Today is 1 September 2020. It marks the centennial of French general Gouraud’s declaration of the state Lebanon. French president Emanuel Macron is visiting Beirut, the second time in a month and a half, and has announced a third visit before the end of the year. In a symbolic gesture meant to show his affinity to the people and culture, his first stop on this visit was with Lebanese iconic singer Fairuz in her own home. He granted her the Legion of Honour award. In another symbolic gesture, French military jets pierced the Beirut sky, leaving a thick trail of red and white smoke—the colours of the Lebanese flag. I was working at my desk when I heard the sound of low flying fighter jets. My body went into full panic mode. I hid my head in my arms and started shaking, crying, and asking “what’s this sound?” I knew full well what the sound was given my experiences in Lebanon. My husband rushed to hug me and repeated in my ear, almost like a mantra “we are safe, we are safe.” It has been a month since the Beirut explosion, the strongest nonnuclear blast in history, that left half of our city destroyed, plus 200 people dead, 7000 injured, about 50 still missing under the rubble, and hundreds of thousands homeless. We are devastated, enraged, and under acute stress. Needless to say, the symbolic gesture of flying jets was mind-blowingly tone deaf to the current moment, the history of Israeli bombardments, and the legacy of French colonial rule.
No matter how many hugs Mr. Macron gives to the people in the streets, the Lebanese people today stand alone. Someone commented that we are like children who were forced to raise themselves because their abusive carers were never really there for them. By carers, they meant our elected officials, not a paternalistic neocolonial figure. The people are cleaning the rubble, the people are looking for missing persons, the people are paying for the broken glass, the people are feeding each other, the people are protesting the army’s attempt to end searches for the missing. The people have no one but each other in this wretched city. Messages proliferate everywhere: for blood donors, for volunteers to distribute food, for people to accompany others who are too frail to walk into their destroyed homes alone. Independent journalists are working for free, while official and private media outlets still host criminal politicians. A group of architects and engineers are offering to do repair work with no return, while some big NGOs are accumulating data and external funding. We have no one but ourselves. So far, a Chilean rescue dog has done more to help us than the entire political class. The dog’s name is Flash.
The destroyed part of the city hosted a large number of art galleries, museums, and studios. It is where many artists live. The blast hit the heart of culture production in Beirut. I’m not someone who mourns art before living creatures. But art is one of the things that made Beirut bearable and recognisable for some of us. 2750 tones of highly explosive ammonium nitrate stored amongst us in the port of Beirut have exposed the layers of destruction, abuse, negligence, and disregard for our lives. We will seek justice and revenge. We cried the day of the explosion and after. Now we care more about revenge than justice. The political rulers of Lebanon are warlords even in peace times. They wage war by other means, on each other but mainly on us. They accumulate wealth through extreme violence, reconstruction plans, and denying us basic services. They now want us to forget the blast, enjoy the show in the sky, and think about the possibilities that reconstruction can bring. This city was never ours to begin with. Its municipality is taken hostage by corrupt men, its public spaces shrink every year, its sea is polluted and privatised, its roads are hostile to walking or cycling, and never meant for public transport. The only scenarios we can see in the proposed reconstruction is further alienation between the city and its people.
Since the Lebanon uprising of October 2019, large numbers of people are protesting, resisting, challenging, and placing their bare bodies in the streets. They regularly confront state oppression through the army, police, and the private militias. Two days after the Beirut explosion, reports circulated about dangerous chemicals in the air. Despite that, people took to the streets and demanded justice. The state responded by throwing an unprecedented amount of tear gas on protestors, as if trying to suffocate the survivors. The tear gas canisters are French made, produced by the French company SAE Alsetex and sold with the support of the French government. They are so powerful that they are listed as military-grade weapon for war, not civilian crowd control. On television, I saw Mr. Macron giving a speech on the resilience of Lebanese people and how we should listen to the protestors. Over the screen, there is a French-made tear gas canister that I kept as a souvenir from a protest in 2015.
Tania El Khoury