اشترِك في نشرتنا الإخبارية
Lynn Zovighian
I was running my usual afternoon jog in my Beirut neighborhood, when I felt a sudden jab in my stomach. An unforgiving cramp had taken over my abdomen. I conceded to the pain, stopped, and walked back home. A moment after stepping into my parents’ home, the earth bellowed, rumbled, and shook ferociously. All imploded.
A life of hard work and sacrifice was wiped away in seconds. Every room in my parents’ home became a war zone. Evidence of love, safety, and adventures disintegrated, leaving jagged loose ends of broken glass, marble, and memories behind. Everything that had mattered all those years could matter no more.
I did not realize that day that it was years of negligence that destroyed my parents’ home. Our home, security, and being were cracked open, dismantled, and dismembered. The Beirut Explosion unfastened the very foundations of our country, leaving our guts out to bleed.
Our nation-wide wounds have been hemorrhaging ever since.
You, the international community, watched us with stupefaction. You told us that our resilience inspired you. That we would not be abandoned.
We have since been rebuilding houses. And yet, none of us have been able to come back home.
I have recently started jogging again. I see the reconstitution of our Beirut still on hold, with hallowed buildings empty like concrete tombstones. It has never been so easy to see, listen, and deeply understand our Beirut. And yet, it has never been so hard to take action.
Today, we face a new threat to our existence: time.
The same way it took years – years of layers of corruption, stocking up of non-compliance, and piling up of heedlessness at the Beirut Port – to destroy the capital with one simple cataclysmic combustion, it will take years, even more years to rebuild a country, an economy, a society, and a new rule of law.
We cannot bring back time. We cannot gain back what we have lost. We must slow down the rate of destruction and salvage what has still not been wrecked. We need to start small, but run with steadfast agility. Every decision we now make is not only a compromise, but a sacrifice for today’s and tomorrow’s Lebanon. There is no one size can fix all.
Now is the time to guarantee that deployed humanitarian and investment vehicles are not complicit in further slowing down the deathly tick of the tock. We need to work urgently, but without skipping any vital steps. We also need to undo our grip on expired and futile plans that will only exhaust our precious time with little chance of achieving even marginal impact.
For this, Lebanon needs to be set up for success as a global national team, endowed with patience, data, power, and hope. We need to divest out of our failed state and political parties and re-invest in the public institutions of tomorrow. We need to underwrite our civil society and private sector to become trusted and capable incubators of our future. We need to invest in our citizenship to re-invigorate belief in ourselves and the worthiness of this country.
The Beirut Explosion exposed the most naked offenses of negligence, incompetence, and strategic devastation. While we shook, crashed, and laid wrecked, not one state institution and politician fell to the ground – not then, and still not now. This heinous crime of crimes against humanity displaced hundreds of thousands of families and livelihoods. But even this Beirut Explosion did not have the force to displace power, greed, and corruption.
We were forced to say good-bye to the over 200 human beings who perished. Today, Beirut is an open door graveyard for the souls that still cannot rest in peace, and the lives and collective future that are now on life support. Only time will tell if those we lost will one day be the founding daughters, sons, mothers, and fathers of a new Lebanon.
For the rest of us, we are still alive. At 18:12 on August 4, my parents and I stood shaking and staring at each other in a tight, shocked huddle. Would there be another explosion? Was more destruction yet to come? We eventually had the courage to loosen our hold of each other’s fleeting existence. It seemed we were safe, but far from sound. Until today, we still cannot begin to count the number of miracles that prevailed over Lebanon in those ruinous seconds.
One year later, Lebanon is giving us little choice to survive. It is time that we give Lebanon choice back. The choice not to fail.
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Lynn Zovighian is a business and peacebuilder. She is the Co-founder & Managing Director of The Zovighian Partnership and a columnist with An-Nahar.
