After decades of war, corruption and a deadly chemical explosion – can Lebanon ever recover?

From the window of her living room, that now lies a few hundred metres from Beirut’s ravaged grain silo, Makrouhi Arkanian remembers watching the sniper fire trip across the port. The 74-year-old Lebanese-Armenian is no stranger to death and destruction. She lived in that same block of flats for nearly three-quarters of a century, over which time several bitter conflicts have been and gone.

During Lebanon’s 15-year civil war between 1975-1990 the port was swallowed by different frontlines. And for years snipers, stationed at the infamous tower block Burj el Murr, would shoot down at those who dared to approach it, she says.

But all the decades spent watching from her window did not prepare Makrouhi for a few minutes past six on the first Tuesday of August. “The last thing I said to my friend on the phone as I watched the smoke rise, was that I could hear the fire engine sirens,” she says, clad frailly in black.

The elderly uncle she lived with called her away from the window, concerned as strange noises began to emanate from the towering cloud of ash. “Then it happened,” she says, with a shake in her voice. “White clouds were all over the place swirling everywhere. Everything turned upside down. I felt that the world stopped and ended at that moment.”

Above her a white ring of immense pressure rose around the inferno of red and rampaged along the port, through her home, across the city and up the mountains, dragging people, buildings and belongings in its wake. Glass exploded as far as 25km away, the tremors were registered in Germany. In Beirut everyone thought an airstrike had landed right next to them.

Makrouhi spent three hours on her own trapped under the rubble, with the body of her 91-year-old uncle, her last living relative, who had been killed instantly. She screamed her “heart out” for help until she had no voice left. But no one came for hours.

Four months on from the blast, which killed more than 200 people, injured several thousand more and initially left over a quarter of a million people homeless, no senior official has accepted responsibility for the disaster.

The authorities have not offered explanations of how the blast, which was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in modern history, could have been allowed to happened. This is despite the fact there is a depressing paper trial showing senior officials knew about the stockpile of poorly stored explosives in the port, which likely caused it.

Instead the investigating judge has faced fierce pushback from the country’s powerful political factions, some of which have taken legal action against his decision to charge the country’s caretaker prime minister Hassan Diab and three former ministers, with negligence.

Meanwhile, the blast cost an estimated $15bn in damage, devastating for a country that amid a pandemic was already in the grips of an unprecedented financial collapse, anchored in decades of chronic mismanagement and corruption.

It destroyed thousands of people’s home and businesses. But the victims of the explosion, just like Makrouhi, have received no support from the government; they did not even organise a clean-up of the worst hit streets.  

This has been particularly devastating amid the economic crisis that has pushed more than 50 per cent of the country under the poverty line and seen the Lebanese currency lose 80 per cent of its value. The simple act of purchasing a windowpane is cripplingly expensive for most.

The army has been handing out financial compensation for some homes, but has not been in touch with Makrouhi, or any of the other families the Independent interviewed, for two months.  Her landlord has not responded to her calls. Her building – marked by danger signs – has apparently been left as an abandoned shell.

And so Makrouhi lives on her own, a few minutes’ drive away in Qobayat, where local charities and a church clubbed together to set her up in a tiny apartment.  She sits islanded by photos of her deceased relatives and has to suffer the humiliation of asking for help to secure pots and pans that were destroyed in the explosion.

“I used to hear the birds, I used to see the trees, I used to live like a queen,” she says crumpling into tears.

“I just want to go back to my home by the sea,” she adds.

A media spokesperson for the Lebanese army told The Independent it was working to distribute a 100 billion Lebanese lira compensation budget that had been approved by the country’s president (approximately £49m at the official exchange rate and £8.9m on the black market). 

So far, they said the army has handed out compensation covering 12,400 housing units but gave no explanation as to why people like Makrouhi and the others The Independent interviewed had received nothing and had not been contacted in months.  The spokesperson said the military had worked hard to remove rubble from the port and surrounding areas, and to date had restored 8,580 flats and was in the process of restoring 13,500 more of a total 55,000 damaged.  

The spokesman added that the military had also distributed 73,000 boxes of food rations sent by other countries but admitted it was unable to handle all the destruction without outside help. “There is no doubt that completing the reconstruction is a long-term process that requires huge resources that are not available to us at the moment." They added that the army also had a list of urgently required materials, including aluminium, wood, soil, gravel, sand and painting materials. 



Despite this, everyone The Independent spoke to had relied on charities to fix the damage.

Across the blast radius, volunteers from a myriad of non-governmental organisations patrol neighbourhoods wielding clipboards to try to organise the reconstruction efforts. It is now normal to have aid workers appear at your door offering food baskets and hygiene packets.

“You have to understand we don’t have a government; the people look after the people,” says Melisa Fathallah from Beitna Beitak charity  (our home is your home) which has fixed well over 650 homes already and is working on repairing 800 more.

She laughed when asked what help the authorities were offering the people.  “The army is calling me to fix their houses,” she claimed.

Just a few minutes’ drive from the port, in the low-income neighbourhood of Bourj Hammoud, Wissam Salah, an out-of-work taxi driver, and his wife Leila, live on a roof with their two young children. The “flat” consists of a single room with a mattress on the floor, which serves as a living room and bedroom for the entire family.

They have a camping gas ring to cook on and use a bucket as a shower. For the past few months have been living off food handouts from charities, which also helped them rebuild part of the walls that were blown away.

Wissam says his aunt, who lives three doors down, received 5 million lire from the army (which is over $3,300 at the official exchange rate but just $600 on the realistic black-market rate). However, they have heard nothing since.

“It’s hard to explain the situation to my child who is always cold,” he says sitting on a broken toilet, one of the few things left they have to sit on. “If I think about the situation too long, I sink into despair,” he adds.

The outlook for the country is bleak. Even if parts of Beirut are rebuilt, the country’s economy is in freefall. The collapse of the local currency has seen some food prices quadruple and the fear is that inflation will keep rising, particularly with the expectation that subsidies on items like flour, fuel, and medication will be lifted.

The international community has pledged millions of dollars in aid on condition that key reforms are pushed through, including a forensic audit which, so far, the Central Bank has refused to do. The government resigned in the aftermath of the blast, but four months on a new cabinet has yet to be agreed on. Without a functioning government further reforms are not possible either.

For people like Wissam that has meant work has dried up while the cost of living has become cripplingly expensive. He says what makes it worse was knowing there would be no answers as to why the explosion was allowed to happen in the first place.

“The government is working for personal gain and not for the people. There is no justice here at all.”

A fraught investigation is under way, but few have hope it will hold anyone senior to account. According to testimonies and documents seen byThe 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, that was ultimately abandoned by the Russian citizen Igor Grechushkin, who leased it, and the man believed to be its true owner, a Cypriot shipping magnate. It shows Lebanese officials repeatedly warning about the dangers of the explosive materials.

The investigating judge, Fadi Sawan, had faced mounting criticism from the public for the fact that no senior political figures had been held to account. Up until two weeks ago only 30 low-to mid-level security officials and port and customs officials had been indicted.

But then on 11 December he took the extraordinary step of charging caretaker PM Diab, the former finance minister Ali Hassan Khalil, as well as Ghazi Zeiter and Youssef Fenianos, both former ministers of public works. (Fenianos and Khalil were both sanctioned by the US over their ties to Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in September).

The move to charge the ministers sparked fury from the country’s myriad and powerful political factions including condemnation from Hezbollah. Diab and the three other former ministers did not show up to the scheduled interrogation last week.

And now the investigation is on hold for 10 days as, according to Lebanese media, the same officials filed legal challenges accusing the judge of not being impartial and violating legal and constitutional procedures by charging such senior people.

Two of the accused former ministers have asked the Court of Cassation, the highest court in the country, to replace Sawan, citing “legitimate suspicion” over the legality of his decision, which they say was politically motivated.

The Independent was due to speak to Diab about the blast and the economic crisis the country is limping through, but his office stopped responding after he was indicted.

Ayman Raad, a lawyer for one of the victims whose wife was killed in the blast, told The Independent he is concerned the powerful political parties will do everything in their power to hinder the investigation. He also feared that the investigating judge is vulnerable to be pressured.

“We are not sure if Judge Sawan is taking a huge step forward for justice, or if he has done all of this as part of a master plan by one maestro who is playing everyone,” the lawyer said. “I have reasonable doubt because judges in Lebanon who are appointed to higher positions are usually appointed because of the political parties,” he added.

Together with other families of victims, Raad has also questioned the choice of arrests. President Michel Aoun admitted publicly that he knew about the stockpile nearly three weeks before the blast but did nothing.

But so far, the most senior arrests are the former ministers and Diab, who had only been in power for seven months when the port blew up.  

“In any normal country if there was a similar explosion, you’d see the heads of the security services at least resign,” said Riad Kobaissi a prominent Lebanese investigative journalist who uncovered several damning documents concerning the stockpile of ammonium nitrate. “They have not even questioned the former head of the army as a witness, even though there are letters showing he knew about it.”

Kobaissi points out that in all the correspondence written by various officials about the stockpile of ammonium nitrate that he has seen “you never read the word disposal”.

Instead most of them appear concerned with trying to sell the material. “No one was thinking of destroying it, everyone wanted to make money from it,” he added, saying that he had “zero hope” in the investigation.

With no justice and little help, those living in the poorest neighbourhoods within the blast radius, are often reduced to living in their broken homes, some of which are not structurally sound.

Several damaged houses have even collapsed amid winter storms in impoverished areas like Karantina, that lies about a kilometre from the epicentre of the blast. Its name is somewhat aptly derived from the word Quarantine; in the 1800s it housed an isolation centre were travellers would quarantine to curb the spread of diseases like cholera and tuberculosis.

Karantina, which is mostly low-income mixed neighbourhood, has a bloody history of tragedies including a massacre during the Lebanese civil war in 1976, and subsequent floods and fires. Now it is a maze of crushed warehouses and clawed out buildings.

There Ehsan Daw, 43, says her four daughters are severely traumatised from the explosion and have difficulty sleeping at night. She says the army appeared two months ago promising compensation but had never returned and the family spent their rent money fixing the flat. An army reference number is pinned forlornly to the front door.  As the currency has tanked, and work dried up amid the pandemic, they live on food handouts and charity donations to survive.

“Every time we get a donation from charity, we give it to the landlord because we owe four months of rent and none of us can find work,” she tells The Independent. “I am afraid for my daughters’ future. Everyone in this government should be punished for this and everything that we have struggled through over the last few years.”

The Independent put her in touch with another charity to help cover cost of her some of her rent and medical supplies.

Back in Qobayat, volunteers were also helping to purchase a dining-room table and pots and pans for Makrouhi, who is steeling herself for a Christmas alone. She asks to be taken to her old home, so she can see the sea once again. At the port she wonders from room to room in a daze, consumed by her own grief.

Her window is still a punched-out hole overlooking the clawed-out grain silo. Next to it a cruise ship, another victim of the blast, lies on its side like a beached whale in the rain.  

Downstairs in her building a workman urinates in the stairwell, a dangerous rickety skeleton. Wind whips through the bleached bones of a now uninhabitable modern apartment block next door.

“I ask that the international community help us – we have had enough. We have suffered too much,” she says, picking her way through water-sodden remnants of her kitchen. “I hope that 2021 erases the pain of the last year. I hope that good days await us.”

Additional reporting by Samira al Azaz