Conflict Incident Report

Residents of Beirut’s Karantina area staged a protest Friday against plans to build a trash incinerator in the working class neighborhood as part of a government initiative to deal with Lebanon’s waste crisis.

“When you talk about an incinerator, you are saying let the inhabitants find somewhere else to live,” one protestor told local media.

The protest was held near the area’s slaughterhouse, with participants lamenting the lack of attention paid by the government to the area, which during the 2015 garbage crisis was inundated with large piles of trash.

Protesters used the occasion to demand a return to their original lands within Karantina, which they said they had been expelled from during the early years of the Lebanese Civil War and which had since been appropriated by local enterprises, such as the slaughterhouse.

“We are asking for our rights. We don’t want land from the church or Dar al-Fatwa [the seat of Lebanon's Sunni grand mufti], we are asking to go back to our lands,” one protester said.

Plans for an incinerator, part of Environment Minister Tarek Khatib’s waste plan that was endorsed by Cabinet last week, have been thoroughly rejected by activists and environmentalists.

Karantina has not been officially announced as the site of the new incinerator, although it is widely expected to play host to the facility.

Groups opposed to the plans say Lebanon lacks the supervisory capabilities necessary to oversee such complex projects, and have also argued the incinerator would further pollute the capital while steering the country away from recycling and composting.

Despite environmentalists’ pleas, Cabinet last week said tenders for the location and construction of incinerators would be determined within six months.