A year on from Beirut explosion, scars and
questions remain
Lebanese capital remains a shell of a city as efforts
to find who is to blame for tragedy have made little progress
Martin
Chulov in Beirut
Wed 4 Aug
2021 05.00 BST
When his
workplace blew to pieces, dockworker Yusuf Shehadi was waiting to hear back
from colleagues who had scrambled to help firefighters extinguish a blaze in
the port of Beirut. The fire was bad and getting worse, they told him in their
last conversation before a giant explosion killed them, and 210 others, a year
ago today.
The
catastrophic blast laid to ruin the place Shehadi had worked for a decade. And
he immediately knew its cause. “I had taken the nitrate from the dock to the
hangar six years earlier,” he said of the massive stockpile of military-grade
fertiliser that he had helped move from a freighter to a nearby hangar in 2014.
Six years
later it had caught fire and pulverised Lebanon’s main port. “Their phones were
dead,” Shehadi said of his eight colleagues, four of whom were also dockworkers
who had helped unload the nitrate from a Russian freighter.
He soon
learned their fate and that of his home town through the Armageddon-like images
that reverberated around the world. Even in a city inured to trauma and loss,
the shocking scenes of Beirut’s devastated waterfront broke new ground for the
horror it caused at the time, and in the miserable year since when answers have
been few.
One year
on, the Lebanese capital remains a shell of a city; while most of the physical
damage has been repaired, the scar on Beirut’s psyche remains raw and
festering, its impact intensified by the anger of a people denied justice.
“Once, just
once – especially now – this country could have delivered an outcome for its
people,” said Fadia Doumit, as she stared at the tangled mess of metal and
masonry strewn across what used to be the port, near where she works. The
enormous debris field is in almost the same state as it was a year ago, a
memorial to a day that has come to define the dysfunction of Lebanon and the
complicity of its leaders.
Attempts at
judicial inquiries over the past year have led to several dozen bureaucrats
being detained, but leaders have refused to be questioned or to vote in favour
of lifting immunity that protects them from prosecution. “The Lebanese state
cannot and will not investigate itself,” said Shadi Haddid, from the town of
Broumana, which is near the port. “No one here is competent to sit in judgment
of the other.”
Questions
about the ultimate beneficiary of the nitrate, how much of it detonated, how it
caught fire and whether any of the stockpile was removed remain unanswered.
“Everyone knows they don’t want to get to the bottom of this,” said Haddid. “It
would implicate the whole political class, one way or another.”
In the
absence of any effective local probe, it has fallen to local lawyers,
journalists and civil-society actors to explore the circumstances around the arrival
of the Russian freighter, the Rhosus, which later sunk at its moorings at the
port, and what then happened to the 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate unloaded
from it.
“They never
told us how much we were moving, but it was a lot,” said Shehadi. “And some of
it was in bad condition, with water in the bottom of the bags. It was so
caustic it eroded the front of the forklifts.”
Over the
past year, the Guardian has been told by international investigators, Lebanese
police sources and by one dockworker that some of the nitrate was moved from
the hangar soon after it was delivered.
Lebanese
investigators suggest that it may have been moved to Syria to be used in crude
explosives, known as barrel bombs, that were dropped from Syrian military
helicopters on to opposition-held parts of the country during the peak years of
the civil war there.
“There were
several trucks that were intercepted and turned back by [Lebanon’s] internal
security forces circa 2015-16,” said one senior official. “They could never
work out where the nitrate was coming from.”
However,
this claim has been contradicted by European investigators, who say an
extensive investigation of the port and its activities has shown that
large-scale smuggling of nitrate from the site in question – hangar 12 – was
unlikely.
Asked about
an FBI report that suggested closer to 600 tonnes than 2,750 exploded, the
authors of the report concurred, but said the remainder probably burned in the
subsequent fire. A European investigator added a caveat that security cameras
showing the hangar’s main doors had not been working for up to several years.
Shehadi too
doubts that nitrate was smuggled out of the port either at the time it was
delivered or subsequently. “There were six doors and they were monitored,” he said.
“They would have needed forklifts to move it, and we would have known.”
Central to
investigations has been the sudden diversion in 2013 of the Rhosus to Beirut,
where it was tasked with picking up 160 tonnes of agricultural machinery to
take to the Jordanian port of Aqaba.
The ship,
however, was already at full capacity and not equipped to take on such heavy
pieces. Its deck buckled after the first loading attempts, and the Rhosus was
impounded in lieu of paying port fees.
For the
next 10 months, the crew was not allowed to leave the ship as port authorities
tried to trace the ship’s owners. “I used to take them food,” said Shehadi.
“They had no idea where they were going at any point in the journey. “There was
something strange about all this.”
Of further
interest has been the shell company used to buy the nitrate. Savaro Limited –
whose ultimate ownership remains unknown one year on – was used only once to
facilitate a deal between a now defunct company in Georgia and a mine in
Mozambique, where the nitrate could have been used for explosives for mining.
The use of
a so-called sole purpose vehicle is seen by lawyers in the UK and in the region
as irregular. The London address of the company was also used to register
companies linked to two Syrian businessmen sanctioned by the US, for allegedly
procuring nitrate for the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad.
Unpicking
the opaque mess of the Rhosus’s journey, the purchase of the nitrate, whether
Mozambique was ever the intended destination and what happened to its cargo
once it reached Beirut have led to cautious responses from most stakeholders.
Asked about
a potential link to Syria at the launch of a landmark Human Rights Watch report
into the explosion, the organisation’s crisis and conflict director, Lama Fakih
said: “The investigation raises questions but we don’t have anything
definitive.”
The HRW
report delivered a scathing summary of the Lebanese leadership, which was
repeatedly warned of the dangers at the port.
“The
evidence currently available indicates that multiple Lebanese authorities were,
at a minimum, criminally negligent under Lebanese law in their handling of the
Rhosus’s cargo,” the report said. “The actions and omissions of Lebanese
authorities created an unreasonable risk to life. Under international human rights
law, a state’s failure to act to prevent foreseeable risks to life is a
violation of the right to life.
“In
addition, evidence strongly suggests that some government officials foresaw the
death that the ammonium nitrate’s presence in the port could result in and
tacitly accepted the risk of the deaths occurring. Under domestic law, this
could amount to the crime of homicide with probable intent, and/or
unintentional homicide.”
The report
was seen as a validation by many Lebanese. “This is what a competent inquiry
should do, and it needs to be replicated by an international team,” said Yusra
Ahmad, at a Beirut cafe. “Finally something for the leaders to fear.”
Toby Cadman
from lawyers Guernica 37 chambers said a credible international probe was
vital. The special tribunal for Lebanon was “a costly and ineffectual academic
exercise that delivered little,” he said of a 15-year probe into the killers of
former prime minister Rafik Hariri.
“The
international community needs to look to a more inclusive, efficient mechanism,
such as those pursued to great effect in the western Balkans. We are exploring
such an initiative currently, bringing together Lebanese and international
legal experts in an independent commission.”
At a verge
overlooking the port at sunset on Tuesday, Dana Salha stood viewing the
carnage. “It should stay here for ever as a testament to what happened. Where
else in the world could this remain unchallenged?”
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