Why clean a Lebanese beach?
The Washington DC-Beirut based Sabra Shatila Foundation as well as American, European, and Lebanese co-sponsors, decided, as part of next month’s 27th Anniversary commemoration of the 1982 Massacre at Beirut’s Sabra Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, to clean nearby Ramlet el Baida Beach and develop a continuing program to keep it clean. As one of the very few free Lebanese beaches, Ramlet el Baida is used daily by Palestinian refugees, poor Syrians, Lebanese, and the nearly enslaved foreign ‘guest’ workers from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Sudan, Bangladesh and other countries. To its great credit, and in support of the Free Gaza Campaign’s (freegaza.org) efforts to break the siege of Gaza, Beirut’s Municipality agreed with SSF that Beirut’s main beach would be renamed “Free Gaza Beach” for 24 hours and that Ramlet el Baida would be forever ‘twinned’ with Palestine’s Gaza Beach. Since the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, Beirut’s beaches suffer from an inordinate a
