Lebanon’s government steps down over Beirut blast anger
Beirut, Monday
Lebanon’s prime minister Hassan Diab announced his government’s resignation Monday amid popular outrage over the deadly Beirut port explosion that has reignited angry street protests.
The collapse of his government had looked inevitable after a string of resignations and a cabinet meeting during which several cabinet members made it clear they would also quit.
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Diab’s announcement came even as security forces in central Beirut clashed again with protesters demanding an end to an entrenched political system widely seen as inept, corrupt and dominated by sectarian interests and family dynasties.
“I announce the resignation of the government,” he said at the end of a speech in which he strove to cast himself as an external victim of a corrupt and selfish political leadership.
The Health ministry said at least 160 people were killed in Lebanon’s worst peacetime disaster, 6,000 were wounded and about 20 remained missing after the disaster blamed on official negligence.
Six days after the enormous chemical blast wreaked destruction across swathes of the capital and was felt as far away as the island of Cyprus, residents and volunteers were still clearing the debris off the streets.
International rescue teams with sniffer dogs and specialised equipment remained at work at the disaster’s charred “ground zero”, where the search was now for bodies and not survivors.
The Lebanese want heads to roll over the tragedy and are asking how a massive stockpile of volatile ammonium nitrate, a compound used primarily as a fertiliser, was left unsecured at the port for years.
Diab’s resignation was met with cars honking in the streets and celebratory fire in the northern city of Tripoli but was unlikely to meet the long-term expectations of the Lebanese population.
The country’s top officials have promised a swift and thorough investigation —but they have stopped short of agreeing to an independent probe led by foreign experts as demanded by the protesters.
The outgoing government is now due to stay on in a caretaker capacity, and the next elections could still be months away.
Before Diab’s announcement, four ministers had already decided they could no longer serve a government that has shown little willingness to take the blame or to put state resources at the service of the victims.
At least nine lawmakers have also announced they would quit in protest, as have two senior members of the Beirut municipality.
The August 4 blast, which drew comparisons with the Hiroshima atom bomb, was so enormous that it altered the shape of not only Beirut’s skyline but even its Mediterranean coastline.
But it remained to be seen whether the disaster will also have a lasting impact on Lebanon’s entrenched post-war political culture, whose masters are widely seen as being bent on self-preservation and buck-passing. - AFP
