AFP – i24news

Police charge at demonstrators with batons after they gather outside seat of government

Police in Beirut used force on Wednesday in order to disperse demonstrators who were angry at the Lebanese city’s failure to collect huge amounts of trash.

Tensions boiled over as protesters gathered outside the seat of government in Beirut and police, armed with batons, charged at them after scuffles broke out earlier in the day.

Lebanon’s Health Minister Wael Abu Faour warned earlier in the week that the country is on the brink of facing a "major health catastrophe" because of trash crisis.

Faour warned that "drastic measures" must be taken and that the must cabinet acts immediately to solve the issue as the country’s water, sea and air, are threatened with contamination.

The growing heaps have been dusted with white poison powder to keep away rats and insects, but the measure does little to combat the odor.

Residents have also begun burning the piles of trash, which have resulted in toxic fumes enveloping parts of the city.

Ordinarily, the city’s trash is disposed of at the Naameh landfill in the mountains southeast of Beirut, the endpoint for waste produced by around half of Lebanon’s four million citizens.

But for the past month, local villagers fed up of living next to the site have blocked entry, preventing any new trash from being dumped and insisting they will not leave until the facility is shut down for good.

"In Beirut, it’s only been four or five days of garbage and people already can’t take it. We have been dealing with Lebanon’s trash for the last 17 years," said Youssef Halabi, a resident of Aramoun village near the landfill.

The Naameh landfill opened in 1997 in a verdant valley outside Beirut.

It was meant to receive trash from the capital and the heavily-populated Mount Lebanon area for only a few years until a comprehensive solution was devised.

But that plan never came to fruition, as efforts to pass waste legislation withered in Lebanon’s notoriously fractured and stagnant parliament.

As nearly 20 years ticked by, the valley that was originally expected to receive only two million tonnes of waste swelled into a trash mountain of over 15 million tonnes.

Residents living nearby say daily life is unbearable and allege gases produced by the site cause health problems.

"This area suffers from high cancer rates, residents have incurable diseases, skin diseases, breathing problems," said Raghida Halabi, 41, a resident of Abey, another village by the landfill.

Last year, angry locals set up a similar protest, blocking access to the landfill and prompting a trash crisis.

They ended the protest after the government pledged it would permanently close Naameh this year on July 17, but when the trash kept coming they resumed their demonstration.

(With AFP)