Lebanon’s Reckoning

It is often said about change that it happens slowly at first and then all at once. Lebanon for so much of the last decade, has been in the shadow of more dramatic events in the region. The Arab Spring, the war in Syria, the rise of ISIS and Saudi-Iranian tensions have dominated the international news agenda whilst Lebanon’s more longstanding, intractable and complex political issues have metastasised in the shadows.

Today it is hard to see much more news happening in Lebanon at once. Growing regional tensions between Israel and Hezbollah threaten the country with major conflict, corrupt and incompetent governance is the most likely explanation for a explosion damaging half of the capital city Beirut, a billion dollar trial concludes into the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and this week the country’s caretaker Health Minister warned that hospitals are reaching maximum capacity.

The World Health Organization has said that more than half of 55 healthcare facilities evaluated by the agency were “non-functional”, three major hospitals were out of operation and another three were running at well below normal capacity. Few politicians around the world have as hard a job as caretaker health minister Hamad Hassan. Hassan has warned that the country is ‘on the brink’ and urged the Government to impose a new two-week lockdown to stem the spread of the virus.

The country reported a one-day record of 456 new infections on Monday, bringing the total number of infections to 9,337, including 105 deaths since the start of the outbreak in February. Lebanon’s worst peacetime disaster has made the difficult art of governing during a fast moving and deadly pandemic that is constantly posing new challenges. Hassan admitted this conundrum that never before has trust been so low in the State at a time in which listening to their Covid policies are more important than ever. “Our ability to control behaviour in the face of the virus is more limited,” the new minister said.

A government that is unable to govern is likely to be overwhelmed by a virus that has forced far more organised and resourced countries to their knees. Just as the infection rate has an exponential capacity, so seemingly have anti-government protests. Protests have the twin impact of putting large numbers of people in close proximity, good for the virus, and also making it harder to run the logistics of the public health response, bad for the people.

Any further locking down would have to somehow account for the tens of thousands of people who’ve been displaced or made permanently homeless by the explosion at the Port of Beirut. A huge relief effort is needed that combines dealing with the twin urgencies of Covid and the blast recovery, all done against the backdrop of a political system in crisis and a corrupt and how nosediving financial system.

Added to this volatile mix is the UN court giving its final verdict on the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minster Rafik al-Hariri. 15 years and $1bn dollars later the verdict has set out how ‘compelling circumstantial evidence’ is the closest that we will ever come to knowing the what and the why of the killing, but it adds to tensions at an incredibly sensitive moment in the country’s history.

The challenge for Lebanon is immense. At this crossroads of a political, health and financial crisis leadership is what’s needed to chart the country out of choppy waters. The resignation of the technocratic government in the wake of the Port blast changes nothing substantive as to the underlying challenges of the country’s body politic and the key question remains whether the country’s elites double down on protecting the status quo or embrace some form of new direction.

What and how this happens remains unclear and will most likely be decided away from the transparency and scrutiny of formal political institutions, to the detriment of the Lebanese peoples search for accountability. What makes the equation even more complex is the question as to how much regional influence is or can be exerted over these same elites regarding this question of political revolution or evolution. However, with the status quo so clearly untenable things may have to change just to preserve a status quo and the one guarantee is that 2020 will be a historic year for the country