This is a conversation with Lebanese journalist Timour Azhari of Al Jazeera (previously The Daily Star) about the legacy of the October 17 uprising six months since it began. We spoke about the current state of Lebanese politics, the government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis and its impact on the country’s most vulnerable groups as well as what protesters might be expected to face once the pandemic is over.
You can read Azhari’s work on Al Jazeera here as well as his archives at The Daily Star here. He is also very active on Twitter with regular updates on Lebanese affairs.
You can follow the podcast on Twitter @FireTheseTimes.
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This episode is dedicated to the work of Syrian Eyes. Please check out their fundraising to help prevent a large-scale escalation of the Covid19 outbreak in refugee settlements in Lebanon.
Featured photo was taken by Hassan Chamoun (I modified it a bit for the episode). Music by Tarabeat. Logo design by Carl Farra.
Transcript prepared by Thomas Cugini and Antidote Zine:
During the revolution, we thought it would be easy to make these party structures irrelevant, but now the crises we are seeing present an opportunity for those parties, so I think it’ll be very difficult. We’re going into a difficult period.
Timour Azhari: My name is Timour Azhari, I’m a journalist based in Beirut, and recently became an Al Jazeera English correspondent.
Joey Ayoub: Timour, I met you in the streets, and we have both been posting updates on the protests in Lebanon on Twitter. You’ve been doing it for a more extended period of time. I wanted to start this conversation with your general impression as a journalist, as someone who has tried to understand the situation as much as you can: what are some of your initial reflections now that we’re approaching the six month mark of this uprising?
TA: It’s important to take a second and stop and think of what we’ve all experienced over the past six months. I can speak about myself personally. As a journalist here, I had been writing just to record history, rather than being able to see any change coming in the future. Then 17 October rolled around and everything seemed like it was changing. We had about a month or so of really intense street protests where the country was basically shut down. From 17 October until after Independence Day was the initial big explosive stretch, and then the economic crisis took over and became the main story. We went from the euphoria of a massive part of the country being united to Oh my god, how are we gonna survive? A lot of people just couldn’t access money.
The protest kept going, and took on a more angry character as people really became frustrated, and then we had the coronavirus come in, and that ended any protests that were still ongoing. We were at the point where we were seeing one or two big protests a week, usually on Sunday, and then there would be other actions in different parts of the country. So still trying to maintain momentum, still organizing, but definitely much more low-key than what it initially was. And then when the coronavirus came, that put things on hold.
I know from my conversations there’s a general feeling in the country that the anger and the frustration, the demands that led people to go to the streets, are still there and probably have increased since, and I expect that when this whole thing is over (if it’s ever over, if we ever get to go back out on the streets again), that we’re going to see a cross between a nationwide block party and a protest. As some activist friends have put it: we’re going to make up for all the things they did while we were stuck at home.
JA: Yeah, it does definitely feel like the coronavirus put things a bit on hold, which I guess is to be expected. I’m curious as to your impression, again as a journalist, and someone who does your research: how have you seen the new government’s reaction to the Covid-19 crisis? How would you evaluate what they have done so far?
TA: Let’s obviously discount any kind of conspiracy idea here that the government brought in coronavirus of course, but coronavirus came as a very opportune crisis for a government like Hassan Diab’s to gain legitimacy from. As far as the crises go that the country is facing, whether it’s the economic crisis, financial crisis, or health sector crisis, I think the coronavirus crisis, when you compare it to the economic crisis or the political crisis in the country, is much easier to solve. Because all you really need to do is shut down the country and make sure that people stay home. That’s the kind of thing that states are good at, especially states that have a security sector that is so much at the forefront, as we have here in Lebanon. We’re not used to thinking about our state in that way, as being a security state. But security forces in this country, whether the army or the ISF, are the main institutions that really function. So this crisis presents a real opportunity for Hassan Diab’s government.
And credit where credit is due, it seems that their handling has shown results. They closed schools really early, eight days after we had our first case. They decided to close down schools and universities even before we’d hit double digits. And they got a lot of criticism for it at the time; people were saying that they’d gone too far, too early. But it actually seems that Lebanon has done a quite good job on the containment side. Where they haven’t done a good job, which takes away from the entire effort, is the economic side of things. Statistics from the finance ministry say that 45% of the country is below the poverty line. The government’s reform plan, which was leaked yesterday, puts that figure at 48%. So we’re looking at half of the country now that is below the poverty line. That means they make less than four and a half million lira a year, which at current exchange rates is below two thousand dollars. Imagine: half the country is making under two thousand dollars a year. That is at least two and a half million Lebanese.
So Hassan Diab’s government decided, Okay, we need the lockdown. If you look at global trends, it makes sense. But if people are stuck at home and they can’t feed themselves, they will go to the streets. That’s where the government has failed, because they announced aid way too late, in my opinion. They announced it in late March, and two weeks later it hasn’t even started to come forward, so people are really in a difficult place now, and we’ve seen protests several times. We’ve seen them in Tripoli, and in the southern suburbs of Beirut, places where traditionally there are people of a much lower socio-economic status. People can’t take it. So if anything, that’s where this government has failed.
Now, if we’re looking at Hassan Diab’s government as a whole: there was the whole question of independence in the beginning. You could have taken the opinion that this government is exactly like governments before; it’s put forward by the exact same parties and therefore it won’t be any different. But to some degree, that has been proven wrong. If you look inside Hassan Diab’s government, yes, there are people who are party people. Berri’s appointees, for example, or the Marada Movement’s appointees. These are traditional Lebanese feudal, sectarian warlords. In the cabinet, there are ministers who are completely loyal to parties. But there are also ministers who have shown a more independent streak. For right now, I think I would put Hassan Diab in there. I think that Hassan Diab is not under the sway of Hezbollah entirely, or under the sway of Berri or Gebran Bassil, though he navigates in a space that needs to make those people happy to some degree.
When the speaker, Nabih Berri, said that he would withdraw his ministers from parliament if the government didn’t change its plan to bring back expatriates, very quickly we saw the government change the plan; they brought the expatriates back. So Hassan Diab has some wiggle room, but in the end, there is that layer of Lebanon’s zuama [cleintelism], and there is a line that he can’t cross. There are other ministers in the government (the justice minister and the information minister) who so far have also shown to be quite competent and have some kind of an independent streak. On the whole, we’re looking at a government that has more leeway and more room to maneuver than previous governments.
But it remains to be seen whether they can really push back on the important issues, political reform. Appointments will be a major test: if they do appointments in the same manner as before, then we can write this government off entirely.
JA: I’m curious as to your thoughts about the sectarian parties. How have you seen them react? I agree with you that Hassan Diab brings a new dimension, for better or worse. But Hezbollah announced some weeks ago that they’re going to mobilize people to tackle the Covid-19 crisis; we’ve seen FPM people and LF people putting their logos on hand gel and that kind of stuff. They both maybe feel they are under threat if they don’t do something, because as you said, the poverty levels are pretty bad, getting to almost half the country now, which is quite startling. They seem to feel the heat in some way or another, but at the same time, historically this has also been their strength; there is a co-dependency between them and “their supporters.” They certainly believe that.
The question is: is it still working? In the post-October 17 landscape, one thing that we said early on, and even a few months into the protest movement, is that there’s a certain way of doing things that isn’t working. Clientelism, wasta, corruption, all of that is still happening, of course, but there’s something about it that was fundamentally broken, like a spell was broken or something. So how have you seen these parties react in the past few weeks? Whether to the financial crisis or to the Covid-19 crisis, which of course are interlinked.
TA: In the same way that the coronavirus presents an opportunity for the government to gain legitimacy, it also provides a space for parties to reassert themselves in their traditional role. And their traditional role is to provide what the state can’t provide. But let’s be very clear here. It’s not that we happen to have a weak state and therefore these parties are filling a gap. No, these parties are the major constituents of the state. The leaders of these parties are the overlords of the country, and they systematically undermine the state in order to create a space for themselves. It’s very important to point that out, because I’ve seen some analysis that says these parties are “filling a void.” Yes, the void is created by them in the first place, so they have a place to exist, so they can build networks of allegiance. Coronavirus and the economic crisis together provide an opportunity for them to strengthen those networks. The big question is whether their finances have taken a hit. From what I’ve gathered over the past months of reporting and speaking to people, yes, these parties have been hit financially in recent years, not just now, but they still have resources on which they can fall back.
During the uprising we were talking about how people had woken up and said, What the hell have we been doing? And unity was powerful in helping people think that If we are all united in this way, we no longer need those structures, let’s build a new Lebanon. The problem is that now a new Lebanon seems very difficult to build. It’s important to realize that we need political change along with economic change at the same time. Sadly, I think we’re going to go for the economic solution, because to change Lebanon’s political system, you need to ask the people benefiting from the system to stop benefiting from it. During the revolution, we thought it would be easy to make these party structures irrelevant, but now the crises we are seeing present an opportunity for those parties, so I think it’ll be very difficult. We’re going into a difficult period.
Going back to Hassan Diab’s government and why parties might feel threatened in some way: Hassan Diab, if you put everything aside, is a much more confidence-inspiring and competent prime minister than Saad Hariri. I think we can all agree to that already. When you watch a speech by Hassan Diab, his Arabic is good, first of all, which goes a long way. He has good speech writers or he is a good writer himself. He is a good speaker, you have to give him that. I think of myself as a critical person, and I’ve covered a lot of politicians in Lebanon since I became a journalist here, but sometimes, when he comes up to the podium, I’ve gotten goosebumps. In my head I’m like, No. But it happens. So he is a rousing speaker, he is a confidence-inspiring speaker, and I think that goes a long way because of what we’ve dealt with in the past.
What we’ve dealt with in the past really was complete incompetence, so just on that level Hassan Diab is a very interesting character, much more interesting than I thought previously. I think a lot of protesters and people who were on the streets also see this. I don’t think it’s black and white, that this guy is completely beholden to parties. Yes, he has red lines, and yes, he’s not structural change. But he’s an interesting character who will be around in Lebanese politics for a long time, because he has shown to do the basics of what a politician is supposed to do.
On the whole this government has shown that. The information minister, for example, is Harvard-educated, has a PhD, is a very good speaker, always has an answer ready. Which compares very well to a Jamal Jarrah in the last government, who was this random politician appointed by Saad Hariri and not someone who you want as your information minister. So the government on the whole is much more confidence-inspiring. But they still haven’t really had their big test; we need to wait for one of those big tests to come around.
JA: Those big tests—what are some of the ways that they might manifest themselves? I think it’s safe to say we are heading toward something, as usual. This is not a sentence that is uncommon when we talk about Lebanon; it always seems that we’re heading towards something, and usually it’s not a good something, unfortunately. As you said, the poverty levels are pretty high, and the Covid-19 crisis made things worse on that front as one would expect. And there are areas of concern that I think have been highlighted by the Covid-19 crisis. One of them, as you mentioned, is financial repercussions. Another one is how more vulnerable groups of people (those who don’t have the citizenship, migrants, refugees, migrant domestic workers) have had to deal with the Covid-19 crisis. You’ve written on this, on how it’s affected migrant domestic workers pretty badly.
What are your thoughts on the undercurrents of the main trends we’re seeing in Lebanon that haven’t been addressed? There seems to be a blind spot, even among protesters, towards a pretty big segment of the population that is easily hidden away from the narratives of governments and policies being good or bad. More often than not, they are simply not included in the equation.
TA: You’re right it wasn’t at the forefront of the protests. Sadly this is something that happens around the world. When there are movements or crises, people think, We Lebanese are in this huge bind, we have so many problems, how can we possibly work to save other people when we can barely survive ourselves? That’s something you’ll hear over and over. But it is a national issue that we really need to address. In Lebanon, the question of citizenship has always been a difficult thing. Very soon after Lebanon was formed, there were Palestinian refugees coming here, and there was a Christian community who were very sensitive to a large influx of Muslim people because it dilutes their power. Not saying I agree with it, but you can understand the rationale behind that.
That’s just an aside. But it is troubling because the Lebanese uprising actually started with the deaths of two Syrian people. That’s an important note that you don’t usually see anywhere. When you see tallies of the martyrs of the Lebanese revolution, you don’t see those two men in there. It’s very inconvenient and unfortunate to say, but these men were in a building that was torched on the first night of the uprising, in this big chaotic outburst of anger. These two people suffocated. They were two Syrian men who were living in the building and suffocated to death, and we didn’t hear anything about that. They’re not part of the narrative; they’ve been completely excluded.
That’s a good starting point to understand how the Lebanese uprising failed to address the issues in this country that Syrians and migrant workers face. Sometimes migrant workers would take part in protests and be welcomed. And I also know that the issue of Lebanese who can’t pass on citizenship (for example Lebanese women who married Palestinians) was there, even quite center stage. Being able to pass on nationality was one of the major demands. If there was a top five or ten demands, it would be there. But even so this question was missing.
It is also important to note how much the condition of these people in this country has depreciated and become untenable over the last six months. It’s also important to note here that the currency began devaluing before the uprising began. It began devaluing in August of last year, and had already devalued quite a bit before the uprising took place, and even before the uprising there were stories of how migrant workers, whether from Egypt, Syria, Ethiopia, or Southeast Asia—many of them come here because they want to make money to send home to their families, and that depends on the exchange rate from lira to dollars. If you’re paid in lira and the currency depreciates, it will reflect less dollars for you to send home.
So that was already an issue before the uprising. Then the banks closed and this whole crisis came to a head, and today the currency has lost half of its value. It’s become an untenable situation for hundreds of thousands of people in this country. We’ve already seen mass repatriations. Notably the Filipino embassy has had a free program where they’ve repatriated about six hundred women and children, and a few men. So there are a certain number of people who can get back home, but the vast majority of these people are stuck here. They’ve paid a lot of money to come here; they want to leave with at least something to show for it. But many are being laid off.
I wrote a recent story where I spoke to a number of women. One of the women lived in an apartment with fourteen other migrant workers, and someone in the apartment had coronavirus symptoms, so they went to Rafic Hariri University hospital, the heart of coronavirus treatment in Lebanon at the time. When she went there, she was turned back because she doesn’t have any papers. You can imagine: a migrant lives in an apartment with fourteen other people; they’re sleeping three people per bed; really tight, cramped conditions—if the coronavirus spreads in such conditions, it would be unspeakably bad. And the coronavirus came on top of the economic crisis, which has made their wages worth half as much.
Because of the kafala system and the abuse that it entails or allows, many migrant workers, many women, thousands of women in Lebanon, live on the fringes of society or in a state of limbo where they don’t have legal residence. If they’re abused, they’re scared to go to the police because they could be arrested and deported. If they feel sick, they’re scared to go to the hospital because the hospital could call the police. They really live in a state of limbo. And conditions for these people have become so much worse.
There are Lebanese initiatives, notably the anti-racist movement and their migrant community center, but also an initiative from a group of migrant workers who used to be in Lebanon. You had Banchi Yimer on to talk about what she’s doing, and I urge people to support them however they can. Because if you think things have gotten bad for Lebanese people, it’s so much worse for migrants in Lebanon.
JA: We’ve seen a number of stories recently of men who have poured gasoline over themselves, and died from it. Can you talk a bit about the symbolism of this? First and foremost, it’s a tragedy for those people’s lives and for their families. But we well know that people pouring gasoline over themselves is quite a symbolic thing to do since the 2011 uprisings in the region. When we started the protest, I knew things were bad, the statistics were pretty clear, but I was hoping that we might achieve a bit more, especially in terms of economic reforms that might redistribute wealth in a certain way. I wasn’t expecting much. My expectations in Lebanon tend to be fairly moderate in the first place, as you might guess. But I am a bit shocked to see that it’s only taken six months since the start of the uprising and we’re already seeing these stories.
I’d like to get your thoughts on this. My worry is that we might see these becoming “normal” stories. That’s what really scares me.
TA: It’s obviously super tragic. Just take a second and imagine what your life conditions would have to be for you to actually pour gasoline over yourself and set yourself on fire. It’s just unthinkable. As you mentioned, this is an act that was popularized by the Arab uprisings from 2011, sparked in Tunisia by a man setting himself on fire. In Lebanon, we saw this happen in February of last year: a Lebanese man, George Zreik, set himself on fire and died from his wounds because of an inability to pay for his child’s school. It was sort of a foreshadow. When I look back to that moment, reporting that story—it’s a level of poverty that I didn’t think existed in this country. Even among Lebanese, even among a Christian community. Sometimes you get the sense from people in Lebanon that all the poor are from one community or another, and that filter is on even subconsciously for me. So it was completely outside of what I thought existed, a man killing himself because he’s unable to pay for his child’s tuition.
Now we’re seeing it much more widespread. Last week, Bassam al-Hallak, a Syrian man, self-immolated in the Beqaa. He did it right near a hospital and still died. State media blamed it on living conditions. Abby Sewell, who’s also a Beirut-based journalist, a colleague of mine, formerly of The Daily Star, reported on the story and talked to his family, and they also said that it was living conditions. And then this week we had two attempts: one man outside of a bank and the other man outside of a municipal building, both in the south. The security forces stopped it from happening.
I really take your point. When we were on the streets less than five months ago, you’d really hope that this wouldn’t be happening, that we would be somewhere completely different today. It is sad, just on a human level, to see that this is happening around us, to people in our communities.
It’s important to see the uprising as caused by economic issues. The whole context of the Lebanon uprising is the collapse of the state’s finances, corruption, the government and politicians moving towards austerity, and the question of Why should we pay for what you’ve done? The Lebanese uprising erupted in that context, and it’s very difficult to escape the context. The context remains. So while we had those beautiful weeks where it really seemed like change was possible and the country was shut down, and it was this amazing show of people power—inevitably that dies down, and then you come back to the same question: Okay, but the money is not there. And the money won’t be there by simply going out on the streets and having great conversations and trying to bring down the government.
So there are certain things that fell short. Independent organizing, while it did get a boost, seems to have lost a little bit of steam now. Roles are a bit ill-defined. Where do we wanna go with this? Do people want to get ready for elections in two years, or do they want to take a different path and become watchdogs? So I’m not sure that the uprising has had very clear definable outcomes yet. But generally, on a national level, I would say that there’s much more awareness. I would say that this government feels much more like it has to respond to what people are saying on the streets and an online, on social media. You can sometimes almost draw a direct thread between the conversation in the country and a statement that comes out.
I would say that this government seems to have much more of an ear to the streets and to what people are saying. But again, we haven’t really had a big test yet. We’ve had the interior minister, for example, order the tents to be destroyed in downtown and in Tripoli, which many people took as a big betrayal. It was completely unnecessary, and seemed like a miscalculation if you’re trying to show that you’re the “government of the people.” Just a condemnable move. But I don’t think that we’ve had a big test, which I would say is appointments, or the kind of “rescue plan” that the government really puts in place, and who was going to bear the losses.
As seems to be the case with many uprisings, including in Lebanon in 2015 but also in other countries, things take a little bit of time to settle. If you’re planting seeds now, it will take a while for them to grow. So I think that we need to wait and see. But I think that as soon as this coronavirus issue is over, we will see activity come back: protests, organizing. It seems like the whole world is on freeze now. Not just Lebanon, everywhere. We’re all taking it day by day, week by week, waiting for things to go back to normal, and then we can talk.
JA: Yeah, that’s definitely the case.
There have been a few riots in prisons; a number of questions around amnesty or clemency, anything that might ease the burden of the system, which is already pretty bad. Many of these people are there for petty crimes, for relatively small misdemeanors, and these populations are concentrated in small spaces, which obviously poses an additional health risk and obvious coronavirus-related questions. I think the lack of intersectionality among protesters (including myself) is one of our major failures. I had hoped we would be able to tackle it. We’ve seen it with the Families March, for example; we’ve seen some moves towards that, more of a willingness to tackle the kafala system (although just incrementally). A big part of it is that migrant workers themselves are increasingly well-organized, which is also obviously contributing to this. But the question of the prisoners in Lebanon, can you speak a bit about this?
Most of the people I know, including protesters, including people who came from very working class backgrounds, do not know how bad it is in Lebanon’s prisons. They really don’t know how bad it is. Unless you have a relative or a friend or a neighbor who was sent to these prisons, you don’t know how bad it is.
TA: Prisons currently are at over 200% of their capacity, so more than double the number of people they were designed to hold. People sleep pretty much like the migrant women I was describing. Very cramped conditions; people are sleeping head-to-feet. In a number of these detention centers you have to sleep in shifts because everybody can’t be lying down at the same time, so some people have to sit or stand while others are sleeping. Perfect conditions for a virus to spread.
Thankfully, the government says that so far there have been no cases found in the prisons. It also seems that people haven’t been tested in the prisons. But what they say is there’s been no reason to suspect this yet. And the government has begun a program of releasing people; the interior ministry said that 559 were released as of a few days ago. This is mostly people who were just arrested and then let go. Still, the justice ministry has been very clear to judges that they shouldn’t arrest people unless it’s for serious crimes.
It’s very interesting because in a way the crisis has forced the Lebanese justice system to modernize. Now judges are holding interrogations and hearings over WhatsApp or Zoom. And the French government has said that they’ll be giving us e-bracelets that allow for people to be let out of the prison system, so they’re not clogging the prison system but you can still keep tabs on them. Those things are moving in the right direction. It’s a very difficult thing, letting people out of prison. The way it’s supposed to happen now is people with under six months left in their sentence are supposed to be put on a list. In Lebanon, the president has to sign off on an amnesty, so we expect the president will be given a list of names at some point and he will either sign off or have reservations. But prisoners and people who are wanted have been calling for many years for a general amnesty.
That would be an amnesty for certain kinds of crimes which would see thousands of people released, but in Lebanon there are tens of thousands of outstanding arrest warrants for people as well. There are many people in the Beqaa, many people in the South, many people in the North, who for various reasons over the years have had arrest warrants out for them and are living in limbo. They can’t do basic things that you need to do in the state because of these arrest warrants. So there have been long-standing demands for amnesty. Politicians have always promised the amnesty near election time—I was covering the last parliamentary elections and there were promises from Nabih Berri and from Saad Hariri that they would be passing an amnesty very soon. And people in the Beqaa were saying that they won’t vote for establishment parties if there is no amnesty. And the amnesty didn’t happen.
If you talk to legal professionals in Lebanon like the people at Legal Agenda, they’ll say what we need to do is a very well-studied amnesty, where you look at each case and determine based on the case whether this person should be released or not. There are thousands of people arrested for drug crimes a year—something like three thousand people are arrested for cannabis alone in Lebanon per year. Obviously we need to reform the drug system. So it’s not just about letting people go; very quickly you’re gonna fill up the prisons and re-clog the court system again if you don’t change the laws. The laws are the main problem in that regard.
For a lot of these people, you can really understand where they’re coming from. It’s mostly young men who grew up in very impoverished areas. If it’s in the Beqaa, they entered into the drug trade or did petty crime basically because of the situation they’re in. In the north, there are things more related to “extremism.” When the Syrian war was spilling over into Lebanon, there were a lot of men from very low socio-economic backgrounds who joined the kinds of groups that you don’t want to be joining and did some things which they now regret. They will blame it on the situation in the country, the sectarian tensions at the time.
So in a lot of these cases you can understand it, but you really do have to study this. The problem is, as a state you simply can’t be seen to leave crimes unaccounted for. The main issue that we have in Lebanon is that the civil war ended with a general amnesty that allowed all of the warlords to enter the government. So I think it’s important that we learn from history and study things, and that’s one thing that successive Lebanese governments have shown that they don’t like to do. They don’t like to put in the work to study things properly, to get things done properly. They do everything like a kid who’s studying right before his exam in the last two days; they leave everything for years, and then they realize, Oh shit, there are elections, okay, let’s do something.
That’s how everything has been addressed in the past, and what you would hope for is that now things take a bit of a more measured pace. Obviously there’s urgency because the coronavirus issue is serious, but we really have to study things and go about a process of reform of the country’s laws.
JA: On that note, imagine we are having this conversation again in six months, and it’s the one-year anniversary of the start of the uprising. I’m not asking you to predict, but what are some things that we can realistically expect to happen? We who are activists, protesters, progressives, people who just want something better for the country: what are some things that we should be on the lookout for? You as the journalist, as the analyst, as someone who’s just trying to take in as much of this information as you can.
TA: What we need to see is a real change in the way that the work of governing this country is done. That means much more transparency and public consultation on things. October is only six months from now, the anniversary of the revolution, the uprising, October 17. I think by then conditions in the country, honestly, will be worse. We’re in a period now where we’re going downwards, and we’re in negotiations with creditors over restructuring the debt; the currency is devaluing; we have no aid incoming from anywhere. On the whole, I think the economic conditions, the living conditions in the country, will be much worse in six months. That’s not optimistic at all, but it’s realistic, if we look at the trends of where things are. For a lot of people, life is going to become a lot more difficult.
We already see it anecdotally now with food distribution. There have been stories done where journalists have spoken to people at food banks in the country, and I’ve seen these people at food banks saying that people are coming in now and they’re ashamed; they are people who never thought they would need food aid ever in their life, and now they’re coming in and doing that. I believe the word is pauperization. We’re going to see what remains of the middle class and upper middle class of Lebanon becoming poor. And wealth inequality is going to skyrocket, because people who have income in dollars, people who have money from abroad, suddenly their money is worth so much more. They can trade a hundred dollars into three hundred thousand Lebanese lira, while people who have all of their money in Lebanese lira suddenly have half as much money.
Imagine you’ve worked all your life, you’ve saved up ten thousand dollars, and suddenly it’s worth five thousand. That changes everything, and it’s probably going to get worse in terms of depreciation of the currency.
If I look away from the economic story for a bit (though I think that’s going to be the main story), the government has promised to tackle certain issues or within its first hundred days or its first year, like the nationality issue, like looking into amnesty, and importantly, reform and independence of the judiciary. If we get those things, if we get a law whereby judges elect judges rather than politicians putting in place the judges, that will be a massive leap forward, because it breaks the chain of dependency between the politicians and the judges. That would be a major thing to look forward to.
On the whole, what we can look forward to is being in a country where accountability is much more center stage. Whether it’s the nerds on Twitter, this group of economists who have come together as an online Fourth Estate, checking things that most journalists don’t understand because journalists aren’t experts in economics or finance—I think at least we can find some comfort in the fact that there are more eyes on Lebanon now. I think the reason is simply that what we saw from October 17 onwards was so beautiful and so profound and so motivating. We really saw the best in people, the best in the country. People abroad who ran away from Lebanon because there were so few opportunities here—the emotional bond was strengthened, and there was a sense that we have something that is worth fighting for. So there’s going to be more eyes, fostering a culture of accountability. I think that will be one of the main takeaways going forward.
So I hope that at the one year anniversary, we can point to some small victories, whether it’s pushing away bad decisions or maybe even holding some people accountable. That might be too much to wish for. But I don’t see massive institutional change by October 17, 2020. Nor do I see the main figures of the political class going away, unless it’s via natural causes, which a lot of them are getting close to. Obviously I don’t wish that on anybody, but let’s just say that.
Thank you very much for having me on, and I wish you all the best with this podcast, it’s great. And this is for you somewhat inspired out of what happened in Lebanon on October 17, no?
JA: Absolutely. And I’m going to have a number of guests on to talk specifically about some of the topics that we brought up today, and as well as more specific issues like looking at migrant domestic workers, refugees, vulnerable communities throughout Lebanon as well, to help the work that you and other people are doing, online or offline. So thanks again for this, Timour, and good luck with everything.
TA: Thank you very much. Wish you all the best.
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