Can Lebanon ever emerge from its fractious past?

The government of Hassan Diab finally resigned in Beirut on Monday evening after a steady trickle of ministerial departures over the weekend. The death toll from the explosion of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate in the port last week has now claimed the lives of at least 250, with more than 100 unaccounted for, at least 4,000 injured, and 300,000 homes wrecked.

The fact that this highly combustible material was allowed to rot in a dockside warehouse was down to institutional corruption, said the resigning Diab,  as if he and his ilk had nothing to do with it. His government will carry on as caretakers until a new team can be formed and elections organised.

So what does this change ? Not a lot, say the demonstrators who also want the president, the former Christian militia warlord Michel Aoun, to go, along with most of his supporters around him. The attitude on the streets reminds me of W B Yeats’s Irish airman foreseeing his death in 1918: “No likely end could bring them loss, nor leave them happier than before.”

The task of repair and renewal in Lebanon, a mix of moral, political and material, is monumental. It is not just a question of rebuilding the fabric of the city and of relaunching the country’s economy. How do you mend a collapsing society in a small country of 6.8 million, where just under a third are refugees, principally Syrian Arabs, Palestinians and Turkmen ?

This crisis has been in the making for at least 45 years, since the outbreak of the civil war in 1975. The conflict lasted 15 years, and entrenched the habit – which become a self-appointed right – of external powers such as Syria, Egypt the Gulf Arabs, Iran and Israel to meddle in Lebanese affairs.

The deal on which Lebanon’s independence was built, the National Pact of 1946, contained the seeds of the ensuing troubles. Under this agreement the presidency went to a Maronite Christian , the prime minister’s chair to a Sunni Muslim, and the presidency of the Assembly to a Shiite Muslim. The cracks and divisions were papered over in the boom years following independence, when Beirut became the Monte Carlo of the Levant. It was when war arrived in 1975 that competing clan interests, foreign intervention and mafia carve-ups began tearing the place apart.

The Lebanon crisis is a wicked problem compounded by toxic human geography as much as politics and history. It is a story of competing clans, states within states, and shadow states built on militia movements. It is a hub for the Arab world and its finances.

The immediate need is for aid and sustenance, and of course medical help in a country under the shadow of Covid-19. The cost to the economy of the blast is estimated to be about $15 billion; the immediate reconstruction of the capital’s fabric will cost about $3 billion.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has led the pledges for an immediate rescue fund of $298 million. After visiting the city immediately after the blast, showing that France as the old Mandate power which ran Lebanon from 1920 to 1946 is again in the lead, Macron said: “Assistance for an impartial, credible and independent inquiry on the explosion of 4 August is immediately needed and available, on the request of Lebanon.”

But the country’s president, Auon, retaliated with a warning that an international investigation would get in the way, and only “slow things down.”

Any aid package would have to take in the parlous state of the civilian population and the one million refugees from Syria facing borderline starvation. In addition, there are older refugee populations of Palestinians and Turkmen, and other minorities making up nearly three quarters of a million.

Since October the economy and the banking system have been on their knees. In 2018 Lebanon was offered a $11 billion “Cedre” (as in the national emblem) fund proposed by France, on the condition of radical overhaul and reform. Despite promises for reform and good behaviour, the attempt at reconstruction appears to have gone into the sand.

Regeneration and repair is only likely  to succeed if there is direct international supervision on the ground. One of the conditions of the Macron pledge of $298 million was that it should go “direct to the Lebanese people”. Whatever that means.

On the ground, an internationally led reconstruction is vital now for Lebanon and Libya. One parallel being talked about is the way the Italians almost singlehandedly shored up Albania through the 1990s in “Operation Pelican” at the cost of about $2 billion a year, although they got no thanks and very little help from either the EU or Nato for their efforts.

The obvious leader of such an international effort would be France and the EU, with assistance from the US, which participated in the pledging conference but did not lead. Comprehensive plans are needed across the region now for reconstruction. But this cannot happen with America trying to dial out, and France trying to speak for the entire EU’s foreign and security policy. France is now deeply mistrusted by many prominent EU allies, notably the Dutch and the Danes, for its mischievous sectarian support for Egypt’s client warlord in Libya, Khalifa Haftar, and its connivance in the Saudi-led campaign against Turkey’s alleged sponsorship of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The devil’s cocktail that Lebanon has become was grimly depicted by the veteran BBC Lebanon correspondent – one of the best they ever had – Kim Ghattas, now of the Carnegie Foundation. She said that if you are a Lebanese in your mid-40s you would have lived through 15 years of war, two Israeli invasions, 30 years of Syrian occupation, two Israeli bombing campaigns, assassinations, several bouts of economic collapse. She might add the flow of refugees since Syria went to war with itself in 2011,  and terrible massacres such as those in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982 by Christina militias and abetted by the Israelis.

The 30 years of partial occupation by Syria ended with the assassination in February 2005 of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Syrian agents and agents of their allies, Hezbollah, the Shiite militia-cum-party, were blamed. The UN Tribunal of inquiry was due to give a verdict last Friday; four Hezbollah agents were due to be named.

Hezbollah is the creature of both Assad’s Syria and Iran, a Shiite militia movement that rivals the Lebanese state. It emerged in the turmoil and fighting as a rival of the older Amal party to represent the Shiite community, the relative but poorer polarity, in the early 1980s. On 23 October 1983,it was behind two big truck and car bombings against the international peace force, killing 58 French paratroopers and 241 US Marines in their respective barracks. It formally declared as a party, founded by activists who had congregated originally at Najaf, the holy city of Shias in Iraq, in 1985.

Today it has members of parliament and seats in the outgoing coalition. It now has forces superior to those fielded by the Lebanese state either in its army or security police.

This is a fact of the war in Syria, where Hezbollah was cajoled and bribed by the Syrian and Iranian regimes to provide backbone to Assad’s weary soldiers and militias. Iran paid for training, new equipment, senior officers’ salaries and war widows’ pensions. It became one of the most formidable field guerrilla forces in the world today – a de facto army – according to Turkish and Israeli analyses.

As Kim Ghattas pointed out in her Guardian editorial, this makes the conspiracy theories about the explosion of August 4, convoluted and potent in rumour almost as much as in fact. Did Hezbollah have an arms dump nearby to the shed of the ammonium nitrate , and were the Israelis trying to attack that dump? Were Hezbollah planning to use the 2,750 tonnes of the compound offloaded from a dodgy Russian freighter in 2014 for their own nefarious purposes, for car bombs and other weapons, in and around Israel or Syria ?

Syria’s part in Lebanon’s story must always be factored into the country’s convolutions. Syria hast been there since the two countries became post-World War I mandates under the French in 1920. It shouldn’t be discounted now. They too have their clan interests and rich history of assassination of  grandees over the years.

Some Lebanese, including Kim Ghattas, hope the shock of the Beirut port explosion, seismic in every sense, will now at last bring change. Antoinette Baaklini of the Lebanon Electricity Company is not so hopeful: “It won’t work, it’s just the same people. It’s a mafia.”