stay. We’d rather get colonized than die here.”
Funerals for those killed in the explosion continued on Thursday, with small groups of mourners gathering across the city to bury the dead.
A funeral for Sahar Fares, a 24-year-old emergency medical worker who had joined the rush to the port to help extinguish an initial fire, only to be downed by the huge explosion, was aired on national television on Thursday morning.A funeral for Sahar Fares, a 24-year-old emergency medical worker who had joined the rush to the port to help extinguish an initial fire, only to be downed by the huge explosion, was aired on national television on Thursday morning.
Her white coffin, held by members of the armed forces, was carried through an honor guard of fire trucks and emergency responders as her grieving family followed. Trucks that lined the way were draped in banners with a photo of Ms. Fares, smiling and in uniform. “My sister is a hero,” a woman could be heard yelling through sobs as Ms. Fares’s coffin was loaded into a vehicle. “She was someone who served, who sacrificed her life to save the country.”
“My sister is a hero,” a woman could be heard yelling through sobs as Ms. Fares’s coffin was loaded into a vehicle. “She was someone who served who sacrificed her life to save the country.” Vivian Yee and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut; Marc Santora, Megan Specia and Elian Peltier from London; and Adam Rasgon from Jerusalem.
The hostility toward the government was made clear by the response to Mr. Macron’s visit. As he toured the Gemmayzeh neighborhood, which was especially hard hit, he was soon surrounded by a crowd that angrily denounced the Lebanese government.
Volunteers who were cleaning up the street chanted “The people demand the fall of the regime.”
Over 50 French emergency workers joined teams from across Europe and around the world to help with the search-and-rescue operations.
France has long maintained deep ties with the country, epitomized by the close friendship between former President Jacques Chirac and Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005.
Mr. Macron, who has sought to deepen the diplomatic ties between the two nations, was greeted at the airport on Thursday by President Michel Aoun.
But while Lebanon is in urgent need of international assistance, many were skeptical that the visit would bring significant change to the nation’s government.
“The Lebanese need support and encouragement, but is it going to change something? That’s unlikely,” said Ms. Tarabay, who worked as an aide to Mr. Hariri. “France has long donated money to successive Lebanese governments,” she added. “But where did the money go?”
There were more immediate concerns on the ground, as search teams combed through fields of twisted metal and debris in hopes of finding survivors in what was both a frantic scramble and a delicate operation. Dozens of tents of rescue crews crowded the port area as teams tried to coordinate their efforts.
At the same time, families of the missing pleaded for help.
Emilie Hasrouty, whose brother, Ghassan Hasrouty, was working in the port at the time of the explosion, said she was putting hope before cold reason.
“Logic says that my brother evaporated,” she wrote on Twitter. “Hope says that he may have gone into hiding at the start of the fire.”
She added in another post that the authorities had said they would not excavate the area, even after the family offered to pay for the equipment.
His daughter, Tatiana Hasrouty, told CNN that her father had been in the operations room of the grain store at the time of the explosion, and believes he and his colleagues may still be trapped under the rubble.
“He went on Tuesday to work and we never saw him again,” she said.
Elian Peltier and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.