Israeli jets continue to traumatise African migrant workers
Israeli jets continue to traumatise African migrant workers
The Beirut port explosion four years ago shattered thousands of lives and its trauma is still palpable. Many of Lebanon’s African migrant workers are haunted by memories of that fateful day.
Amélie David
The Beirut port explosion four years ago shattered thousands of lives and its trauma is still palpable. Many of Lebanon’s African migrant workers are haunted by memories of that fateful day. Their wounds – both physical and emotional – were left untreated, and now an expanding Israel-Hamas war is traumatising them once again.
A few minutes before 5pm on 6 August, a boom rippled across Beirut. Two days earlier, people in Lebanon’s capital had commemorated the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
The boom was reminiscent of the shattering sound back then, when 237 people were killed.
This explosive sound was quickly followed by another – stronger and louder. In the bustling streets, terrified people scrambled for shelter.
It was not a bomb, or an explosion at the port: Israeli attack planes had torn through the air, flying as close as possible to the ground, fast enough that they broke the sound barrier. The sonic boom and shockwave this creates is used as a tool of psychological warfare, and it came right before a scheduled speech by Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.
It wasn’t the veiled threat of war by Israel that threw Marian Sesay, a Sierra-Leonean migrant living in Lebanon. It was the trauma of the past. “Those sonic booms, that’s like what happened on the fourth of August explosion for sure,” says Sesay, referring to the port explosion among whose fatalities were 76 foreign nationals. “Now, I’m scared of every little sound”, she says over the laughter of children in the background.
On that day in 2020, 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate kept in Beirut’s port exploded, killing hundreds, injuring more than 6,000 and leaving around 300,000 people homeless. Sesay worked as a domestic worker then in the Bourj Hammoud municipality, on the outskirts of Beirut, not far from the port. When the blast boomed through the air, like everyone, she was stunned at first then fear rapidly set in. “After the blast, I was afraid of everything. I had insomnia and I was always afraid I was going to die”, she recalls. “That sound is a trigger.”
The young woman came to Lebanon 10 years ago to work for a Lebanese family under the Kafala system, an extreme form of employment sponsorship that allows employers to control the entry, exit, work, and residence of migrant workers, making the labourers vulnerable to exploitation and modern slavery, particularly in domestic work.
Collectively, the Arab region is home to more than 24-million migrant workers, making up 40% of the labour force – the highest share of any region, according to the Global Slavery Index. Lebanon has at least a quarter of a million from Africa and Asia.
Crises exacerbate the vulnerabilities of workers under the Kafala system and the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion was a case in point.
“Many of the people in the affected areas were vulnerable women, and while Lebanese had other places to go to, they didn’t,” says Ghina Al-Andary, an officer at Kafa, an NGO that helps domestic migrant workers in Lebanon.
In the affected area, in-house help had become a status symbol.
Viany De Marceau, a Cameroonian who came to Lebanon as a domestic migrant worker under the Kafala system in 2015, explained this in an article for the Migrant Worker Action group: “Along the port of Beirut, two maids per apartment are not enough. The more maids you have, the better you are regarded. There are two Filipinas for the cooking, two Ghanaians to take care of the children, an Ethiopian or a Cameroonian for the cleaning.”
After the 2020 blast, most of the help Lebanon received was prioritised for locals. One MP, George Atallah, proposed a law to explicitly exclude families of nonLebanese victims from compensation.
Marceau wonders who remembered the Africans who died on 4 August 2020. She wrote: “Even in death, for you, we do not count. They retrieved the bodies but did not mention the presence of the Black women, our presence.”
In the aftermath, some migrant workers decided to leave Lebanon for good. Others chose to stay. They healed with the help of some organisations, the community, and their family back home.
But the scars are still there – scratched each time Israeli jets break the sound barrier, as they have done several times since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.
The Israeli state responded to the attack not only by bombarding Gaza (where over 41,000 people have since died), but also stretching the hits, or threat of them, to parts of Lebanon, Syria and even Iran, in pursuit of Hamas allies like Hezbollah.