The Infijar الإنفجار

Vahe H. Apelian

 

I imagine that almost every noun in a dictionary has synonyms. Although  synonyms are meant to be words that are expected to have the same or nearly the same meaning, but not all of them equally or even nearly convey an event or a feeling or a description. 

 A thesaurus would list synonyms for a noun. Out of the many synonyms noted for explosion, I note the following, blast, burst, detonation, blowout, blowup, flare-up, and others. But none of these words, even the word "explosion", can convey, in my mind, the enormity of what happened in Beirut. In sound, shape, appearance and most importantly as the catastrophic event that, in a matter of seconds, altered peoples’ lives, even the word explosion may not do justice to the destruction that ensued.

Infijar is the sounding of the Arabic word for explosion - انفجار. I thought it’s fair the we adopt the word in our lexicon to characterize the catastrophic explosion that happened in Lebanon on August 4, 2020 at 6:08 p.m. , simply because it remains in a class of its own and it happened in Lebanon, whose official language is Arabic.

Surely the Lebanese and many others will remember what they were doing when the Infijar took place. It happened that I was talking with two friends in Armenia. We had befriended decades ago when we lived in Lebanon. Each of us had gone its own way onto the western shores. They have now settled in Armenia. They asked me to interrupt our conversation and follow the news because something terrible had happened in Lebanon. Never, in my wildest dream, would I have envisioned the devastation that had just taken place. 

By now we know that 2700 metric tons of Ammonium Nitrate that had been in storage in a seaport warehouse had exploded. The infijar is claimed to be the second most horrific event since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagazaki, and is rated as the worst devastating single event inflicted upon a people and a country not in war. 

The catastrophic event was man made due to carelessness. It came to present the bleakest picture possible of the misfunctioning Lebanese state marred by corruption that had led to grass root protests since last year. The protests had led to the resignation of the PM Hariri and the formation of a new “technocrat” government. But  the new government also continued to remain ineffective and unresponsive to rightful demands of  the demonstrators. 

The state and the Lebanese society as a whole remain entrenched in their sectarian ways. Sectarianism constitutes the backbone on which the Lebanese society and hence its governance is founded . Armenians also take pride in the system, noting that they are ranked among the ten largest communities that make up the Lebanese society and hence constitutionally assured representation in the government commensurate to their official demographic constituency. 

The grass root protests first erupted on 17 October 2019. As of day of the Infijar,  293 days had come and gone by but the government remained unable or unwilling to come to a resolution and start addressing the woes of the people.  The government’s inability or unwillingness  to seize the moment and marshal the country out of the abyss, culminated in  the collapse of  Lebanon’s economy. Lebanon became the only country in the Middle East and North Africa that experienced hyperinflation having their money devalue precipitously as the ongoing fear of spreading Covid-19 infection had effectively paralyzed the country as a whole. Such was the prevailing state in Lebanon up to that very moment when the Infijar occurred.

I imagine that in Lebanon, the day after the Infijar was like waking up from a horrific dream only to find out that it is true. I do not think we have yet grasped the enormity of the loss in lives and in property and the incalculable damage inflicted on the people and the infrastructure.

Among the horrific destruction of lives and property, voices are being heard that the Infijar may also shake the very foundation of the Lebanese society and governance and usher it away from its sectarian feudal ways onto a better governance that rewards merit rather than ethnic affiliation, and holds a person responsible and not look away not to raise the rage of the person’s community.

Time will tell if fundamental societal changes and new norms will come about in Lebanon and hence in its governance in the aftermath of the Infijar. Meanwhile, the task at hand is helping and assisting in patching the shuttered lives.