Lebanese citizens have nothing left but the luxury to dream of the new year.
Nothing happening today gives the Lebanese grounds to await a less miserable future. They only have dreams. The dream of getting back the fruit of their life’s labor deposited in banks. The dream of light during their evenings, which have been made dark by the constant electricity cuts. The dream of an employment opportunity for their children that doesn’t require joining the droves of migrants striving to find work halfway around the world. The dream of the investigation into the port explosion crime coming to a conclusion that gives the families of the victims hope that their loved ones were not killed twice; the first time because of deliberate negligence and complicity, and the second because of the criminals’ conspiracy to conceal the truth and impede accountability and prosecution. The dream of officials who do not share what remains of the country’s corpse as citizens wait in queues for bread and gasoline, in a race with the exchange rate to meet their needs for the day.
The Lebanese dream of a country like the others around the world. A nation that is not an arena on which sects compete for shares but one where politicians compete to show citizens that they would provide the best future for their country.
Next year will not be a normal one for the citizens of Lebanon. It could be said that it will be a year of reckoning. I hope that it will be a year in which they hold themselves accountable, first for their misguided choices. These choices have taken those whom citizens are complaining of positions that have allowed them to humiliate citizens and their children in all kinds of ways. The Lebanese have a habit of decrying the wretched state they find their country in, accusing everyone of being responsible and disregarding the fact that it is they who are primarily responsible.
Next year should be one in which Lebanese officials are punished for what they have done. This reckoning requires that Lebanese citizens abandon the culture of the herd, which has led them to march behind leaders whose sectarian sensibilities are aligned with theirs and who ensure their petty interests are furthered at the expense of the national interest. Thus, good choices must be made.
When I say that Lebanese citizens can do nothing but dream, I am not exaggerating. How could Lebanon’s conditions improve if the citizens remain as they are and their leaders remain as they are, continuing to disregard the country’s interests and behaving with an obnoxiousness that leaves them looking down on citizens’ pain?
Where will we find citizens capable of disregarding their narrow partisan and sectarian proclivities so they can gain insights and make good choices? And where will we find these brave politicians who leave their interests behind and build the courage to work for the nation and speak candidly about the reasons for the situation that Lebanon is now in without hesitating to admit their responsibility for that situation.
In his end-of-year speech, did President Michel Aoun decide to go over his term and discuss it openly with his citizens? What did he find? Speaking about the “Shiite duo’s” boycott of the government because of objections about the investigation into the crime of the explosion at the Port of Beirut, the president discovered, five years into his term, that systematic, deliberate and unjustified disruption is breaking institutions apart and eating away at the state!
Who made this discovery? The president who allowed state institutions to be disrupted for two and half years - by allying and colluding with Hezbollah - so that parliament would be obliged to elect him president of the republic. He is the same man who was not embarrassed about [Saad] Hariri’s government being brought down, through a decision announced from Aoun’s home in Rabieh, to prevent the Special Tribunal for Lebanon from investigating the crime of Rafik Hariri’s assassination.
The president did not ignore the question of Hezbollah’s weapons, though he did address it circuitously. He referred to the “tripartite” (army, people resistance) that Hezbollah has imposed on the state and ministerial declarations. However, he said that despite this “tripartite” that notes the role of the “resistance,” the state alone should be responsible for implementing the “defense strategy” and determining how best to protect Lebanon. And Aoun is the president who could, if he wanted to, impose the correct national position on Hezbollah and compel it to put its weapons at the service of the national military establishment. Nonetheless, what happened is that Aoun took the cover he needed to ascend to Baabda Palace from Hezbollah in return for ignoring - rather, providing cover for - Hezbollah’s hegemony over political and judicial decisions domestically and the harm it has done to Lebanon’s Arab ties.
Most Lebanese parties have been disregarding the role Hezbollah plays in strengthening the culture of loyalty to the sect at the expense of loyalty to the nation. True, all sects and religious confessions share this mentality, but the biggest impediment to the emergence of a national cross-sectarian culture has become that it is being imposed through the force of arms on the Shiite sect, which is only represented in both government and parliament by the “Shiite duo.” Added to that is Hezbollah’s loyalty to an Iranian ideology and figure, which contradicts its claims to being a Lebanese party, an argument Prime Minister Najib Mikati recently used to defend it, calling Hezbollah “a political party like the others on the Lebanese parties scene.” Mikati did so although he knew the truth about the threats that Hezbollah’s policies have come to pose, not just to the country’s political and judicial institutions, but on the identity of the country itself.
Declaring these stances requires a lot of courage. Nonetheless, the fact is that with such policies and under the mercy of such politicians, the Lebanese can do nothing but enjoy the blessing of dreams and nothing else, a different future or the blessing of living in another country.
