Under the weight of the crisis in living conditions facing citizens, Lebanon’s squares witnessed protests and demonstrations once again amid the state’s resignation from its duties and its adoption of policies of procrastination, deferral and disregard the country’s economic and political collapses as it drowns in its factions’ disputes and quarrels.
Tripoli, the most impoverished city on the Mediterranean according to international reports, was the natural place for the Lebanese’ return to the streets after conditions in the north became intolerable. Deprivation borders on literal hunger amid a total lockdown imposed by the ravaging spread of the coronavirus. This is the authorities’ latest failure, and it comes after they had failed to put a plan to contain a disease that claims tens of people and destroys the health of thousands daily.
The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the crisis in living conditions and left hundreds of thousands of those with low incomes, who buy their bread with their daily wages, vulnerable to an ordeal that has not been seen in Lebanon since the famine of the 1st World War; that is, a year before Grand Liban was established. The struggle to put food on the table during the mandatory lockdown, with its draconian measures and financial punishments, a lockdown which was not accompanied by the provision of financial compensation to those harmed by the measure or a search for ways to lighten its burden, has revealed another side of the meaning of the political system’s collapse. Rather, it speaks to the naivety of the officials in charge of its executive, legislative and judicial branches and their blindness to the bigger picture of the domestic and foreign situations. It shows that they cannot see that the corpse of Lebanon, as a country and political system, is rotting under the watch of an indifferent world preoccupied with its anxieties, which range from absorbing the epidemic’s losses to containing political crises moving across the planet.
News published by Asharq Al-Awsat about President Michel Aoun looking into extending his term, which was denied by presidential palace sources, speaks volumes about the ruling clique’s inability to come up with a single novel idea outside the context of clinging to Aoun and his allies maintenance of their positions. Everything else, from addressing the successive disasters that hit the country, or pushing the investigation into the blast of the Beirut Port to its conclusion, are matters that mean nothing to this group of power-hungry rulers and those who support them, justify their mismanagement, and stand in the way of toppling them in the streets, as happened after the 17th of October. What concerns them is getting rid of the Taif Agreement and changing the framework of governance such that more failures and subordinates can be brought to power.
More significantly, extending Aoun’s term means maintaining the current parliament and using the pretext of the inability to hold legislative elections. Aoun and those who stand behind him would thereby continue to use Lebanon as a bargaining chip in the forthcoming US-Iranian negotiations, whereby this devastated country would play the role of defending Iran’s nuclear program. From it, Iran’s rockets would be launched if its interests are threatened, as numerous Iranian generals have stated.
All of this is happening amid floundering attempts to contain the coronavirus pandemic and the skyrocketing inflation of the price of essential goods. The government decided to subsidize these goods with the Central Bank’s hard currency reserves. And perhaps once a month, we hear news about the Central Bank’s reserves drying up and the caretaker government leaning towards “guiding” subsidies at times and canceling them at others, a step which would threaten broad segments of Lebanese society’s ability to secure their livelihood. As media outlets loyal to the ruling parties put citizens in the picture and inform them that continuing to subsidize products for a limited forthcoming period cannot be done without depleting the Central Bank’s compulsory reserves, the state and its customs and security agencies ignore the scandal of the hundreds of trucks smuggling goods to Syria every day; whereby unknown- known factions inject fuel, food and hard currency into the veins of the Assad regime they are allied with.
In notorious Lebanese fashion, ignoring the widespread smuggling has come to resemble institutional military and security protection of the regime in Damascus. Indeed, there is a focus on the losses incurred by the public treasury because of the subsidies on basic commodities, while the complicit and corrupt officials do not dare point to the obvious irreconcilability between bearing the cost of supporting Bashar al-Assad and containing the ramifications of the collapsing domestic economy.
On the other hand, if a citizen who had sold his last remaining electronic appliance to buy bread and oil takes to the streets to protest because his children are hungry, he has lost hope, and his future has become bleak, the authorities, accompanied by their media arrive in their riot gear to clamp down on what they call a threat to security and agents of foreign powers or extremists sympathetic to ISIS. On the other hand, the regime has become so frail that its factions cannot agree on a framework to regulate the mechanisms of looting and dilute it as it had been doing for thirty years.
At this point, it may seem justified to demand that the authorities, with their various criminal parties and components, agree on quotas for their corruption and theft, as this could perhaps alleviate the suffering of the Lebanese who are waking up to a new nightmare every day. However, this demand would clash with the reality that authorities are brain dead and are no longer capable of saving themselves, even through more lying and deception.
