Beirut, the anger of Fatima: “The port still burns for us”

Fatima’s husband, Ahmed, worked in the port of Beirut for thirty years. It was one of the cleaners. Thirty years is also the time she and Ahmed were married. A union made of effort, affection, sharing of sacrifices. Fatima says that God did not want to send their children but that he was nevertheless generous: never a quarrel, never a broken word “every time he went out to go to work he would say to me: I’ll be back soon”. He also said it on August 4, 2020, before saying goodbye to start the afternoon shift from which, however, Ahmed never returned. He was killed like 200 other people by the double explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate in the port of Beirut. Fatima felt the earth shake once, then twice, she thought it was an attack, then she feared an air attack, then she thought about hiding “fifteen years of civil war taught me how to do it.” After an hour, when silence replaced the sound of broken glass, Fatima turned on the television: an explosion in the port, maybe two. The dead on the streets. The screams, the destroyed neighborhoods. “Ahmed where are you? Why don’t you answer? », The cry that from that moment accompanied her for twelve days while, against all rational criteria, Fatima continued to hope that the rescuers would find her husband, that they would call her to tell her that he would return home injured but I live. Instead they phoned her on August 16 to report that the first body found in the morning was that of her husband, under a pile of rubble, in work clothes. Since then Fatima has been walking every day towards the port of Beirut “I can smell it,” she says, leaning against a tree in front of the entrance gate, “it was her second home. Coming to see him here makes more sense than visiting the cemetery because I feel that he left a message for me under the rubble, before he died, and the message is: ask for justice ”. So for 14 months, every 4th of the month, Fatima has been demonstrating in front of gate number 3 with the other relatives of the victims, to ask for justice for the dead, for the 6,500 wounded, the devastated neighborhoods. Now that she is alone, the struggle for truth marks her days «I have to show the world that corrupt governments have stolen our most precious things and they have to pay for it. I don’t trust politicians, I don’t trust the judiciary but I believe in the good faith of a man, who is Judge Tarek Bitar. If God protects him, we will finally have the names of the guilty ones, we will have justice, and finally we will give ourselves peace ». Tarek Bitar is the titular judge of the investigation into the explosion at the port. For months it has become the symbol of the war against the underworld, the patronage management of power in a country where everything, from politics to business, is divided according to sectarian logic. Judge Bitar took over from Fadi Sawan, who was removed from office in February because he was accused by three former ministers who he had accused for negligence of not being impartial: his home had been damaged by the explosion, which made him unreliable according to the accused. Bitar, replacing him, not only did not tone down, but kept the lines of inquiry of his predecessor and added other former ministers to the list of suspects, unnerving the force that most influences the fate of the country: the Shiite Hezbollah movement, which he does not want an investigation, let alone a trial, and he demonstrated this by asking his supporters to take to the streets last October 15. The result was the most serious armed confrontation in a decade. The city militarized for hours. The snipers on the buildings, the tanks on the street and a death toll of seven and at least thirty injured. For all the specter of the return to civil war. Hezbollah does not want the names of the port security officers linked to the movement to emerge and has played the most subtle card by intimidating public opinion. The demonstration was the muscular, armed test that Hezbollah can control not only the consent of its supporters but the balance of Najib Mikati’s government – which has just taken office after 13 months of stalemate – and of parliamentary life. Hezbollah ministers have threatened to withdraw from the government if Judge Tarek Bitar is not removed from the investigation and in the strict sectarian division of power in Lebanon, if the Shiite representation withdraws, the government falls and the existence of a cabinet administering the power, are linked to the international aid that the country desperately needs given that the currency has lost 90% of its value in less than two years and that 78% of the population now lives below the poverty line. A few weeks before the demonstration, Tarek Bitar had asked to be able to summon politicians and security officials, had set hearings to question former Prime Minister Hassan Diab and had declared that he wanted to interrogate three former ministers and bring a trial against them with the accusation of murder and criminal negligence. Many refused to appear, Hassan Diab went to the United States in order not to attend the hearing and the others, especially Hezbollah representatives, began to accuse him of wanting to politicize the investigation. It was clear to the families of the victims from the beginning that Bitar would encounter the same challenges and obstacles as his predecessor, so the judge began to represent more than the transparent application of the law, but a hope for change in a country in to which everything seems destined to crystallize to guarantee impunity for the elites by harming ordinary people. Zeina Matta is a Christian, like Fatima she walks towards the port every 4th of the month with the photo of her martyr from the explosion. Charbel, his son, was a soldier. After the first explosion, she first called her mother, told her that she was running to help the injured, not to leave the house for any reason. He called her back after an hour, described the smoke, the people crying in the street, the ambulances that weren’t enough, the kids in the street with their legs cut off “don’t go out, mom – he reiterated – I’m going to the port, they need me there, that God protect us ». In the following hours, Zeina tried to contact him many times. First the phone rang empty, then it stopped ringing. He wandered around hospitals for four days asking if his son had been hospitalized there, then started showing his photo asking about his dead body, and eventually found him in a mortuary wrapped in a white sheet, with uniform. stained with blood, perhaps from the people he was helping before he died. «The flames of the port have never been extinguished for us – says Zeina, bending over the photo of her son – if we do not get justice they will never go out. For this we need to believe in Tarek Bitar. We don’t have a state, maybe we never had one. We no longer have our children. At least we want to know who starved us, who killed them. ‘