This is a personal essay.
On August 4, 2020, I was at home when the city entered my house without knocking.
Not Beirut the postcard. Not Beirut the metaphor. Not the tirelessly resurrected Beirut of songs, tourism campaigns and sentimental speeches. A different Beirut came in: a city of shattered glass, collapsing ceilings, ripped doors, pulverized walls and that immense, inhuman sound that seemed to come not from the port but from inside the earth.
For a few seconds, perhaps minutes, time was no longer a sequence. There was no before, no after, no explanation. Only matter turning against us. Windows became weapons. Furniture flew. Walls shook. Houses folded inward over the heads of the people who had believed themselves safe inside them.
We ran. We called names. We checked bodies. We stepped over glass. We tried to understand whether what had happened was an earthquake, an air strike, the end of the world, or merely another Lebanese day advancing to its logical conclusion.
Then came the sirens.
That was followed by the images of streets we knew rendered unrecognizable, of faces opened by glass, of people carrying other people, of hospitals already drowning in crisis receiving an entire wounded city at once. More than two hundred people were killed. Thousands were injured. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Beirut looked as though a giant hand had struck it across the face – the result of one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded. 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, stored in a warehouse with minimal security precautions, had blown up, ignited by a nearby fire.
No one has been held accountable because impunity in Lebanon is not a malfunction of the system. It is one of its principal functions.
Yet numbers, however necessary, have always had a strange relationship with catastrophe. They measure its scale while concealing its intimacy. “Thousands injured” does not tell you about the shard that remained lodged in Yara’s flesh. “Hundreds of thousands displaced” does not tell you what it means for Ramzi to see the contents of his life lie exposed to the sky. “More than two hundred dead” does not tell you about the chair that will remain empty at the Najjar family table, long after the television cameras have moved on.
This is why I said this was a personal essay. Because I remember everything. Every obscenity.
And then came the aftermath. The brooms. The volunteers. The young people arriving from every corner of the country to sweep streets, remove rubble, cover broken windows and carry what the state had once again dropped. I remember Beirut bandaging Beirut while its rulers rehearsed their expressions of concern.
The Lebanese were praised, naturally, for their resilience. Resilience is the compliment most often paid to people whom nobody intends to protect.
We cleaned. We rebuilt. We buried our dead. We returned to damaged offices, damaged homes, damaged streets. Some of us replaced the glass. Some left the country. Some remained but never entirely returned.
And those responsible? They waited. They obstructed. They hid behind immunity, procedure, jurisdiction, political affiliation, sectarian reflex and the inexhaustible Lebanese talent for transforming a straightforward demand for justice into an existential threat against an entire community.
Six years have passed. A child born on the day of the explosion is now old enough to ask questions. Old enough to understand that things happen for reasons. Old enough to expect adults to tell the truth.
What answer would we give that child? That hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate were stored for years in the heart of the capital, while officials knew enough to warn one another but apparently not enough to protect us? That one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in modern history took place in a city of millions, yet responsibility dissolved on contact with power? That the investigation was repeatedly blocked by the very political and judicial system it was meant to examine? That in Lebanon, the closer a crime comes to the state, the further it moves from justice?
No one has yet been held accountable. The sentence is almost too simple for what it contains. No one.
Not because nothing is known. Not because the explosion left no documents, no correspondence, no chain of authority, no record of warnings, no evidence of negligence. Not because Lebanon lacks judges, laws, courts or prisons. And certainly not because the crime was too small to merit the state’s attention.
No one has been held accountable because impunity in Lebanon is not a malfunction of the system. It is one of its principal functions.
The investigation has recently moved again. Judge Tarek Bitar, having spent years fighting obstruction and paralysis, completed the main phase of his inquiry earlier this year, reportedly identifying approximately 70 people as suspects. This is important. It deserves cautious hope. But an investigation is not yet accountability, and hope is not a verdict.
We Lebanese have been asked to survive for so long that survival itself has become a method of governing us. Every time we manage to stand again, our endurance is used as evidence that what was done to us was somehow bearable. But surviving a crime does not make the crime smaller. Rebuilding a house does not acquit the person who destroyed it. And continuing to live is not the same as consenting to what nearly killed you.
Indeed, this is a personal essay. But in Lebanon, the personal is rarely only personal.
This is also a political essay, because political power determined who could be questioned, who could refuse to appear before a judge, who could obstruct an investigation and who remained exposed.
It is a social essay, because the blast did not fall upon an equal society. Some could repair their homes, travel, seek treatment and begin again. Others were left to negotiate alone with broken walls, lost livelihoods, permanent injuries and grief.
It is an economic essay, because the explosion came amid the collapse of the currency, the destruction of savings and the implosion of public institutions. People were asked to rebuild homes with money trapped in banks, to pay for medical care in dollars they no longer possessed, and to reconstruct a city while those who had dismantled the country’s economy remained in power.
The explosion remains lodged in Beirut’s body and in ours. The obscenity is that it has been remembered by everyone except justice.
It is also a psychological essay, because six years without accountability teach a society something. They teach us that evidence does not necessarily lead to truth, that truth does not necessarily lead to judgment, and that judgment does not necessarily reach the powerful. They teach us to distrust not only institutions, but causality itself.
A crime without consequences does not remain in the past. It continues to happen.
It happens each time a victim’s family walks into another anniversary without an answer, as they did again only days ago. It happens each time a suspect turns procedure into refuge. Each time an official speaks of justice in the passive voice, as though justice were weather we must patiently wait for. Each time the country asks the wounded to commemorate what the state refuses to prosecute.
Perhaps this is the most devastating legacy of August 4 – not only that Beirut was blown apart, but that the meaning of responsibility was blown apart with it.
We know how to mark the anniversary. We light candles. We carry portraits. We read the names of the dead. We stand silent at 6:07. But remembrance without accountability risks becoming another service the victims are forced to perform for the country that failed them. They must keep the dead publicly alive because the institutions of the living have chosen amnesia.
Six years later, perhaps the most obscene thing is not that the crime has been forgotten. It has not. The explosion remains lodged in Beirut’s body and in ours. The obscenity is that it has been remembered by everyone except justice.
So yes, this is a personal essay. And I no longer want to be told that August 4 belongs to my memory. It belongs in a courtroom.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
