A casualty is evacuated after a protest turned violent in Beirut on October 14/Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

October 17, 2021

One of the most vivid descriptions of the personal afflictions of war that I’ve ever heard came from a Montreal cab driver recalling what it was like to grow up in the remote hills of Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley during the civil war of the 1980s. “I was just hitting puberty when the explosions started,” the man, now a father himself, recalled. “I felt terrible, because I thought that what was happening to my body was also causing the explosions.”

The life of Lebanon over the past four decades can be broadly catalogued in major explosions: The October, 1983, suicide bombings of the US and French peacekeeper barracks in Beirut that killed 307 people and led to the withdrawal of the multinational force; the 2,000-lb bomb that killed reformist Prime Minister Rafic Hariri on February 14, 2005 and left a 30-foot crater in the Corniche; and the August 4, 2020 Beirut port explosion of 2,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate that killed 218, injured 7,000, left an estimated 300,000 people homeless and caused $15 billion USD in property damage.

Last year’s port explosion wasn’t the most morbidly ironic of the three — that prize goes to Hariri’s assassination for the date chosen by the perpetrators, which made it Lebanon’s Valentine’s Day Massacre. After 11 years of investigation into that assassination, the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon rendered its verdict that there was no evidence either Hezbollah leadership or the Syrian government — both long assumed to be suspects one and two — were involved in the murder. That verdict, delayed by the port explosion from August 7 to August 18, 2020, was followed last December by the sentencing in absentia of Hezbollah militant Salim Ayyash — whereabouts unknown — to five consecutive life terms for Hariri’s assassination.

Lebanon is now reliving the protracted national drama of the Hariri bombing and the corruption-besieged investigation into it, only with a much bigger crater, a much longer casualty list and the knowledge that this time, the catalyzing tragedy was generated not (that we know of at this writing) by tactical depravity but by its frequent sidekick, stupidity.

Yes, the Beirut port catastrophe comes a close second in irony for being the first major explosion in Lebanon in anyone’s memory that wasn’t ignited by political belligerence. That hasn’t kept the aftermath of the port explosion from being leveraged for political belligerence, which in Lebanon also travels under the alias of sectarian violence.

The violence this time is both simpler and more complicated. The key contributor to the political crisis engulfing the Lebanese people this time is not the usual sectarianism.

The investigation into this explosion and the sequence of unfathomable, corruption-imbued choices at multiple levels of government that caused it is being led by Judge Tarek Bitar, the chief magistrate of the country’s criminal court, who is known to be unburdened by political or sectarian affiliation to any of Lebanon’s factions, parties, militias or rivalrous coalitions. Bitar is the second judge to head the investigation. The first one, Fadi Sawan, was removed in February after charging two former ministers with criminal negligence in the disaster.

Which brings us to Judge Bitar’s Catch-22. The first explosion in the modern history of Beirut not attributed to political warfare is, again, widely attributed to political corruption; the same political corruption that removed Bitar’s predecessor from the post, and that hangs as a threat over his every move. On October 12, Bitar issued an arrest warrant for MP Ali Hassan Khalil, a senior official and former finance minister in Survivor Hall of Fame member Nabih Berri’s Amal party. Bitar has also issued warrants against former Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk, an ally of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated Rafic.

“Judge Bitar is giving the Lebanese hope in the domestic judiciary after many people have totally given up on justice and accountability locally,” Aya Majzoub of Human Rights Watch Lebanon told Al Jazeera. “He is single-handedly facing off with the entire political establishment that is implicated in the Beirut blast.”

Both President Michel Aoun, a Christian, and newly installed Prime Minister Najib Mikati, a Sunni Muslim, are supporting Bitar against pressure from Iran-backed Hezbollah, the Shia political party listed as a terrorist entity by both Canada and the US that possesses more military hardware than the Lebanese Army.

On October 14th, a protest by the foot soldiers of Hezbollah and fellow Shia group Amal calling for Bitar’s removal turned deadly when unidentified rooftop snipers fired into the crowd. Six people were killed in the four-hour shootout that ensued, with responsibility for the incitement still unclaimed and Hezbollah blaming the Christian Lebanese Forces party, which blames the violence on the disruptive ubiquity of Hezbollah guns. Witnesses expressed fear of a possible return to the days when Beirut was a circular, sectarian/political firing squad with civilians caught in the crossfire.

The violence this time is both simpler and more complicated. The key contributor to the political crisis engulfing the Lebanese people this time is not the usual sectarianism. This cycle of strife began with the country’s worst economic meltdown of modern times, in which the Lebanese pound has lost 90 percent of its value since 2019, inflation in 2020 was 84.9 percent and the port explosion was what chaos theorists might call the tipping point of a phase transition. In other words, it didn’t help.

Lebanon’s sectarian political divisions have existed in their modern form — through peace, war, Syrian suzerainty, Iranian interference, triumphs of pluralist democracy — for decades. But the current crisis, which, in its unprecedented alchemy of avoidable, man-made human suffering, echoes other recent hell-on-earth datelines from Venezuela to Afghanistan to Ethiopia to Haiti, is also the product of hypercorruption. Which is why the man who is both the potential saviour and therefore the target of the piece is neither a moderate politician nor a radical cleric but an independent judge with a record of incorruptibility.

The corrupt interests inside and outside Lebanon who have the most to lose from authentic justice would prefer to disrupt that process by changing the narrative, unleashing havoc and exploiting the country’s reputation as a sectarian hornet’s nest as a cover. It’s the simplest way to divert from a crisis generated by corruption, exacerbated by corruption and whose rational solutions represent an existential threat to that corruption in the form of unfettered, functioning democracy.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington. She also served as communications director for the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building (ICAN).