Journalist Rami Khouri: Beirut Explosion Follows Years of Lebanese Gov’t Incompetence & Corruption
August 05, 2020 | Democracy Now!
▻https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/5/rami_khouri_lebanon_beirut_explosion
(...) RAMI KHOURI: Well, the information that has come out from the people who investigated it so far is that the storage shed was also storing some fireworks and other materials nearby, and it was those materials that caught fire or ignited or something happened because of the heat and humidity, and created a little fire. The fire department was there to put it out, and then that fire ignited the ammonium nitrate.
But the real story is not just the 3.5 magnitude Richter scale measurement. It’s the 9.0 magnitude political scale measurement that this is going to unleash. Because looking backwards and looking forwards, this explosion is a consequence of the cumulative incompetence, corruption, lassitude, amateurism and uncaring attitude by successive Lebanese governments, going back ten, 15 years that has brought the Lebanese people to a point of pauperization and desperation. They don’t have enough water. They don’t have electricity. They don’t have jobs. They don’t have reasonably priced food. Education is declining. Every dimension of life in Lebanon has declined, steadily, uninterruptedly, for the last 15 or 20 years.
It is the ruling political elite that is responsible for this, and looking back and looking forward, because this amount of ammonium nitrate was allowed to be stored there, when people knew about it. Other governments knew about it and did nothing about it. And people were talking to judges to pass a ruling to get the stuff out of there, because it was dangerous. And nobody did anything. So therefore the political shocks, the aftershocks are really going to be, I think, the significant dimension of this, beyond the humanitarian suffering that we are now seeing dealt with. (...)
That’s the real aftermath of this explosion. And you see it in people saying, for instance, Lebanese saying, “Don’t give aid money to the government. They will steal it. They have stolen everything else. They’re going to steal the aid money. Give aid money to the Lebanese Red Cross, to NGOs, to hospitals. But don’t give it to the Lebanese government.”
This is an important point because the ability of the Lebanese government, like all the Arab governments in the last 20 years or so, to continue a policy of autocratic authoritarian militarized policymaking that has led to the pauperization of a majority of Arabs. Around 70% of Arabs are poor or vulnerable now. And that is quickly increasing with COVID-19 and other things like this bombing.
The ability of Arab governments to maintain these cruel policies is very much linked to the support they get from international parties including the Americans, the French, the British, the Russians. Everybody. There’s nobody that comes out of this modern legacy of Arab state failures—nobody comes out looking good. The French president is supposed to go to Lebanon today. People are very much anxious to hear what he says. And if he just comes and meets with the Lebanese government and makes happy statements about “we will always support you,” people are going to jeer at him and tell him to go home. (...)