Beirut, a city in ruins

The Lebanese capital, already on its knees, has been battered by explosions

The August 4 explosions in central Beirut that killed at least 154 people and injured thousands is the latest blow to a city that has been grappling with many crises. Beirut is no stranger to tragedies. In the past five decades, the city has seen a prolonged civil war, assassination of an elected President and a former Prime Minister, terrorist attacks and foreign bombings. Still, Beirut moved on.

But the last few months have been particularly bad for the Lebanese capital as political and economic crises brought life to its knees. Lebanon is going through one of its worst economic crises. The public, angered over corruption and the government’s inability to provide even basic services, are in a permanent agitation mood. The blasts, believed to have been caused by ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at the Beirut port, could deepen the economic and political crises.

 

Once an outpost of crusaders, Beirut was captured by the Ottomans in the early 16th century. The city was locally ruled by Druze emirs, who at times had challenged the Ottoman control. By the 17th century, it emerged as an important trading hub between Europe and the Ottoman Sultanate. European and American missionaries became active in the city. The Syrian Protestant College, established by American Protestant missionaries in 1866, later became the famed American University of Beirut. After the fall of the Ottomans following the First World War, Lebanon came under the French mandate. France retained its control until the country became independent in 1943.

Civil war

For over three decades since independence, Beirut flourished as trade and finance hub under its western style government. The multi-ethnic, multi-religious city was also seen as a liberal haven in an otherwise authoritarian West Asia.

But there were fault lines, too. The governance system the French left behind favoured the Maronite Christians, whose ties with Europe go back to the Ottoman period. The influx of Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war had changed Lebanon’s demographics as well. Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) moved to Lebanon after it was expelled from Jordan in 1970. Battles between the Christian militia, Kataeb, and the PLO broke out in April 1975 in Beirut, which would soon slide into a bigger civil war. For Beirut, the civil war opened the gates of hell.

The city was practically divided into two — the Muslim dominated west and the Christian east. Militias controlled both parts and fought against each other, while the government looked helpless. The years that followed were one of the most tumultuous periods in Lebanon’s modern history.

The country would first see Syrian troops coming, which would be followed by multinational troops and then the 1978 and 1982 invasions by Israel. In 1982, the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon, but the civil war continued, with local Christian and Muslim militias fighting each other. Radicalised by the 1979 Iranian revolution and the Israeli invasions, the country’s Shias, largely inhabited in the south and east, would form Hezbollah, expanding the scope of the conflict.

On October 23, 1983, two truck bombs blew apart the buildings in Beirut that housed American and French military members, killing 307 people. Earlier in the year, the US. Embassy in the city was bombed, killing 17. The bombings forced the multinational forces to leave the country.

The civil war came to an official end with the 1989 Taif agreement, according to which a Maronite Christian would be President, a Sunni Prime Minister and a Shia Parliament Speaker. This tenuous confessional system held the country together ever since, but with economic troubles mounting in recent years, the old fault lines came back to haunt the country again. And Beirut, being the capital city with an estimated 2.2 million population, has been the fulcrum of crisis.

Since late last year, the city has seen large protests, which sometimes slipped into sectarian violence. Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned last year amid protests, leading to the formation of a new government of technocrats, but the economy remains in ruins. The blasts, which have battered the downtown Beirut, make matters worse for the city, which is already on its knees.