Blast from the past: a long-awaited verdict in Lebanon

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Soon after the first Chinese citizens graduated from American universities in the mid 19th century, political mistrust between the countries took hold. Now the world powers are at odds once more and China's students are again caught in the middle. And in Nigeria, there's endless appetite for wigs made of real hair. Vietnamese locks are prized for their bounce. Mongolian ones are said to be easy to curl. We look at a curious supply chain involving Indian pilgrims, bathroom drains and the occasional goat. First up though, A verdict that had been long awaited in Lebanon was handed down yesterday. A UN backed court in the Hague passed judgment on four men tried in absentia for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was killed by a truck bomb in 2005. The trial chamber therefore finds Salim Jameel Ayesh guilty as a co perpetrator of count one conspiracy aimed at committing a terrorist act. One defendant was found guilty while the other three were acquitted. All four are members of Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group and political party. Fifteen years ago the assassination sent shockwaves across the Middle east and the marked a turning point in Lebanese politics. There were fears that yesterday's verdict could deepen long running sectarian tensions. But many Lebanese have more pressing concerns.

Some are now calling for a sustained uprising against Lebanon's government, whose negligence they blame for last week's devastating explosion.

Last week the cabinet quit in the wake of the blast that destroyed Beirut's port. The country's politics is paralyzed while parliament haggles over a successor in a bankrupt country. Reconstruction is going to be a struggle. Today's tragedies might just overshadow those of the past.

The explosion that killed former Prime Minister Hariri in 2005, it was massive, both in its scale and in its Future implications for Lebanon.

Greg Karlstrom is our Middle east correspondent based in Beirut.

His convoy had just left a cafe near the parliament building downtown. It was traveling along the Cornish, the seaside road in Beirut, when a massive truck bomb exploded. It killed 22 people, including the former prime minister. Injured, more than 200 left the crater meters wide and would prove to be a watershed moment for Lebanon politically that would inflame deep divides that linger to this day.

How do you mean? In what way was it a watershed moment?

Hariri led the country for much of the first 10 or 15 years after the end of the Lebanese civil war. He oversaw the controversial rebuilding of downtown Beirut. He's credited with bringing back a measure of economic stability to the country and prosperity to the country. The backdrop to his assassination, though, was the ongoing Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Syrian forces entered Lebanon during the 1970s. They were heavily involved throughout the civil war. After the end of the war, they stayed until 2005. Hurriy was a member of the anti Syrian camp in Lebanese politics. After he was assassinated, many Lebanese initially laid blame on the Syrians and on Hezbollah, the Shia political party and militia which is aligned with the Syrians. And so it set off enormous protests which culminated in the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon later in 2005. But it also created a schism within Lebanese politics. There were mass protests in favor of the Syrians on March8 and against the Syrians on March 14. And the political camps in Lebanon from that point on were known as March 8 and March 14, divided on the question of roughly whether they were pro or anti Syrian. And that is a divide that, though it is not as salient today, continues to be at least somewhat relevant in Lebanese politics.

And so how much did this trial play into or re inflame those divisions?

The verdict, in one sense, certainly a significant moment. This was a trial that took the better part of a decade to conduct. It cost the better part of a billion dollars. It was something that, when it was first announced more than 10 years ago, was extremely controversial in Lebanese politics. But as the process dragged on and as the investigation was obstructed at various points by the Lebanese government, many people began to lose hope that there was ever going to be an adequate explanation or investigation of what happened. And the verdict that was announced confirmed those fears. I think for many Lebanese, one defendant was found guilty. The other three were found not guilty. The the tribunal said it had no evidence that either Hezbollah or the Syrian government were directly involved in the assassination. And so you're left with, in the verdict, you're left with the idea that essentially one low level member of Hezbollah acted independently in assassinating a former prime minister, which is, of course, implausible. So many people come away from this unsatisfied feeling, like it doesn't really answer the question of who was responsible for this killing.

And there are some unfortunate echoes of the Hariri assassination in the explosion that happened on the waterfront in Beir recently. How are things with the recovery from that after the government has resigned over a week ago?

Well, as many people expected and feared, things are paralyzed when it comes to the politics here in Lebanon. The government resigned, of course, after this catastrophic explosion that killed almost 200 people, wounded thousands more, and was the result of stunning negligence and alleged corruption on the part of the Lebanese government, which left thousands of tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate sitting at the port a kilometer away from the city center. The government stepped down amidst some protests that followed the explosion. Now the question is, what will replace this government? Who will take over? And the immediate question is who will be the prime minister? There's a lot of haggling going on right now, and it will be certainly weeks, if not months before the political class can reach an agreement on that. In the meantime, the country falling ever further into economic misery.

And what about the situation on the ground for ordinary residents of Beirut? How goes the recovery, the rebuilding?

There have been thousands of volunteers who came with push rooms with shovels, and they've made a remarkable amount of progress. Where the streets were once carpeted with broken glass, where apartments were full of debris and chunks of rock and furniture, much of that has now been removed. The city looks somewhat better than it did two weeks ago. The next step, though, the actual reconstruction, is going to be more difficult. Two sort of unique problems in Lebanon. One is that almost everything that is needed to rebuild has to be imported from outside. And Lebanon doesn't have stockpiles of this stuff sitting around. This all has to be paid for then in a Lebanese currency that is increasingly worthless. People concerned about what their insurance is going to pay for, people wondering whether it's worth rebuilding their businesses or whether they should try to cut their losses and perhaps leave the country.

And so, given all that that Lebanese face at this moment, this verdict, these tensions that go back 15 years, this will just sort of be in the noise for them, you think?

I think so. If this verdict had come out 10 years ago, even five years ago, it might have had a real impact on the political scene. But right now, first, it's simply been a long time. The verdict There was no particularly dramatic moment even in the reading of this verdict. It was a six hour, very dense, very legalese affair. And people here are simply preoccupied with more pressing concerns, with this monumental task of rebuilding a shattered city. And given that it's also not in the interest of any of the political factions here in Lebanon to use the verdict to try and escalate tensions. So it's very unsatisfying outcome for a lot of people, but it's unlikely to be one that raises tensions further.

And there's already been lots of talk of investigating the negligence behind the blast more recently. I mean, do you think there's something of an analogue in the Hariri verdict? A long investigation with a not very satisfying conclusion?

Many people here in Lebanon see an analog. They would of course like to see a proper investigation into this explosion that leveled half of their capital city. We've heard a number of powerful political figures in this country, including the President Michel Aoun, who has said there's no need for an international investigation and that anyone who pushes for one is simply wasting time. Everyone in the Lebanese political system somehow culpable in this, whether it's their influence at the port, whether it's ignoring warnings from customs officials and security agencies who urge them to get this explosive material away from a major population center. So no one here really has an interest in doing a proper, thorough, open investigation into what happened. And many Lebanese, yes, watching the verdict come out in the Hague yesterday, are worried that they'll get exactly the same sort of inconclusive answer whenever the port investigation finally finishes.

Thanks very much for your time, Greg.

Thank you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, subscribe to the Economist. To find the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer. American universities are the top choice for many young people in China. But the pandemic and rising rhetoric between the two countries have made life difficult for current and potential students. Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, suggested that Chinese nationals should be banned from studying science and mathematics in America.

If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America. They don't need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.

That's assuming they can even get to America. In the autumn, China has canceled many international flights, leaving admitted students with a difficult choice and leaving some of those already in America stranded. But this isn't the first time that Chinese students looking to study in America have become casualties of tensions between what are now the world's two biggest superpowers.

Yun Wing is still remembered in fact as a statue to him at Yale University, because he is the first Chinese graduate from any American university. This happened in the middle of the 19th century.

David Rennie writes Chaoguan, the economist's column on Chinese affairs, and is based in Beijing.

He was a very bright kid, an orphan from a small village in the south of China, spotted by American missionaries who brought him to New England. And he went to Yale and then made it his life's work to try to give other Chinese young men, at that stage, only men, the same opportunity that he had because he believed that the decaying Imperial China could only be saved with the help of modern education and in particular American education.

And what does that dynamic look like now in terms of Chinese students in America or coming to?

This summer is extremely tense for tens of thousands of Chinese families whose kids have got places at very popular American colleges. But there's a combination of COVID which currently means that Chinese people are not allowed to travel to America, and then just a general climate of suspicion. So this is a real crisis not just for the elite of China. There's also a bunch of middle class Chinese. They're all facing this terrible dilemma that they've got an offer from an American college, but they've no idea whether it's going to work out for their kid.

But why America specifically? Why not study elsewhere for a foreign education?

The kind of Chinese who want to study in the west have a really clear sort of hierarchy in their minds of the kind of country that is going to make them marketable later on. And unfortunately, the US is really at the top of that. If you are the British or the Canadians or the Australians, you have to tolerate the fact that you're just not seen as quite as prestigious. So, for example, I met a basically a child of the elite. She calls herself Elle in English. She goes to a very elite Chinese private school in Beijing. She has offers from her top choice, New York University, but also from University College London. She also has an offer from Toronto University in Canada. But when I asked her, she was incredibly kind of ruthless about it. That she goes to Canada, there'll be so many other Chinese students that she probably won't even get to speak English. So what's the point of that? She thinks that America is a country of immigration, that it's more open to people like her, that if she wanted to stay on in America, maybe try and get a job or a green card, that America is a much better place to build a new life.

And that in turn creates problems for the American universities that would have hosted these students, are hosting these students. What are they doing about this?

They're trying a bunch of different things. So you've seen them being quite proactive. There was a very successful legal push led by Harvard and MIT and then a bunch of other universities, which effectively forced the Trump administration to backtrack on what had been a very, very strict change that they had announced where Chinese students in the States whose classes were going to be online for basically Covid reasons faced deportation if they weren't taking any physical classes. And so that was beaten back. Other colleges you're seeing, so NYU actually, where Elle has her place, they have a campus in Shanghai, a kind of satellite campus, and they're offering to take kids there. It's really a bit of a mess for Chinese who want to study overseas. And so you're seeing kind of questions now about will we see just a kind of sharp decline, the number of Chinese studying overseas. And you know, that would suit the Chinese government in some ways because although they're very keen on Chinese students going and studying things like astrophysics or AI or really cutting edge technology, kind of rich kids who want to go and study film studies, they would rather that money and those kids stayed in China.

And how do you see all this fitting into the broader relationship between China and America?

Well, I think it is a sign of America losing some soft power. I mean, there may well be plenty of people in America who think that actually why do we want all these Chinese students coming to American colleges and taking places maybe from Americans, American colleges would say no, no, no. These Chinese students, very few of whom are on scholarships, are paying very high international fees. And if it weren't for all those hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, actually some big American universities, they wouldn't be financially viable without Chinese students these last few years. And they're actually cross subsidizing American students. But I think there's also something pretty tragic about the idea that America no longer wants to be a beacon for Chinese students. That idea that Chinese students might pick up respect for the west or critical thinking or open debate, that America is kind of shutting its door on that. And I think if that trend continues, this will be, I think, seen as a turning point where that hope that an open China, particularly if China was willing to send the children of its elite to study in the outside world, that might have an influence on liberalizing China. That optimism is already hanging by a thread. And I think if the student flows dry up. Then you're really seeing the west giving up on the idea that China is capable of change.

And do you think that drying up is now likely? What would the consequences be of that?

The saddest thing almost is that we've been here before. So remember Yung Wing, the first Chinese graduate from an American college back in the mid 19th century? His career trying to bridge those two countries where he wanted America to help China become more enlightened and powerful through the power of education. He himself had his heart broken. By trying to bridge those two cultures. He coincided with a nativist backlash. The Chinese Exclusion act, one of the worst laws that Congress has ever passed, basically banned all Chinese people. He had American citizenship at that time. He lost it and ended up an illegal immigrant in the country that he loved so much in America. But the thing about history is that repeating a mistake doesn't make it any less foolish.

David, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

On the streets of Lagos, wigs signify wealth. Women with silky human locks tumbling down their backs stroll past others with coarse synthetic threads. That desire for the real stuff fuels a hair raising international trade from those who want to get rid of it to those who will pay almost any price to get it.

There's a huge market for wigs in Lagos. You can buy a wig with human hair from anywhere between 60 and $800.

Olivia Ackland writes about Africa for the Economist.

The hair comes from everywhere. Brazilian hair is praised for its sheen and durability, Vietnamese for its bounce. Mongolian is allegedly easy to curl.

There's that large a supply of human hair, that large a variety?

Well, that's how it's sold. In reality, it's quite hard to trace where it really comes from. I spoke to Oseremiza Oyofo, who is the founder of Hair Envy, which is a luxury hair retailer in Lagos. And she told me that it can be very difficult to find a good supplier. I was a roaming, unsatisfied customer. I was tired of it because I just felt cheated all the time. It wouldn't be as long as I'd like it to be. Maybe it wouldn't hold a curl, it wouldn't straighten, it wouldn't look, it wouldn't have the shiny. So there are not very scrupulous standards in the industry. Oyofo told me some of the things that she saw as a consumer that she was buying hair which she wasn't happy with, and it wasn't really what it pretended to be.

Why is it so hard to Know what you're getting, though.

So there are lots of different steps in the hair supply chain. Most of the hair that ends up in Africa comes through factories in China. And sometimes unscrupulous middlemen will bulk up the human hair with hair from goats or hair from horses. And then the hair can often be mislabeled. So Chinese hair is not particularly popular in the African market, but Peruvian hair is. And so Chinese hair might be packed into boxes, claiming that it's Peruvian or Brazilian, which is also popular. And then once the hair arrives in Nigeria, there's also opportunity for mislabeling it and pretending that it is top quality Brazilian hair, when perhaps it might not really have come from Brazil, for example.

I mean, those are the desired origins. But where does all the hair actually tend to come from?

So it comes from all over the world. Quite a lot comes from China itself. A lot comes from India. Myanmar is now the fourth largest exporter of human hair. It quadrupled the volume of hair it ships out in the past decade. Through a fixer in Yangon, I spoke to a hair trader who deals directly with people who cut off their hair. He said that he can tell when the economy is suffering because more women come to his shop to offer him their locks. He said that his clients get around $18 for their locks, but it varies according to weight. And then some 500km north of Yangon is a town which has been nicknamed Hare City, the town of Paabu, which used to be full of farmers who are harvesting onions and chilies, but now lots of them have turned to the hair trade. And so you have these collectors who go from door to door, collecting and paying a small amount for people's hair, which comes out of plug holes and combs and hairbrushes. And they're gathered together and put in a sack. And then people sit and untangle them, picking out the lice and the white hairs.

And this is the stuff that ends up in wigs in Nigeria.

So one wig seller that I spoke to scoffed at this suggestion, and she said that we call this stuff factory trash, and I don't use it in my wigs. I think a lot of it does end up in the wigs in Nigeria, because it's a sort of middle of the range hair. The same wig seller also told me that she prefers to avoid hair that comes from India, because a lot of the hair that comes from India is cut off. Pilgrims at temples who go to sacrifice their hair as a gesture of surrendering their egos to the God Vishnu and then in turn, the temples sell the hair on. And some people in Nigeria are suspicious of this temple hair. They think that it's cursed. One lady I spoke to said that she had heard that snakes slither over the hair in the temples.

Okay, so what do you do if you want to wear a wig, but you don't want to wear a wig made of hair that used to belong to someone else?

So if you'd rather not use human hair wigs, then you can go fully synthetic. Only hair experts tell me that the synthetic hair is not as beautiful and shiny. It's much coarser.

Thanks very much for joining us, Olivia.

Thank you very much for having me on the show.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow. Sam.