Gemayel Accuses Authorities of Lying over Garbage-Flooded Shore

Kataeb Party chief MP Sami Gemayel on Tuesday accused authorities of “lying” over the latest garbage crisis on Keserwan's shore, shortly after he was accused of staging a “show” and seeking electoral gains from the Monday warnings he made over the issue.

“All officials mobilized today after the environmental disaster that we witnessed yesterday on Keserwan's shore. I thank them for their enthusiasm, efforts and insistence on media appearance, but we cannot but evaluate what happened,” Gemayel said at a press conference.

“The storm ended on Friday and no one acted except after our (Monday) press conference. They all mobilized today to clean up the shore... It seems that staging a show is the only thing that pushes the ruling class to act, but what they called a show is my duty as an MP,” the young lawmaker said.

“My job is to monitor your work and to pinpoint any wrongdoing against the Lebanese. If you consider this a show and a populist move, I in my turn consider it to be my role under the mandate that I was given by the people,” Gemayel went on to say.

The Kataeb chief also accused Environment Minister Tarek al-Khatib and the Council for Reconstruction and Development of “lying” over the source of the garbage that flooded Zouk Mosbeh's shore.

“You have resorted to lying. The CDR said that it did not leave any waste on the shore except in areas after the Nahr al-Kalb river whereas the environment minister said the garbage came from the river. But why did the High Relief Commission clean up the entire Lebanese coast today?” Gemayel added.

He also said he received pictures of garbage on the shore of the Jnah area south of Beirut, near the controversial Costa Brava landfill.

Lebanon's festering trash crisis came crashing ashore this week after residents woke up to find a powerful winter storm had laid a mantle of waste at the Zouk Mosbeh beach, just a few minutes' drive north of the capital, Beirut.

The scenes were a national embarrassment for a country that once prided itself on its sparkling Mediterranean coastline but cannot wean itself off the convenience of throwing its trash into the sea.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri ordered an immediate clean-up of Zouk Mosbeh beach.

Civil society groups say officials are making fortunes on shady deals for landfills and incinerators, at the public's expense. They say, too, that the government is using trash to fill in land along the coast -- a bonanza for politically connected developers who can cash in on the property that's been raised, quite literally, from the sea.

A fleet of heavy machinery has been working the coastline east of Beirut since 2017, pouring trash into the Mediterranean at a land reclamation site at Dbayeh.

Officials say they are doing nothing untoward, and that the landfills they operate are done to technical specifications.

But the stench is impossible to deny.

Travelers arriving to Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport are greeted with a waft of odors from an expanding landfill at the end of one of the runways. Officials reopened the Costa Brava landfill there to absorb the trash left out in 2015.

The scandal at Zouk Mosbeh beach led Lebanon's nightly news broadcasts on Monday, but environmentalists say they were not surprised by the scene -- a pile of cattle bones, footwear, tires and vast amounts of plastic waste that reached over 30 meters (100 feet) inland.