Paul Wood

The mood in Lebanon is for revolution

Before the blast, corruption had spread like a malignant tumour

A Lebanese protester carries a photo of three-year-old Alexandra Najjar, the ‘Angel of Beirut’ [Getty Images]

When 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left in Beirut’s port exploded last week, a three-year-old girl named Alexandra Najjar was torn from her mother’s arms as they ran inside from their balcony. In the same instant, every-thing in the apartment was flying through the air — doors, window frames, shards of glass, the air-conditioning unit, the family’s piano — and something hit the little girl. She died later from her wounds and on Lebanese social media she has become the ‘Angel of Beirut’, a symbol of the innocent people ‘murdered’ by their government’s negligence and incompetence, as her father, Paul, put it. He gave a restrained and dignified interview to local television, refusing to call her a ‘martyr’, a word local politicians would have used about her had she, more conveniently, been killed by some outside enemy (Israel would be best). Instead, she was simply a ‘victim’.

A photograph shows Alexandra on her father’s shoulders, with curly hair and pink dungaree-shorts, waving a Lebanese flag. This was at one of Lebanon’s many anti-government protests. Addressing the political class now, her father said: ‘You are all criminals… You killed us in our homes… a place where I thought I could keep my family safe.’ The explosion had not killed Christians, Muslims, or members of this party or that, he said, just Lebanese. And now the Lebanese had to unite to overthrow the old, corrupt system. ‘Please, enough. We have to stand together. We have to change things, for Alexou — for every child to live in the country we wish we could have.’

The Lebanese prime minister Hassan Diab and his entire cabinet resigned this week, so you might think that Paul Najjar had won. But power in Lebanon lies elsewhere than the succession of usually bland and forgettable government ministers. A rich and well-connected Lebanese friend told me: ‘The same motherfucking gangsters are still in charge.

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