Despite the particular political and geopolitical context in which it occurred, the explosion in Beirut on August 4 is another instance of the environmental violence immanent in the circulation of global capital, its propensity to render the material environments through which it circulates sources or causes of harm to human and nonhuman life, in potentiality if not in actuality.
The explosion, which has so far killed around 200 people, injured 6,000 and made 300,000 people homeless, may have been an accident, but the placement of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate at the center of a densely populated city is not. If the accounts in the press are true, the explosion was the result of a flawed but an ordinary, routine procedure. The stockpile of ammonium nitrate was transferred to a dockside warehouse in 2014 from a cargo ship sailing from the Georgian port of Batumi on the Black Sea to the port of Beira in Mozambique. The ship, the Rhosus, made an unscheduled stop in Beirut in November 2013 to pick up an additional cargo of heavy machinery to deliver to Jordan for extra cash because its owner, a Russian businessman called Igor Grechushkin, did not have the money to pay for the ship’s passage through the Suez Canal. But the additional freight proved too heavy for the old ship, which it turned out was leaking. The port authorities in Beirut deemed it unseaworthy and impounded it, confiscating its cargo eleven months after it docked at the port because Grechushkin would not pay the docking fees and other port charges. The ship was abandoned in place and a year later it was moved out of the way further up the pier where it sank in February 2018. In the meantime the stockpile of ammonium nitrate languished in Warehouse 12 until it exploded on August 4.
Multiple requests were presumably made by the military and the state security to customs officials to remove the material, and port officials made requests to the judiciary, which in turn made requests to the Public Works and Transportation Ministry to remove the material, or for guidance about how to dispose of it, but they were unanswered. If this is what happened then the storage, or abandonment, of tons of potentially explosive material amidst an urban population without proper precautions is a matter of negligence, incompetence, and corruption of the customs and port authorities, the Lebanese bureaucracy, and the political elite. In this respect the incident is not unique. Lebanon has been mired in environmental violence for decades, much of it attributable to rampant urbanization combined with the predation of members of the political elite and their clients on public institutions: stripped mountains, deforestation, coastal erosion, air pollution, water contamination, recurrent sewage and garbage disposal crises. During the last years of the civil war Lebanon, like many countries embroiled in military conflicts, became a dumping ground for toxic waste, the excreta of European industries. One particularly egregious instance took place in 1987 when members of a right-wing militia took money from an Italian company in exchange for dumping toxic waste materials smuggled through the same port that blew up on August 4. 15,800 barrels of various sizes and 20 containers of chemical waste were dumped in abandoned factories and warehouses, quarries and mine shafts, landfills, harbors, and valleys in remote regions where sheep and goats later died from drinking contaminated spring water. Some of the toxic waste, around 5,500 barrels, was removed and allegedly shipped back to Europe for safe disposal following an investigation by the government that began in 1988 but was interrupted in 1989 by a war that broke out between rival right-wing factions, one of which led by the current president who was then the chief of the army and one of two claimants to the post of prime minister. The investigation was resumed after the war ended in 1990, but new shipments of toxic waste kept arriving at the port of Beirut. No one knows how much of the toxic waste dumped in the late 1980s is still there and the sites that have been excavated have never been remediated. At the time of the investigation in 1995 nine of the men involved in the toxic waste scheme of 1987 were employees of the Ministry of Environment, two of them advisers to the minister.[1]
The bags of ammonium nitrate dumped at the port of Beirut in 2014 were not waste materials, the refuse of production, but useful means of production, instruments of extractive capital useful precisely because of their explosive capacity. They were not supposed to explode in Beirut but the explosion of the whole cargo at once, and the physical destruction it wrought upon the built environment of the city, revealed the concentrated power of the material that was going to be detonated gradually, out of sight in the piecemeal destruction and transformation of the African landscape. The cargo was to be delivered to Fábrica de Explosivos de Moçambique (FEM), a Mozambican company with operations in Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. FEM is majority-owned by Moura, Silva & Filhos SA, a publicly traded Portuguese company that expanded its operations into Mozambique in 1999. Both companies manufacture explosives and supply them to mining and construction operations, including building dams, roads and railways; FEM often participates directly in such projects. That is, were it not for the accidental interruption of their intended delivery, the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate were eventually going to be detonated in the extraction of materials and the construction of energy and transportation networks necessary for expanding the circulation of capital and keeping it in motion across Central and Southeast Africa.
Since the late nineteenth century the circulation of extractive capital has become increasingly entangled with the circuits of financial capital, the transportation industry, and urbanization, as it also increasingly acquired a planetary scale. Since the middle nineteenth century, with the expansion of railroads, but especially in the last four or five decades, the grammar of capitalist large-scale extractive industry, the way it works, was no longer confined to mining sites: the forms of labor employed in it and its environmental effects and aesthetics extended across the landscape and into urban areas. Extractive capital has come to subsume in its circuits not only far flung mining sites and manufacturing centers but also financial districts, seaports and other nodes in transportation networks that have come to traverse the planet. Money and technology from extractive industries have been historically recycled through the urban built environment, cities and material networks that support them, but today cities and urban regions are built and redesigned as nodes in the planetary circuits of extractive capital, to ensure its uninterrupted circulation.
The extractive industry is notorious among all industries for the violence it has wrought and still wreaks upon the environment, not to mention the violence to which it subjects the bodies of workers, individually and collectively. The deterritorialization of extraction, however, the extension of the operations and circuits of extractive capital beyond points of extraction, reterritorializes the environmental violence associated with it onto the planetary networks that support it. Ironically, Beirut became accidentally enrolled in those networks by interrupting the circulation of commodities intended for extractive operations. It became a node in the circuits of extractive capital, and the capital of Moura, Silva & Filhos’s shareholders, once the Rhosus docked at the port. By confiscating the shipment of ammonium nitrate the custom authorities at the port of Beirut rendered the city an extension of the mining and construction operations of FEM in Mozambique and elsewhere across the African continent. Over the past hundred years there have been around three-dozen accidental explosions of ammonium nitrate across the world. Some of them occurred at chemical plants but many occurred at seaports, on cargo ships, trains, and trucks. Like the explosion in Beirut, the latest addition to the list, these were all mining accidents that occurred far away from the sites of extraction, at places in the networks that support extractive capital.
Extractive capital circulates through cities also in the form of investments in the built environment. Since the end of the civil war in 1990 Beirut has been subjected to the environmental violence of capitalist urban development, most pronounced in the simultaneous destruction and privatization of the central business district. It is true the war damaged a good part of the historic downtown, but what really destroyed it was Oger Liban, a subsidiary of a Saudi construction company owned by former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri (now defunct), and Solidere, a joint-stock company with powers of eminent domain formed to redevelop the central business district when Hariri was prime minister. Oger and Solidere tore down historic buildings and replaced a living, plural, bustling place with a vacuous vessel for real estate speculation and foreign investment, especially oil wealth from the Gulf States. The center of Beirut has been rebuilt as a space for foreign investors that is inaccessible to most of its citizens. One of the most heartening aspects of the last uprising in October 2019, as in previous uprisings, was the reclaiming of urban space by the protesters, even if momentarily, and imbuing it with life like no amount of foreign capital investment could. Many Lebanese today repeat the mantra “If this explosion doesn’t change anything nothing will”. No one knows if it will change much but one hopes that the revolutionary potential unleashed last October would continue to reclaim the city from the clutches of global capital and its agents in the Lebanese political elite.
13 August
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[1] See Fouad Hamdan’s reports for Greenpeace: <http://www.fouadhamdan.org/environment/publications/index.html>