November 16, 2000

Moving A Mountain
Beirut Tries to Regain
Its Former Splendor

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L Lanadfill Slowly Replaces Seaside Dump,
As Lebanon Encourages Redevelopment

By HUGH POPE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Few have ever tried to clean up a mess as big as the eight-million-ton mountain of trash dumped untreated into the Mediterranean during Lebanon's decades of civil war.

It isn't just any old pile of rubbish. It could prove an investors' gold mine. It's intensely political. And it's potentially dangerous. There's a loud outcry to stop the work when rifle rounds, mines, hand grenades and even the battered hulk of an armored personnel carrier are unearthed.

"We also find bones. Maybe some of them are human," says Imad Hossari, propelling his four-wheel drive over the 70-foot-high mountain of waste rising from what used to be part of the sea. A site manager for the cleanup, he points to the old shoreline, past a dredger slurping up purple-black junk from the seabed. "That's where I used to swim as a boy," he says. "Before the war, it was beautiful here."

Snipers' Roost

This seafront was once the site of Beirut's best hotels. But when Lebanon's 15-year civil war started in 1975, the city center was ripped in two and became a frontline of the sectarian conflict. The hotels became vantage points for snipers.

Garbage men from west Beirut, which is mainly populated by Muslims, lost access to the main dump in the Christian-populated eastern half of the city. So they knocked down the seafront railings and heaved everything into the water.

As the war dragged on, trucks piled on medical waste, rubble from shelled buildings, dead animals, plastic bags and household garbage. A pause in hostilities in the early 1980s brought demolition debris from scores of buildings damaged in the war, helping to spread the dump over 81 acres.

Lebanon's Christian and Muslim factions finally signed a peace deal in 1989 that gave the Muslims some of the political power that they had sought. And in 1994, a government decree handed redevelopment rights covering 230 acres of the city center to a private company founded for the purpose, called Solidere. As partial payment for its work, Solidere got the dump.

Business Hub

Once reclaimed, the dump would give Solidere an extra 155 acres of land for high-density development. The dream is to turn Beirut back into the business hub of the Middle East.

"We have to get all the plastic out. It's inert, but clients don't want to dig up plastic bags. And they're going to be digging six floors down for parking," says Omer Karameh, the Solidere manager in charge of the cleanup. "You can't get banks to come for their regional headquarters if you don't have top-quality land." The bulk of the cleanup work is being done by the Radian International unit of San Francisco's URS Corp. under a $53 million contract the waste-management company has with Solidere.

It should take five years altogether for 250 workers to finish the work in an inferno of pounding machinery and putrid odors. Every day, laborers scoop rubbish out with excavators, dump it through house-high grills, feed it through rolling separators, and blow plastic bags into collecting cages. Then they hand-sort the residue. The first seven acres of land reclamation, begun in June last year, is finished, and a slice of it has been sold to a Saudi prince with plans to build a Four Seasons Hotel.

The flyblown top of the dump provides an excellent view of the old commercial heart of the city. Buildings riddled with bullet holes have been restored by Solidere. Roads are beginning to clog with traffic. Limousines are parked five deep around the newly reopened Phoenicia Intercontinental Hotel, 100 yards from the dump, just outside the Solidere project area.

But critics of the restoration effort say Solidere won't be able to overcome the glaring fact that it is building a five-star development in a one-star country. Lebanon's sewage is still pumped raw into the sea, when the broken pipes can get it there at all. The granite pavement laid in the development is in stark contrast with the nearby squalor.

Hariri's Role

Some say the redevelopment is simply a vehicle to further enrich millionaire Rafik Hariri, who launched Solidere during his first term as prime minister from 1992 to 1998. He says he owns 7% of the company, while others believe he controls far more of it. When he was out of office over the past two years, the government dragged its feet and at one point stopped cleanup work for weeks. Profit from land sales and rentals fell from $78 million in 1997 to $3.7 million last year.

Despite criticism of Solidere, Lebanon's electorate handed Mr. Hariri a resounding victory this past summer and he is again prime minister. Solidere's shares, also traded in London, rose from about $7 to $8 on the prospect of his return to power. But Mideast violence and worries about Mr. Hariri's capacity for reform brought shares that sold for a high of $17 in 1997 down to less than $7 in recent days.

"The attitude of the old government was more damaging than any Middle East conflict. We were unable to get a single permit. It was absolutely political," says Nasser Chammaa, chairman of Solidere. "But we have created a unique environment. It'll be a wonderful place."

Heading the dissenters is Assam Salam, a city planner and latest head of a once-grand dynasty of Sunni Muslim merchants and politicians. He believes the dump's journey from rags to riches is a misallocation of state assets. The tab is supposed to be $850 million, including payments to 10,000 squatter families, the dump cleanup and construction of a new French-designed sea wall to protect the landfill replacing the dump.

Big Wasteland

Mr. Salam blames Solidere for needlessly bulldozing buildings damaged in the war and turning them into landfill. He says the Lebanese economy won't recover quickly enough to justify the high prices Solidere needs to charge developers to turn a profit eventually. Many lots are still vacant, and he believes they will remain a wasteland for years. Except for expatriate Lebanese here in the summer, tourists are scarce. Foreigners leery of conflict in the Middle East are hardly clamoring for first-class hotel rooms.

"The center was the only meeting point for Muslims and Christians. It was full of life. But it wasn't the kind of life Solidere wants. The aim of these people is to get virgin land," he says. "They also gambled on a Middle East peace that hasn't materialized."

When the latest Israeli-Palestinian clashes flared in September, militant Lebanese in sympathy with Palestinian hard-liners quickly dragged the country into the conflict with the capture of three Israeli soldiers on the border and the seizure of an Israeli businessman they say is a spy. The Middle East situation creates added challenges to getting the dump cleaned up. Amine Bou Onk, chosen by URS to manage the company's share of the dump contract, says he has had to spend a lot of time lately trying to calm employees: "I had an engineer come in. He kept saying: 'The Israelis are going to hit us.' I told him, 'Don't worry about the things you can't control.' "

Despite high unemployment among Lebanese, manual laborers at the dump are mostly Syrians, helped by Egyptians, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. They work for $10 a day, and sleep several to a room or squat in places like the basement of the shrapnel-torn carcass of the soon-to-be-rebuilt Hilton Hotel. With a social conscience that he says he once didn't have, Mr. Bou Onk now sidesteps Lebanon's anti-Palestinian employment rules to give refugees a chance to work.

"I offered to pay 30% more and hire Lebanese workers, but there were no takers," says Mr. Bou Onk. "Lebanese would never handpick garbage. They'd rather play backgammon."

Write to Hugh Pope at hugh.pope@wsj.com