Lebanon heads for meltdown as protesters keep returning to streets
Power of the street has run headlong into a system invested in entrenched graft and incompetence
Power of the street has run headlong into a system invested in entrenched graft and incompetence
In mid-December, a month and a half into protests that have crippled Lebanon and placed its political class in the dock, a priest caused a stir by telling his congregation to start stockpiling food.
The coming three years would be difficult, the cleric in the southern city of Sidon said. Citing the country’s Maronite Patriarch, he advised people to plant their own wheat. “His Holiness says the crisis will last for years, and famine is approaching.”
The words were quickly seized on by some who saw the sermon as fearmongering, and others who viewed it as a salient warning, as an economic collapse unlike anything since the Lebanese civil war.
Fragile even in a good year, Lebanon’s economy is disintegrating at an alarming rate, sparking a currency devaluation, a mass flight of money, restrictions on withdrawals, a grave threat to the country’s banking system and a guarantee that –
without a foreign bailout – the country will default on its enormous debts by March at the latest.The extent of the economic collapse was on show across the country in the lead-up to Christmas, with close to 400 restaurants closing,
malls that usually teemed with expatriates home for the holidays empty and local businesses reporting a plunge in trade of up to 80%.
Rumblings of a looming abyss were part of the reason huge crowds of Lebanese took to the streets from 17 October, demanding an overhaul of a political class that had presided over nearly 30 unstable postwar years, while gaining fortunes funded largely by state funds.
So stark has the situation become that Lebanese who took to the streets – railing initially against a tax on the messaging application WhatsApp – have kept coming back.
Lebanon’s other traditional backers are disinclined to help without fundamental reforms. The US and Saudi Arabia have largely conditioned any help on Iran-backed Hezbollah being defanged in a country
where it holds sway over the political process, feeding off the state economy, while at the same time generating its own revenues.
Feudal lords and leaders of political blocs, including Druze officials and powerful militia, Hezbollah, have begun stockpiling food, while warning that a nationalistic spirit so vividly on display could be splintered by renewed sectarianism if and when times get tougher.
“Hezbollah … is trying to prepare its community against the challenges on two fronts; first, an attempt to increase local production of food, through agriculture and animal farming. And secondly, through securing the international roads linking their community’s regions to Syria
