Carlos Ghosn "Went From The Frying Pan Into The Fire!"

LEBANON

No Tomorrow

Lebanon is on the brink of becoming a failed state.

“Once celebrated as the Switzerland of the Middle East, Lebanon is facing a severe crisis,” wrote Der Spiegel, a German news magazine. “Its economy is collapsing, while electricity and adequate medical care are hard to find. The state has completely failed its people.”

Recently, the electricity worked for around three hours a day, the Washington Post reported. An approaching commercial jet aborted a landing at Beirut’s airport because the runway lights shut off. Traffic signals don’t work, adding to traffic that was already terrible.

Desperation in Beirut is high. The city has a violent past as well as a rich history as a prosperous, cosmopolitan center of the Eastern Mediterranean, as this BBC profile illustrates – once, it was known as the Paris of the Middle East, the region’s bookseller and a glamorous financial capital where the world’s glitterati flocked.

Now, a spate of suicides in the capital has given the crisis a macabre feel.

One man shot himself on a busy street, leaving a suicide note referencing a famous song about poverty during the civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990. “A country at the crossroads of the Middle East’s flashpoints appears to be coming apart,” Bloomberg wrote.

Food shortages and hunger are becoming the norm. “This is the first time I’ve come here,” said Haifa, who was among a throng crowding a food and medicine distribution station recently in Beirut, in an interview with France 24. “Our lives have been turned upside down. We had a good lifestyle, but that’s all finished now. All of a sudden we’ve become so poor, we’ve got nothing.”

Lebanon is on the precipice of a deep financial crisis, NBC News explained. The currency has collapsed. Unemployment is skyrocketing. The decline began years ago as leaders mismanaged and overspent. Late last year, anti-government protests erupted against the economic situation, corruption, sectarian politics, entrenched patronage and the inequality they create in society.

Then the coronavirus delivered the knockout punch as businesses shuttered. In March, Lebanon defaulted on $90 billion of debt. Negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for another $10 billion loan have failed to deliver results. Lebanon has mixed relations with the US because Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed political party, wields significant political power there. The US and others have designated it as a terror group.

Now, protesters take to the streets routinely to point out that their leaders who became wealthy due to the corrupt system they created should be held responsible now that economic catastrophe has struck, CNN reported.

Still, talk to anyone in Lebanon who remembers the civil war and its aftermath and they will talk about the famous resilience – and defiance – of the Lebanese, pointing out how people would dress in any finery they could find and celebrate as if there were no war, as if there were no tomorrow – because there might not be.

Nowadays, those people shrug and say, we overcame bullets and bombs, so this too will pass.