Lebanon’s ministers are toppling like dominos, amid public demands for the entire government to resign over the devastating explosion that levelled much of Beirut last week.
Finance Minister Ghazi Wazni and Justice Minister Marie-Claude Najm were the latest ministers to resign from the 20-person Cabinet on Monday, bringing the total number of resignations since Lebanon’s worst peacetime disaster to four.
The resignations follow days of rage on the streets of Beirut, where this weekend demonstrators clashed with security forces in large-scale anti-government protests.
READ: Beirut blast will send Lebanon “rushing towards collapse,” say experts
The explosion last Tuesday has been blamed on an entrenched government culture of incompetence and corruption – but even the whole cabinet resigning wouldn’t be enough to quell public fury, analysts say.
“The problem extends much deeper than the current government — it really rests with the entire political class,” Aya Majzoub, a Beirut-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, told VICE News. “People are calling for a regime change. They don’t want to see any of the faces that we’ve seen before in government; they want a completely new system.”
The resignations Monday came a day after Information Minister Manal Abdel Samad and Environment Minister Damianos Kattar also stood down over the catastrophic explosion at Beirut’s port, which killed more than 200, wounded 6,000 and left 300,000 displaced.
The stream of resignations has triggered media speculation that Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s entire Cabinet could quit at a scheduled meeting Monday afternoon, in the face of widespread public outrage. If a total of seven ministers resign, the Cabinet would effectively become a caretaker government. At least nine members of parliament have also resigned.
“The country is heading into the unknown,” Sam Heller, a Beirut-based analyst for International Crisis Group, told VICE News. “People are understandably so angry at the country’s leaders. They were responsible for a bombing of world-historical scale that’s devastated the city at a time when I think so few are able to bounce back from that.”
This weekend, riot police in body armour clashed with demonstrators advancing on Parliament Square, using disproportionate levels of violence, according to Human Rights Watch. Protesters set up gallows and nooses to hang effigies of Lebanese politicians, while others held signs that read "resign or hang”.
Human Rights Watch’s researchers observed security forces using excessive amounts of tear gas Saturday, as well as firing a tear gas canister directly at a protester’s head – severely injuring him – and shooting rubber bullets and birdshot pellets indiscriminately at protesters.
Majzoub from Human Rights Watch was herself beaten at the protest, hit by an officer before others threw away her phone, which she had been using to document the event.
Mazjoub told VICE News that the heavy-handed response by security forces had only added to the public’s anger over the disaster, which was caused when a massive stockpile of highly explosive ammonium nitrate – a compound used in fertiliser and bomb-making – was left unsecured at the port for years, despite repeated warnings among officials of the risks it posed.
“They’re livid that, after this horrific blast happened, security forces chose to repress people who were expressing their very justified rage and anger over the incompetence and corruption that led to the explosion,” she said.
READ: Beirut residents describe the trauma of the explosion
“What’s even more egregious is that the army and security forces have been noticeably absent from the clean-up and relief efforts. They weren’t helping to pick up the rubble, clean up homes and provide shelter, yet they spend all their resources to crack down on people who were demonstrating. It shows very clearly the priorities of the state.”
Lebanon’s top Maronite Christian cleric, Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai, called in his Sunday sermon for the entire government to resign, as it could not “change the way it governs”.
“The resignation of an MP or a minister is not enough ... the whole government should resign, as it is unable to help the country recover,” he said.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Hassan Diab said in an interview Sunday night that the Lebanese people had the right to be furious after "decades of unbelievable corruption”, as pressure piled up on his administration.
International donors pledged $297 million in aid for emergency relief on Sunday at a summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, stipulating the funds had to be "directly delivered to the Lebanese population” to avoid being siphoned off by corrupt elites.
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