A Pit(i)less Blame Game at the Beirut Port of Institutional Corruption

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Sep 30, 2020 Lebanon
Beirut's grain silos were at the epicenter of the August 4 explosion at the port and had a capacity of 120,000 tons of grain. Beirut, Lebanon. August 6, 2020. (Zein Jaafar/The Public Source) Beirut's grain silos were at the epicenter of the August 4 explosion at the port and had a capacity of 120,000 tons of grain. Beirut, Lebanon. August 6, 2020. (Zein Jaafar/The Public Source)

A Pit(i)less Blame Game at the Beirut Port of Institutional Corruption

By : Rohan Advani

After the explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut on 4 August, half of the port was completely destroyed and sections of the city adjacent to it have become uninhabitable. The explosion claimed the lives of 191 victims, a death toll not yet settled, from firefighters, port and migrant workers, to nearby residents. Several are still missing. Three hundred thousand people have lost their homes in a city already facing a severe housing crisis fueled by years of real estate speculation. Residents of this country, whose ruling class has engaged in systematic plunder, redistributing wealth away from the masses to a small sliver, now have to confront the fallout of urban destruction and further dispossession wrought by political and economic schemes planned behind closed doors.

In the midst of accumulating calamities, the significance of the port and its destruction should not be underestimated either. Almost three quarters of Lebanon’s total imports pass through the Port of Beirut, which means that the majority of goods that sustain life in Lebanon have been compromised. United Nations officials warned that Lebanon’s government holds no strategic stockpiles of grains as its most important grain silos were destroyed. As a result of sheer criminal negligence, the country’s free zones have been wiped out, its storage facilities demolished and its warehouses razed to the ground. 

While corruption is touted as the primary suspect, this piece demonstrates how mismanagement, graft, and illicit activities are an institutionalized routine at the Port of Beirut. Rather than a "weak" Lebanese state unable to police and control corruption, this brief historical account of the port’s politics illustrates how Lebanon’s political class actively created and maintained the conditions for corruption and mismanagement to flourish. In effect, what took place on 4 August was no accident or simple negligence, but a crime rooted in political struggles.

Corruption and Deregulation: A Civil-War Legacy


For years, it has been an open secret that the Port of Beirut is characterized by institutional corruption and smuggling. For a ruling class as corrupt as Lebanon’s–systematically propped up by regional and international powers–it is not wholly surprising that such negligence took place, even if the scale of the disaster was unimaginable. 

From 1960 to 1990, the Port of Beirut was managed by a private concession granted to the wealthy Lebanese businessman, Henri Pharaon. During the Lebanese Civil War, parts of the port were destroyed and seized by the Lebanese forces, even though Pharaon still held the concession. In 1991, when the concession expired, the Lebanese government formally took control over the port as the war came to an end, seeking to restore its status as the most important port in Lebanon–the primary gateway between Lebanon and the global economy. Initially taken over on a temporary basis, the government sought to finalize the institutional status of the port, with some politicians arguing for an extension of the previous concession, others calling for privatization, and a minority hoping to establish some form of public sector control. “It will be built anew, entirely equipped with modern material and techniques...it will become the best,” said Minister of State for Transport Affairs, Shawki Fakhoury, in 1992.[1] Six years later, customs and excise revenues, mostly from the port, proved to be the biggest contributor to the state’s coffers, accounting for 43.1 percent of total government revenues.[2]

A rescue worker stands by the Beirut Port grain silo during a search operation. Beirut, Lebanon. August 6, 2020. (Zein Jaafar/The Public Source)
A rescue worker stands by the Beirut Port grain silo during a search operation. Beirut, Lebanon. August 6, 2020. (Zein Jaafar/The Public Source)
 

Yet for all the talk of restructuring, many of the pre-existing administrative structures and hierarchies from the previous private concession were kept in place as Lebanon’s politicians fought over the institutional future of the port. Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, for example, had been pushing for privatization while Elie Hobeika sought to extend the previous concession in order to take back control of the port from Samir Geagea. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Transport, headed by Shawki Fakhoury, an independent who had close ties with then President Elias Hrawi, and the Ministry of Energy, headed by Mohamad Yousef Beidoun, close to Salim al-Hoss, battled over which ministry the port would answer to.

To break years of political deadlock over the future management of the port, in 1993, Hariri appointed a “temporary committee” to manage the affairs of the port.[3] In order to reconcile differing political standpoints and economic interests, various contenders and political coalitions were each offered a seat on the committee. Yet the status of the committee was left intentionally unclear. The port kept its own private account at the Central Bank instead of transferring revenues directly to the Ministry of Finance, and because it was not considered a public institution, the committee’s books were never audited or made publicly available. Operating under overlapping ministerial jurisdictions and subject to competing political struggles, an institutionalized bureaucracy and regulatory supervision purposely failed to materialize.

Unsurprisingly, corruption and political patronage flourished. Numerous reports in the early 1990s noted that the port continued to function as an outlet for drugs that were produced and processed in Lebanon. Certain parts of the port were a no-go zone for Lebanese custom officials, as Syrian intelligence officials collected customs revenues and siphoned them off to Damascus. Customs officers and clearance agents would receive bribes from clients to evade taxes and to sometimes slow down cargos belonging to their competitors.[4] Cargo scanners were either bypassed or put out of commission, while safety measures were outright flouted in light of the weak regulatory mechanisms and juridical confusion. In one particularly outrageous example of corruption, the Ministry of Social Affairs granted a disability-related tax exemption for a luxury car to a three-month old child.

A Perpetual “Temporary Committee” 


These political struggles to control the port, in the wake of the civil war and the ensuing temporary committee, set the stage for the institutional ambiguity and corruption that came to haunt the port. The temporary committee was never disbanded and replaced by a permanent body. Headed by Hassan Koraytem, the general manager of the port, the committee’s temporary nature often served as a convenient pretext to evade institutional accountability.

Following accusations of smuggling at the port, Prime Minister Saad Hariri said in 2019 that, “[countering] smuggling is not the task of the temporary committee, but a duty of the security services, customs and military forces.” Yet a few years prior, Koraytem himself told the journalist, Jeremy Arbid, in a 2015 interview that he did not know how to classify the port, describing it as a private company owned by the government. In evidence of institutional ambiguity, the port authority unsurprisingly withheld the transfer of revenues to the treasury for the years 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2012. 

The temporary model also facilitated the brokering of deals with little oversight or democratic consensus. For example, in October 1998, just weeks before Hariri left office, it was made public that the Dubai Port Authority (now DP World) had reached an agreement with the Lebanese government to run the Beirut Port under a twenty-year contract. However, given the lack of a permanent bureaucracy, deals quickly became the object of political battles. When Selim al-Hoss was inaugurated as Prime Minister in 1998, many of Hariri’s allies at the port were expelled and replaced by allies of al-Hoss, then President Emile Lahoud, Speaker Nabih Berri, and the new Minister of Transport, Najib Miqati. Thirty-two politically connected private operators in the port demanded steep compensation for their loss of business, and by 2001, the Dubai Port Authority pulled out of the contract.[5] The final compromise was a form of partial privatization, whereby a US-UK consortium, alongside Lebanese investors and contractors with close political ties, took over the management of the container terminal and began operating it in 2005. 

But in September 2019, as part of a broader set of economic reforms, the government announced its aim to scrap the temporary committee and replace it with either a private company or a public-private partnership (PPP). Citing corruption as one of the main reasons for reform, Hariri said that “we will move toward a new stage,” by “implementing reforms, adopting advanced laws and stop[ping] smuggling.” A month earlier, former Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, took a surprise visit to inspect the port and lambasted the customs department, saying that “as of today, there is no [cover] over anybody’s head at customs.” According to Mohammad Chamseddine, a research analyst at the Beirut-based Information International, one to two billion dollars of government revenues is lost each year in evasion from customs duties at the port.

Whether significant progress had been made in scrapping the temporary committee remains unclear. Only five months before Hariri’s announcement, former Minister of Public Works and Transport, Youssef Fenianos, expressed “full confidence in the temporary committee that manages the port.” From 2005 to 2015, the government let the situation continue unabated as the port consistently turned handsome profits and increased revenues on a yearly basis. Only in the wake of dire economic crisis in late 2019, after a significant decline in revenues, did the government begin to take issue with the temporary committee and speak of reform in this sector. What is clear, however, is that these were anti-corruption campaigns led by the same ruling class that allowed corruption and negligence to thrive.

Criminal Negligence and Deflected Responsibility


Following the explosion and the beginning of a government probe, many are outraged as to why 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate were stored on the port after having arrived in November 2013. Customs officials said that their department had sent six letters to the judiciary demanding a solution to the problem of storage and removal. A source close to a port worker said that a team had inspected the material six months ago, warning that it could “blow up all of Beirut” if not removed.

While it remains questionable who is directly complicit, the institutional ambiguity has already ignited the blame game. In contrast to the customs officials’ claims, Interior Minister, Mohammed Fahmi, told citizens to ask customs why the ammonium nitrate was kept within reach of residential areas. Koraytem said that it had been put in a warehouse on a court order and knew it was dangerous, but “not to this degree.” In this public-private partnership model, actors take credit during times of success–but following disasters like this, the model quickly turns into a convenient tool to redirect responsibility toward the other actors. The result is a pitless blame game among Lebanon’s political elite, devoid of responsibility and accountability, let alone justice. 

Given the institutional framework of the port, the issue of overlapping ministerial jurisdiction, and competing political struggles over its management, the question of criminal negligence cannot be simply reduced to an individual affair. The entire system, constructed by the ruling class since the end of the civil war, is culpable. Corruption, safety violations, and even incompetence are not simply aberrations, but the expected outcomes of these struggles for control over infrastructures of influence.

As the government places several port officials under house arrest, Lebanon’s residents realize that those who have been ruling the country for decades are equally complicit in the greatest disaster to have struck Lebanon in recent history.

[This article was originally published on The Public Source as part of their (Dis)order Report Series on 22 September 2020.]

_________________________

[1] David Pike, “MEED Special Report on Shipping - Beirut Bounces Back from the Abyss,” Middle East Economic Digest, 27 March 1992.

[2] Hannes Baumann, Citizen Hariri: Lebanon's Neoliberal Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2016).

[3] Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2012), 189.

[4] Ibid, 41.

[5] Ibid, 192.

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
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Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412