When Worst Gets Worse

The blast in Beirut laid bare the wreckage from decades of sectarian politics

- Lin Noueihed

When Dany Chakour reopens his four upscale Em Sherif restaurants after repairing the damage wrought by the devastating Aug. 4 blast in Beirut, he plans to turn over the 11% sales tax he collects on each transaction to the local charities that helped clean up the city—instead of giving it to the government. “It’s a form of civil disobedience to give to trusted organizations in this time of need rather than to the state, where I don’t know how it will be spent,” Chakour says. “What has the state ever done for us? The state can’t even provide us with electricity.”

Lebanon was already coming apart at the seams before a 2,750-ton cache of ammonium nitrate detonated at the Port of Beirut, killing at least 171 people and wounding thousands. As the realization sank in that the blast was neither a terrorist attack nor the start of a new war with Israel but the culmination of decades of corruption and mismanagement, the streets exploded with rage.

Protests promptly dispatched the 7-month-old government of Prime Minister Hassan Diab, who blamed his failure to prevent the disaster or lift the country out of a deepening financial crisis on a political elite so entrenched and so self- serving that it threatens to “destroy what’s left of the state.”