19 July 2011
Editor’s note: This is the last of a three-part series on the social and economic conditions in Tripoli.
TRIPOLI, Lebanon: Mohammad Debban kneels in the shade cast by a half-built boat in the fishing port of Mina in Tripoli. He pulls out a brush from a bucket of paint and gently applies white acrylic to the hull.
This is his job for three months of the year – the summer season is when the sea is the calmest for small fishing boats to sail out on, and it is when Lebanese families throng to seaside restaurants to get a whiff of sea spray while feasting on the sea’s bounty. In short, it is when fishing in Lebanon’s seaside towns enters full swing.
During the remaining 9 months of the year, Debban stays at home, fretting over ways to provide for his kids.
“All I hope for is a fixed job. But look at the port. Fishing is dead,” he says.
Tripoli’s ailing landscape is a lot like its economy. It is a concoction of three cities – Tripoli, Beddawi and Mina – and of various economic sectors – industry, tourism, fishing, vegetable trade, transport and more – all inhabiting vestiges of a once thriving economy.
Once considered the capital of Northern Lebanon and a hub of Levantine transport, poverty rates are higher in Tripoli than they are in any other Lebanese city. Thirty percent of Tripoli’s residents live below the poverty line and according to a 2004 government-funded study, 5 percent of residents are considered to be “severely impoverished.”
Since the early 1980s most of Tripoli’s large factories have closed, so an industry that once boasted 3,000 workers now only has 300. Between 1996 and 2004, the report observed a “large decline” in the vast majority of Tripoli’s economic functions.
Those issues have led to a myriad of social problems. The Arab Urban Development Institute recorded 700 cases of drug abuse among the youth in the Bab al-Tabbaneh area alone in 2010. Bab al-Tabbaneh is a fault line of political fighting that transpired between some of the city’s Alawites and Sunnis last month, and is the poorest neighborhood in all of Lebanon.
Many of the Tripoli natives The Daily Star has spoken to reported that marriage rates have dropped, because the costs of setting up a home is no longer a viable option to most of the city’s downtrodden youth. Mostly they sit at home, or loiter in the streets, biding their time until an opportunity turns up.
Debban motions to the cluster of fishing boats gathered in the marina. They are shades of pink, blue and yellow, standing still if not for the rocking back and forth on medium sized waves lapping against the dock. The city’s minarets peek out from behind the garden that hugs the outer part of the port.
The boatmen had been ordered by local authorities to stay at bay because of “rough seas.” The fishermen take this time to gut and scale their catch at the dock. They are diligent. It is roughly four hours after the fishermen first mounted their boats that morning and not a peep can be heard.
That is until a screaming match erupts between some fishermen and a tourist guide on a Felucca docked near the center of the port. “Tripoli is in such a state because its people are thieves!” tourist guide and owner of the Felucca, Salem Sadeq, exclaims.
“Speak for yourself! It’s the parliamentarians that are corrupt, not the people,” says Mohammad the fisherman as he launches onto the boat, wagging a finger at Sadeq.
Six sailors have mounted the boat to argue about the reasons for Tripoli’s dire straits. This devolves into a series of blanket statements about sectarianism. “No one cares about the Sunnis,” says one.
Another man presentexclaims, “The Muslims don’t know how to take care of themselves.”
But soon the argument settles on a sentiment they can all agree on: Tripoli’s political representatives have let them down, producing a colorful list of economic promises during election season, and virtually vanishing from their Tripoli offices after they have been elected.
This is an argument that the report on Tripoli’s economic development agrees with. Seeking to dig out the historical roots of Tripoli’s problems, the report traces the city’s economic disenfranchisement to the early days of the Civil War. After Zghorta and Tripoli signed a peace in 1976, one year after the war’s eruption, Tripoli was no longer of any real concern to the country’s main political players, leaving the city to socioeconomic decay.
The authorities are much easier on the fishermen in other Northern seaside towns, the fishermen report. Regulations are less constricting there and the fishermen subsequently are much more prosperous.
“I wanted to invest in a much better boat than this,” said Sadeq.
“But the authorities keep playing around with us. They are so erratic, and unfair, that it’s just not worth it.”
The fishermen disembark from the boat, and charge toward the port’s police station to complain about a rule that has recently been imposed on them. Boatmen in Mina must now obtain licenses in order to sail, something that would cost them hundreds of dollars and 15 days off of their work which they would spend receiving training in Batroun.
Mina is the only port where the rule has been enforced. The police chief at the station confirms this.
Unfortunately, the police are not responsible for enacting the rule, and with a wave of a hand from the police chief, the fishermen leave the station and return back to their boats.
In many ways, fishing is the heart of Mina’s economy. With Tripoli’s inner-city dwellers having become accustomed to shopping at supermarkets, it is mostly the fishermen’s families’ who meander the winding alleys of Mina’s old market.
“When there’s a good catch, then we’re happy,” says one man tending to his vegetable produce.
Further along the coast of the city is Khan al-Tamathili, a landmark on Mina’s tourist map because it is a 700-year old Mumluk inn.
Now the earthy tones of the Khan’s arches are draped with colorful laundry, which the Khan’s inhabitants – some 45 fishing families jammed into around 50 five by seven meter rooms – have left out to dry.
The courtyard is sprinkled with garbage, which the children skip over on their way to the old well, where they wrestle with tangled pipes in order to pump water out.
Just as the Khan speaks of a city that was once a place where weary travelers on horseback converged, the Tripoli train station, some 3 kilometers north of the Mina, is a living testament to the city’s strategic location. It is the closest major city to the Syrian border.
The train station first opened its doors in 1889, and later was shut down by the Civil War’s outbreak in 1975. It ran trains between Lebanon and Syria where it connected to a train network constructed by the Ottoman empire and the Allies who usurped them.
Eight German trains stand still in their tracks there and the government continues to employ several station employees, left overs from days when the train station was still active.
“I don’t know what they’re still doing here,” Mohammad Hassan al-Turk, owner of still-running train station cafeteria, says of the employees.“Probably waiting for the train to arrive.”
In the Bab al-Tabbaneh area, the Abu Ali river cuts through an impoverished neighborhood. Water is gushing down the mountain, running straight toward the sea.
In a country where water-shortages are rampant during the warm months, this is a very sorry sight.
A vast crusader castle overlooks the clusters of Ottoman-style houses, inhabited by some of the country’s poorest families.
Underneath the castle, the famous Bab al-Tabbaneh market lines the street. It was once considered the “gate of gold.” It sold vegetable produce and manufactured goods from the region’s once thriving farming and industry sector to the country’s bargain-hunters at unbeatable prices.
The Civil War gave it a harsh beating, never again to be repaired. Repeated violence in the area only added salt to its wounds.
A listless Abdel Majid lights up a cigarette while workers are carting eggplants over.
“This market is dead. Not sick, not in urgent care – Dead.”
Copyright The Daily Star 2011.
