A Conveyor Belt into the Abyss: Two Years on from the Beirut Blast
Two years after the devastating blast that rocked Beirut’s port, D.C.’s Lebanese ex-pat community watches as the country further sinks into a dark abyss
By: Aneeta Mathur-Ashton
Capstone submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master’s in Journalism and Public Policy with international specialization from The American University School of Communication 2022
For Nassim Geagea, a cinematographer based out of Beirut, August 4, 2020, was a nice Saturday, just like any other day. Geagea had friends visiting him from Dubai and they were driving up the mountains outside the capital.
Everything seemed normal until their car began to violently shake at 6 p.m.
Geagea saw everyone running toward a cliff to see what happened. He too got out and ran toward it but couldn’t see anything. So, he got back into the car and drove down the mountain.
He saw a gigantic mushroom cloud engulfing the capital.
Lebanon has had a history of political assassinations, former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri’s in 2005, and Geagea assumed something similar had occurred.
He was wrong.
A fire at the Port of Beirut triggered an explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, killed 218 people, injured hundreds more, and caused around $1.5 billion in damage.
The blast did not just decimate a crucial part of the city. It exposed decades of corruption and economic disaster accumulating under the surface since the country’s devastating civil war.
Now two years later with little progress to show, Lebanon’s ex-pat community in Washington is riddled with fear and guilt as they watch their life savings disappear and their country fall into a deep political and economic abyss with little hope of returning.
The blast itself
The blast at the port was caused when a cargo carrying the ammonium nitrate caught on fire.
The fire triggered an initial smaller explosion, which was followed by a massive second explosion that was felt as far as Turkey, which is more than 500 miles from Lebanon.
After the explosion, Lebanese officials admitted the stockpile had been sitting there for more than six years.
The blast fast-tracked the country’s ongoing financial crisis, which accumulated since the country’s civil war.
Aya Mazjoub, a Lebanon and Bahrain researcher in the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch, said the country’s financial collapse formally began in 2019 and was caused by overspending by the country’s government.
The central bank gave the government lots of money by borrowing from international lenders and Lebanon’s commercial banks, Mazjoub said.
“They [the government] basically devised a Ponzi scheme where they were offering interest rates up to 17% for people to deposit their money in commercial banks, and then the banks were giving this money to the central bank who was then loaning it back to the government,” Mazjoub said.
The scheme became unsustainable, causing the Lebanese Lira, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar, to devalue almost 95%, forcing the banks to lock and preventing people from accessing hard currency, she said.
The blast, in addition to the existing economic issues and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, caused the country’s GDP to plummet from $55 billion in 2018 to $20.5 billion in 2021, according to a report by The World Bank.
Record-high inflation and the steady devaluing of the country’s currency have left everyday people dependent on their family members outside Lebanon to provide them with necessities like food, medicine, and clothes.
Starting over after losing everything
Two years after the blast, Geagea lives a new life 5,000 miles away from Beirut in an apartment in Washington.
As he waits for his work permit to be approved, he spends his free time going to therapy to work through the PTSD he was diagnosed with shortly after the blast.
While he enjoys the new life he is building in the United States, he admits it was never part of his plan.
Geagea made good money as a cinematographer in the Middle East, hopping between countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Like others in the private sector at the time, his salary was in U.S. dollars instead of the Lebanese Lira.
Geagea said everything was going according to plan until the country’s economic situation worsened in 2019, causing interest rates on bank withdrawals to increase to astronomical figures.
“At some point, they would say ‘give us $30,000 and you’ll get 15% interest rate.’ This is where we felt like oh, there’s something going wrong,” Geagea said.
The situation worsened from there when the withdrawal amount decreased from $1,000 to just $50, he said.
Once the withdrawal figure hit $50, Geagea said the banks stopped withdrawals in U.S. dollars and would only give it in the Lebanese pound.
Because he was only being paid in U.S. dollars, Geagea was forced to turn to the black market to convert it to the Lebanese Lira to buy necessities.
Geagea said the conversion process caused his money to lose up to 90% of its value. He ended up losing a significant amount of his life savings over the span of two years.
The massive loss of his life savings, compounded with the loss of his home, forced Geagea to leave Lebanon and resettle in Washington.
Expats bear the brunt:
Geagea is not alone. Hundreds of Lebanese have resettled in Washington in the years leading up to the blast and after due to the economic crisis.
Edy Semaan, a communications specialist at the World Bank, based in Washington, was also forced to leave the country.
Born and raised in Beirut, Semaan left five years ago at the onset of the crisis, making him the first person in his family to leave.
After he left, Semaan was forced to become his family’s main source of income. His dad lost his retirement fund.
“I had to leave my old country and my friends and my family to be able to build a future for myself elsewhere somewhere in a different country,” he said. “That is hard on anybody, let alone having to be at 28 the sole financial provider for your entire nuclear family.”
Semaan never anticipated taking on this role. Nor did he predict the strain getting worse after the blast, as his family’s dependency on him doubled.
His mother still works but her salary is deflated because it is in the Lebanese Lira.
“My mom’s salary per month is only enough for her to fill up her car with gas and to buy some groceries. Imagine one trip to the grocery store and a month’s worth of gas in the car is what her entire salary per month allows her to purchase,” Semaan said.
Semaan said he struggles with his family’s financial responsibilities as a young adult living in a big city.
“Even the fun stuff that we want to do, you can’t because you have to think about how to save that money to send to your family. It really is not possible to think about yourself,” Semaan said. “You have to put your family first because there are several people counting on you.”
Looking forward:
On May 15th, Lebanon headed into its first parliamentary election since 2018, bringing modest but meaningful change in the country’s political framework.
The elections saw the Iran-backed militant group and political party Hezbollah lose its majority and independent candidates win 13 parliament seats.
While many believed the elections would usher in big changes, others questioned the potential for change given the country’s track record.
Kareem Chehayeb, a Beirut Correspondent for Al Jazeera English, said he doesn’t know how hopeful a person can be when the country has been relying on “patchwork measures” to support the economy and avoid any structural reform to repair the damage.
“Can we convince everyone who has left to invest their money in the country, trust the banks, and take the risk of contributing to society again?,” Chehayeb said.
For Jad Blaik, the child of one of the thousands of Lebanese who fled after the 1975 civil war, the election, compounded with the turmoil of the last decade, has left him with the difficult task of understanding what it truly means to identify as Lebanese.
“To identify [as Lebanese] is very difficult already. And it’s harder having never lived there but to then slowly see your country deteriorate. It begs the question of if Lebanon is turning into just simply a concept and a culture and no longer a sovereign state.”