Many call for change in government after Beirut explosion
Shock waves from a massive explosion that ripped through Beirut last week continued to reverberate through the state’s Lebanese community over the weekend, as mourning turned to anger.
“We go from sadness to shock to anger,” said Nicole Samaha, 35, a pharmacist from Chestnut Hill. “Of course we go to anger.”
Across Boston’s close-knit Lebanese community, many have begun to call for a rebuilding of the Lebanese government after thousands of tons of state-seized ammonium nitrate officials had for years kept stored in the city’s port ignited Tuesday, killing 160 people, wounding more than 6,000, and destroying part of the historic capital.
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With the population of Lebanon roughly equal to that of Massachusetts, nearly everyone in the Middle Eastern country has been impacted by the blast, along with their friends and family around the world.
“Everyone knows someone missing, dead, in a coma, or homeless,” said Samaha in a phone interview. “To say the least, we are devastated.”
Investigators are probing negligence as a cause of the explosion after warnings that the compound, a highly explosive fertilizer, was unsafely stored at Beirut’s port and had been ignored for years, and that no action was taken to move the stockpile away from the area, which borders residential neighborhoods, high-end shops, and popular nightlife spots.
At a rally in solidarity with anti-government protests in Lebanon in Copley Square on Saturday night, dubbed “End of a System, Beginning of a Country,” most who attended had stories of the damage that they said negligence had inflicted.
Fadi Kanaan, 39, of Boston said some of his family had been treated for deep cuts and broken fingers. Rasheed Akiekie, 31, of Boston, who organized the rally, said his childhood home was destroyed in the blast. One of Samaha’s close friends is reported to be in a coma.
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Fadi Metri, 55, Braintree recounted in a phone interview how his niece was driven north of Beirut to another city to get treatment for cuts and a concussion after the explosion reached her apartment, destroying “everything with hinges.” St. George, the nearby hospital where she works as a doctor in residence, had been seriously damaged.
The Rev. Timothy Ferguson, who leads the largely Lebanese immigrant congregation of St. George Orthodox Church in West Roxbury, which is connected to the hospital, said he immediately knew something was wrong when he saw the faces of parishioners who had logged on at a previously scheduled virtual meeting Tuesday.
“They’re very emotional and very sad,” he said of the congregation, which attended a special service Sunday to remember the dead. “We have a personal, tangible link to that event. It isn’t [just] a news event for us. … It’s a very existential one. Each of us have strong emotional feelings about that.”
Some congregants were still waiting for news on whether relatives were injured, displaced, or worse, he said.
After years of alleged corruption and mismanagement by officials, amid the worst economic and financial crisis in decades, anger against the government has reached a boiling point for some.
“If I had the power I would kill everyone in the government,” Metri said. “You can write that. They are responsible there.”
During the rally in Copley Square, Malik Salibi, 35, of New York, who was helping his fiancee move in with him from Boston, burst out in frustration, interrupting the speaker in Arabic before storming off. “Prove to me things will be different,” he yelled in English, challenging the speaker’s hopeful words about change.
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After the rally, Salibi apologized for the outburst and said he was frustrated that months of protest he had participated in before the explosion had not yielded any political progress. “I don’t see anything changing without something messy,” he said. “Without blood.”
The blast and the issue of the government have become two crises at once, according to Moataz Nourgodine, 23, of Boston before the rally. “We have always known the government was corrupt. We didn’t know it was so inhumane.”
One sign at the rally, splattered with red paint, read, “The Government Is Killing People.”
For those who survived the Lebanese civil war, the destruction is particularly hard to see.
George Jreige, 58, of Westwood, who left Lebanon in 1980 amid the conflict to attend Northeastern University, said he remembered bombings from his childhood, but said they were nothing like this blast.
“There was a lot of destruction and damage in Lebanon — but over the course of years,” he said in a phone interview. “In just two seconds that much devastation.”
Jreige said the effects of the explosion are compounded by other problems, like the devaluation of currency and wages, high unemployment, and strict limits on withdrawing money from banks.
“Really it’s like [the government] stole their soul,” he said. “They stole their hope in the future.”
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Kanaan, who grew up walking to school through the neighborhood destroyed by the blast, said he remembered the city was still repairing walls pockmarked from bombs and bullets in the 1990s, before he left for Yale and later MIT.
Now such repairs to the city he still visits every summer will have to be made yet again
“If not for COVID, we would be there,” Kanaan and Samaha agreed as they waited for the rally to start. He could well have been in the area when the explosion took place, he said, in a twist of fate similar to so many in the Boston Marathon bombing, which he had been running in when the bombs went off, he said.
The explosion also reminded Samaha of the Marathon attack, though the scale of the damage and loss of life in Beirut was much greater.
“The Boston Marathon bombing was terrible and that was what in compared to this?” she said.
For Ghenwa Hakim, 33, an immigration lawyer from Dedham, and for many others, too, the days have passed since Tuesday endlessly watching videos of the explosion, calling family, and growing ever more angry with a government they say has long mismanaged the country.
“This is the last straw. ...There needs to be a change,” said Hakim. “It doesn’t get worse than this.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Lucas Phillips can be reached at lucas.phillips@globe.com.
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For local Lebanese, anger in the aftermath of blast - The Boston Globe
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