We demand accountability for the Beirut blast
Six years after the explosion, the domestic investigation is complete, but an indictment is yet to be issued. On August 4, 2020, at 6:07 in
Six years after the explosion, the domestic investigation is complete, but an indictment is yet to be issued. On August 4, 2020, at 6:07 in the evening, we lost the people we loved the most. Children and parents, husbands and wives, firefighters who ran towards the port while everyone else ran away. The explosion that killed at least 218 people, wounded 7,000, and left more than 150 physically disabled was no accident. It was the foreseeable result of thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate left to rot in the heart of our capital, with the knowledge, in writing, of the highest officials of the state. For six years, we have been told to wait. We waited while the first investigating judge was removed for daring to summon ministers. We waited while his successor, Judge Tarek Bitar, was buried under lawsuits filed by the very men he sought to question, while the investigation stayed suspended for years, while politicians who owed us answers hid behind immunity they had written for themselves. We buried our beloved ones twice: once in the ground, and once under the paperwork of a state determined to protect itself. Then, this March, something happened that we had almost stopped believing was possible. Lebanon’s domestic investigation was completed.
The file, naming 70 officials and security officers, arrived on the desk of Public Prosecutor Ahmad Rami Al Hajj. We were told this was a breakthrough, and it was. We welcome it. But here is what we were not told: nothing obliges the prosecutor to finish his review by any date at all. The file must come back with Al Hajj’s opinion before Judge Bitar can issue the indictment that brings the case to trial, and until then, accountability is paused. The results of the investigation can sit on Al Hajj’s desk for a month, or a decade. In Lebanon, we know what happens to files that sit on desks: they gather dust until the world forgets, and impunity wins. We will do everything in our power to ensure this is not how this case ends. We are not lawyers; we are families searching for the truth. But we understand something simple: an investigation that never becomes a trial is accountability denied, it is impunity by exhaustion. Our grief is not confined to Lebanon. Nationals of Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Pakistan, Palestine, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and the United States died or were terribly injured that evening. Fortunately, some governments did not look away. French forensic experts landed in the days after the explosion, and France’s own judicial investigation shared its findings with Judge Bitar.
The BriefWire