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Elda Al-Ghoussein wrote in the Al-Akhbar newspaper:
After the explosion of August 4, the muddy wheat in the port of Beirut became double evidence of the “greatness” of the building that protected part of the capital, and of the ugliness of the explosion that demolished part of it, buried bodies underneath and destroyed everything around him. The debate arose on the need to keep the “teacher” as a “historical” witness recalling the crime of the State against the people. The book of the Minister of Culture and Agriculture, Abbas Mortada, reached the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, on the 18th of this month, to “consider manufacturing as part of the human heritage and preserve them” in the way it ended after the explosion , to stimulate open debate. Sources from the Ministry of Culture, Al-Akhbar reported that the book “was based on the proposal of the Director General of Antiquities, but it was clear that it needed a decision from the Council of Ministers. This is not available under the interim government, “and noted that Kuwait’s ambassador to Beirut, Abdel-Al-Qenaei, announced a few days ago that his country was ready to” rebuild the waste that was originally built with a loan from Kuwait. ” .
The director of silences Asaad Haddad confirmed that the priority is “to discover the foundations of the absurd and to evaluate its eligibility, which will most likely be done by Czech experts because the company that built the building is Czech”, noting that “the foundations of the silences extend to a depth of 16 meters, while the last explosion occurred at a distance of 50 One meter, including a hole 42 meters deep.
Los silos is an independent campus from the port, its administration is attached to the Ministry of Economy, and includes 104 silos that used to contain 125 thousand tons of grain, including what was added (about 20 thousand tons) in 1994 in its first restoration after from the war. Its construction began in 1968 and was inaugurated two years later, with a law and a loan from the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development, designed and supervised by the Swiss “Buhler Group” and implemented by the Czechoslovak company “Promstaff”. Before the big bang, according to Haddad, “there were two projects on the table, either to expand the waste and increase its capacity by an additional 30,000 tons. We had prepared maps and we were looking for funding, or to preserve, restore and paint the structure.”
Opinion survey of architects on the importance of leaving the landmark as a witness to memory and history, showing a difference of opinions. Regarding the architect Fadlallah Dagher, the most important thing in the first place is “not to erase the effects of the disaster, but to preserve the structure of the scandals for the moment until the search for their destiny, while people continue looking for a roof to protect themselves, and we are used to quickly eliminating the effects of events as if nothing had happened ”. This happened after the war with the reconstruction of Beirut. “Downtown Beirut was a place full of life. History was erased after the war. The place changed and its identity and memory were erased.” It is assumed that the logic has changed, and there must be a place that remembers the crime of the political system that cannot escape forward and exempt the soul from the fact, suggesting the point of squandering or taking advantage of the gifts to come to recreate it and make the system float. . He highlighted the need to “preserve a place of memory, a memorial, that symbolizes the humanitarian catastrophe that struck on August 4. Either the slapping structure or any alternative idea, and presenting it through a national and not an international contest, because the topic is ours. This is a crime scene caused by negligence and criminality. You cannot begin to think about removing it, and once the work of removing debris or corpses is finished ”.
The matter is different, according to the head of the Beirut Heritage Association, Suhail Mneimneh, who considers that “the association, in contact with researchers and historians, rejects the idea of preserving the silences so as not to remember the depression, especially because the place It is very large, and it can meet a monument to the event. He pointed to the experience of the “Beirut House” (Barakat Building), which “opens once a month for exhibitions, or the Martyrs’ Square, which has been turned into car parking, or the deserted markets of Beirut.”
The architect Elie Najm believes that “it is necessary to review the entire port according to a new project, reaching Dbayeh, including the Burj Hammoud landfill and the Lenore project, and connecting the port with the Arab highway project and the project of the tunnel to the Bekaa, which can lead to the establishment of a free zone in the Bekaa and storage containers … This negates the need for all the space occupied by the rooms that were destroyed. The aim of the idea is to “launch integrated projects rather than looking for a quick rebuild without looking to the future and the surrounding environment. The most important thing is to reject the logic of commercial reconstruction, but to think through national or international competitions in a place that recalls memory, such as silence being a witness to the crime, and we know that the memorial is the place of the accident and is not confined to a statue. All this with the need to accommodate people, whether through parks or otherwise, to visit the region and create a link with it, and improve the surrounding environment and the social fabric within the affected areas to that the rupture of the social environment with the Central District of Beirut is not repeated after its reconstruction.
The architect Georges Boustany does not agree with the idea of leaving the nonsense in its current state, “because the continuation of the destruction refers in the future to the fact that Beirut was not colonized, and that the event is the result of neglect and corruption. , especially since its causes are still ambiguous, and it is a clear event such as an attack by another country or a civil war. Silos occupy a large part of the port. He points out that “keeping it can divert it with future generations, due to the complications that followed the accident. The silos refer to a beautiful period of our memory, which is the end of the sixties, and I do not like to leave it as a memorial, but the discussion about the reconstruction of the waste in its current form or not should be opened with the need to establish an access area for people with an independent entrance to the port ”.
Source: News
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