BEIRUT,
Lebanon — There was once a nice sea view at the Al Jazira beach club,
and umbrellas of palm fronds sticking from the sand are reminders of
nicer days. Nowadays, the place is surrounded by an ever-growing garbage
dump. “It
used to be a beach,” said Hassan, a Syrian man who works as a caretaker
at the club and insisted on being identified only by his first name
because of a lawsuit concerning the city. “There was sea. There were
rocks. I used to fish.”
Just
up the shoreline, Mohammed Jradi, who has been fishing the waters of
the Mediterranean off Beirut for 20 years, said the trash had driven
even the fish away. “All over the world, they have solutions for this, but not here,” he said.
There is no end, it seems, to Lebanon’s trash crisis,
a potent symbol of the dysfunctional, sect-based politics that defines
this tiny country – just half the size of Vermont, the journalist and
historian David Hirst has noted.
When trash piles built up across this city two years ago, enveloping
Beirut in a nasty stench, they spawned a protest movement, called “You
Stink,” against the political class.
Credit
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Now,
the latest episode of the crisis has become a uniquely Lebanese story,
entwining bird migration, civil aviation, mysterious gunmen and the long
story of Lebanon’s struggle to become a functioning state that can at
least take care of its trash, more than 25 years after emerging from a
long civil war.
Last
year, as a Band-Aid solution to the garbage crisis, the municipality
opened the Costa Brava landfill here on the shoreline, not far from
Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. And so for many visitors to
Beirut, a city whose shabby-chic architecture, great cuisine and French
colonial influences is otherwise enchanting, the first thing to greet
them was a strong whiff of garbage.
The
landfill also attracted birds — lots of them — not just the sea gulls
that normally fly around the coast, but others on migratory patterns
from Europe and North Africa. “In other words,” wrote one local blogger, “a giant free Lebanese restaurant for birds.”
More
seriously, this posed a problem to civil aviation. When an airliner
with Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines hit a bird this month — an episode
that recalled Capt. Chesley Sullenberger’s crash landing
in the Hudson River eight years ago after hitting a flock of birds —
Lebanon’s trash problem suddenly became a matter of aviation safety.
Almost immediately, gunmen showed up on the coast line,
apparently deployed by the government to shoot the birds out of the
sky, raising the ire of environmental activists, not to mention the
fishermen.
Credit
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“I used to see sea gulls everywhere,” Mr. Jradi said. “But today there are none. They were shot down.”
He
added, “of course, I am missing them. They were entertainment for us.
For me, it was an entertaining scene, watching them fly.”
Activists have said that the killing of the birds was in violation of the Barcelona Convention,
which aims to protect wildlife in coastal regions of the Mediterranean,
and that the government could have found other solutions, like using
tranquilizer guns on the birds.
“Lebanon
is an important bird area,” said Paul Abi Rached, a prominent Lebanese
environmental activist, noting that millions of birds from Europe and
North Africa pass through Lebanon each year on migratory patterns.
“So what you are killing are not Lebanese birds,” he said. “They are the birds of Europe. That is the catastrophe.”
Brava landfill. Contamination and garbage could tip the life balance and
the biodiversity of the Lebanese coasts and the Mediterranean.
Credit
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The chairman of Middle East Airlines, Lebanon’s national carrier, told an interviewer with the TV channel MTV
this month that the safety of airline passengers was more important
than the lives of birds, saying that the hunters would continue their
work as needed.
The
garbage problem has long been a symbol of a failure of Lebanese
politics, one that activists say has its roots in the time shortly after
the country’s civil war, which ended in 1990. Soon after the war ended,
the government set up a trash collection company, called Sukleen, that
was connected to political parties and over the years became a vehicle
for corruption, say activists. This thwarted the possibility of other
solutions, like recycling, and in a country as small as Lebanon it has
been hard to find enough space for landfills.
“Lebanon is a very densely populated place,” said Habib Battah, the founder of the news website Beirut Report, who has written about the Costa Brava landfill. “Other countries have big, open spaces, but we don’t have that.”
He
said that in the long term, recycling was the answer, because when
trying to find new places for trash dumps, “wherever you go in Lebanon
there is a village nearby.”
Mr.
Battah said the problems with garbage went back the decision at the end
of the war to privatize trash collection. He said that Lebanon offered a
lesson to other postwar societies on the dangers of rushing into
privatization too fast, and that he often wished he could bring
free-market libertarians to Lebanon for a field trip to see what can
happen in the absence of strong government regulations.
“Basically, when you do that, people in power get richer,” he said.
Public
services across the board, not just trash collection, have long
suffered in Lebanon, he said, forcing political leaders to confront a
difficult question: “What do you fix first? The water? The garbage? The
internet?”
