More outrage ensued on Saturday 12 November, when activist Joumana Talhouk uploaded a video of the construction site on Facebook. In reaction, some activists made use of the Beirut Marathon event the next day, where people were “running for a cause”, to run for Ramlet el Bayda, demanding putting an end to the construction. They filmed the construction on the site for as long as they could, until they were approached by men on the ground who nearly confiscated their phone and told them to leave the site. It was surprising that work was ongoing even on a Sunday, most likely to hasten the construction process that was previously halted because waves washed over the site. Of course, this only proves that the site is too close to the sea and should be classified as public property based on order 144 of 1925 which classifies the seashore as public property, defined as the farthest area reached by the waves during winter, including sand and rocky shores. Activists refer to this Order to argue that investors have no right to build on public maritime domain. The law, however, has been largely ignored, and several decrees over the years have allowed privatization and exploitation of public maritime property. As Cynthia Bou Aoun, a reporter with Al-Akhbar newspaper notes, the exception has become the rule when it comes to the coast of the capital, where this project is no different from many other projects which have encroached upon the shoreline by receiving exceptional decrees allowing development. In fact, there are currently more than 1,200 illegal structures on the Lebanese coast, mostly erected after the chaos of the Lebanese civil war.

  Conflict over the Ramlet el Bayda beach is not new, and NGOs as well as independent experts and activists have been working for years to understand how the privatization of Ramlet el Bayda started. In fact, public pressure and work by the NGO Greenline stopped the development of the NARA project on the same beach in the 90s, planned by the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In 2012, the organization NAHNOO took up the fight for the space, and started a campaign called Bayda Ramletna, to raise awareness about the public use of the space. As a public beach, Ramlet el Bayda has been disregarded by the Beirut municipality, making the beach neither clean nor safe for the public to use. It is highly polluted, with sewage pipes flowing directly into the sea (as is the case in many other locations on Beirut's shoreline), and lacks proper design and maintenance, with no easy pedestrian access, as well as lack of monitoring and lighting, making the space particularly inhospitable to women. When it was discovered in September 2016 that a permit was given to Achour Development to develop the plot to the South of Ramlet el Bayda, mobilizations and direct actions intensified. Both NAHNOO and Greenline organized panels to discuss the details of the case, some with the presence of the Governor of Beirut, judge Ziad Chbib, as well as protests on the site. The governor seems to be shrugging off the issue, claiming he has no legal grounds to stop the development since the plots are privately owned. Ironically, back in June 2016, when public attention was drawn to the area after the wooden staircase leading down to the beach was destroyed by excavators, the governor claimed that “The Ramlet el Bayda public beach will not be closed and any form of restricting citizens from accessing the shores, be it for constructional purposes or by erecting fences to close off the area…” [1] At the time, he had called on the Ministry of Public Works and Transport to draw the borders of maritime public property, to put an end to this issue once and for all. Meanwhile, the said minister, Ghazi Zeaiter, responded that these borders are already provided by Article 2 of Order 144 of 1925 and claimed that the excavations plans are “illegal”, and called on the Interior Ministry and the Municipality of Beirut to preserve the coast.

  More recently, social movements such as We Want Accountability (Badna Nhaseb) as well as independent activists have begun to organize protests and actions on site. For example, on November 14, 2016, a group of activists spontaneously went to the site and tried to remove the pipes that were dredging sea water from the site into the sea. They were attacked by men in civilian clothing, and one of the activists was seriously injured. The next day during a protest organized by We Want Accountability, more security men were on the site and clashes erupted again between these men and activists. At the most recent protest against the privatization of the space on 26 November 2016, organized in coordination between all the NGOs and civil campaigns working on the issue, there was a notable increase in the number of protestors, who blocked the sea road of Ramlet el Bayda, and marched from the northern end of the beach to the south where construction was ongoing. Protestors were met by riot police, who had blocked the public road leading to the beach with barbed wire leading activists to ask whether their role is to establish security or condone the theft of public property. When trying to access the beach from the shore, protestors found their path blocked by a river of sewage, that had been purposefully widened and deepened to prevent them from passing through, with riot police walling the area on the other side. With almost no light on the beach except for the headlights of a police car, and the suffocating stench of sewage, most protestors found the scene quite apocalyptic. Although some activists managed to build a bridge across the sewage from abandoned pipes and were willing to clash with the riot police, organizers managed to keep the protest peaceful, to the dismay of many who wanted their rightful access to the beach, and promised to take the matter to court, claiming the law is on their side.

  Although what is happening today on Ramlet el Bayda is a clear violation of the laws governing coastal properties, the concerned ministries and authorities seem to be turning a blind eye to these violations, and jeopardizing public spaces for the sake of real estate owners who have the wealth and political power to pass exceptional decrees and receive illegal permits to develop and fence off a space that has been publically used for decades.

  Much remains dubious and unclear when it comes to the case of Ramlet el Bayda, such as inconsistent decrees and regulatory frameworks, as well as “secret documents” that researchers have been uncovering, showing that public officials have over the years involved themselves “in the deliberate work of blurring records to preemptively circumvent the ability of city dwellers to formulate legally buttressed claims.” [2] What is clear however, is that little time remains to preserve Ramlet el Bayda as a public space for the citizens of Beirut and prevent the city from becoming “the first Mediterranean city without a seafront [2].” 

Today, the project is shrouded in controversy. Achour Development is claiming that the plots he is currently developing on do not fall within public maritime domain and are legally classified as private property because they are not sandy and because their elevation is too high for them to fall within public maritime domain. In parallel, and to the frustration of activists, governmental bodies are claiming that the development is not on the public beach, referring to the space used by citizens to swim, the plots of which are owned by Hariri. Meanwhile, activists and researchers are referring to maps from the 50s and 60s which clearly show that the land is indeed sandy and reached by the waves, and that human landfilling activity is what has caused the elevation, adding that indeed around 40% of these plots in total is within public property, making the rest of the plot too small for any sort of development. The public nature of plots is also shown in aerial maps from the 60s, where the corniche wall dividing public and private property is evident, and this wall clearly cuts through plot 3689. Moreover, two of these plots (3691 and 3692) were marked as non-developable according to building laws, and these marks have mysteriously disappeared from current cadastral maps. Notably, there is no EIA conducted for this project. There was an EIA done for a bigger project, but due to technical and financial reasons that project was discontinued, although it received a permit, as well as two exceptional decrees. Achour did receive an exceptional permit for this particular project, but activists are claiming this permit is illegal, and the municipality of Beirut is stalling making the permit accessible to activists. In addition, such a project needs a permit from the Ministry of Public Works and Transport, since it involves transporting large quantities of sand from the plots, and such a permit does not exist. Activists also claim that someone within the DGU was bribed into classifying these plots as rocky and not sandy. Based on these arguments, as well as many other complications and confusions around the project, experts within the movement are demanding from the Governor of Beirut to stop the project until these issues are clarified, as well as from the Ministry of Public works and Transport to clearly draw out the borders of public Maritime Domain.

The relevant decrees concerning the regulation of public maritime domain in Lebanon is explained in this booklet written by architect Abir Saksouk and published by the Dictaphone Group. However, the exploitation of Decree 4810 of 1966, which permits a very low exploitation of coastal properties on Zone 10 (inclusive of Ramlet el Bayda) is important to highlight, as its violation has led to the private exploitation of the seafront and is a clear illustration that the State in Lebanon protects the interests of the rich elite and of capital rather than the interests and needs of the public. For example, this Decree was abolished by Decree 169 of 1989, established illegally during the civil war, the effects of which is illustrated nicely in this video by the Legal Agenda.