Beirut 2020

by Charif Majdalani

  The second collapse was the inescapable result of the very principles of the second republic, and the mutation of warlords into “politicians.” Right from the start, in the euphoria of the return to peace and the expectation of fabulous opulence, the tentacles of a gigantic system of siphoning funds allocated to the country’s reconstruction were efficiently put in place. The mechanisms of dubious contracts, institutional racketeering, insider trading, fake invoicing, corruption, and complicity were brought up to operational speed very quickly at all levels of the state sector, which was overhauled for the sole purpose of enriching the people colonizing the country or those who had become its foreign masters. Useless construction sites sprang up, giving the impression of a beehive at work, slush funds became routine, along with favors and kickbacks, percentage deals, shared projects, fictitious jobs, and the clientelization of local communities.

  The only real newcomer among the converted warlords at that time was the businessman Rafic Hariri, who was made prime minister after an agreement sealed between the Saudis (the financial backers of the reconstruction) and the Syrians (the keepers of the peace and unofficial occupiers of Lebanon). He arrived on the scene with genuine ambitions to rebuild the country, despite his questionable taste in urban planning that nearly transformed Beirut into a kind of megalopolis like those in the Gulf emirates. I don’t know how much he allowed to happen, how much he was forced to do. He apparently used rather undemocratic means to strip the owners of the city center of their properties, granted himself a few privileges and off-book accounts, and plunged Lebanon into debt. More importantly, he was forced to work alongside the old Syrian-backed warlords who were now his peers, and to reluctantly offer them high-ranking sinecures in public office and astronomical payments for tender contracts. But even that was not enough, he was still not considered sufficiently docile. His assassination in 2005 provoked what was—although it is rarely described as such—the first real Arab revolution. Millions of Lebanese people in the streets expelled the Syrian occupiers from the country. Our naive belief at the time was that we were getting rid of those responsible for the widespread corruption undermining the government, that everything was going to be fine from then on, and that this second republic would serve its citizens at last. The enemies of Syria came out of the shadows, Aoun the braggart returned, and his followers saw this as the second coming of the Messiah, or of de Gaulle after the Occupation. Alas, politicians of all persuasions—newcomers as well as former allies of Syria who had kept their positions—renewed their old alliances or created new ones that had no other object but to preserve the oligarchy’s control of the government, which continued to be profitable, extremely profitable.

  All this lasted for thirty years. Maybe there is a riddle to be solved in the dates that define this country’s history. Because thirty years, from 1945 to 1975, is also the time it took for the first republic to collapse. Another thirty glorious years, from 1990 to 2020, duplicated the preceding ones. Beirut became the party town and center of nightlife for the entire Middle East again, and maybe even of the entire Mediterranean. You would see more Porsches and Maseratis here than in Beverly Hills. It was a good place to be rich, but you could also become rich in art and design just as well as in business or real estate, and the banks offered such mind-boggling interest rates that it was an El Dorado for annuitants. Nothing was produced anymore, agriculture was abandoned, industry was nonexistent, people lived on imports, and the government decided to borrow US dollars from the local banks at absurd rates, in order to finance large-scale projects. The debt reached thirty billion, then forty, then fifty, and the interest alone was higher than the GDP. But Roberto Alagna was singing at Beiteddine, Placido Domingo at Baalbek, and the Miss Europe contest was held in Lebanon. Once again, we were dancing at the foot of a volcano whose threatening roars everyone refused to hear, or on the edge of a precipice into which we finally fell.

  The repairman came to have a look at the washing machine. He admitted it was making a strange noise, opened it up, and there, to his surprise, he found an enormous screwdriver he had left inside it, which was what was causing the infernal clacking in time with the drum’s rotation. He laughed and told me about a cousin of his who had a scalpel left in his stomach by a surgeon. Then he added that I was lucky, because if I’d had to buy a spare part it would have cost me the same amount as I would have paid six months ago for two whole new washing machines, maybe even three. I’m tired of all the never-ending images my compatriots use to illustrate inflation and the devaluation of the currency. But I played along, and even added my bit. I told him that a little earlier at the bank, for the first time I had seen a guy carrying two enormous plastic supermarket bags stuffed full of bundles of Lebanese banknotes.

  This afternoon, as I was coming home from taking my son Nadim to visit one of his French friends who is returning to his country for good, I found myself in the middle of a demonstration of Sudanese people protesting the apathy of their embassy and its unwillingness to repatriate them. Most of them no longer have any work, or are earning only a pittance because of the devaluation. They suddenly appeared, several hundred of them, surrounding the cars in the intersection not far from their embassy. I recognized those called the Arabs, but also the towering Dinka from the South, and men from Darfur. It was quite strange. Apparently there are helpless young women sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the Ethiopian embassy, waiting to be repatriated because they were laid off or no longer want to work for so little they can’t send money home.

  When I got home, I observed my Sri Lankan building supervisor. He was standing in the middle of the little garden in front of the building, which he tends with meticulous care. He has nurtured the gardenias and hibiscuses back to vigor, and skillfully pruned the loquat trees. Anytime a plant is ailing on our balcony, we give it to him and a few days later, we find it thriving again. This morning he was looking after the rosebushes. He made me think of Professor Calculus and his white roses. Or even—with his indifference to turmoil, as his salary dwindles away to nothing and his future becomes even more precarious—of those Persian poets tending their rose gardens as the Mongol hordes were preparing to swarm into Isfahan and Tabriz.

  We were late leaving Super Vega tonight, my wife and I. Nayla, who is always cheerful in the evening, was singing songs from her eccentric French repertoire from the 1930s. All along the street, the pubs looked like great islands of light spreading to the edge of the sidewalks, erupting with babble and laughter. But once you walked past the last of them, it was like leaving an ancient town, beyond which there is only forest—pitch black. There has been no electricity at all for a few days now. When you listen carefully, you notice that the rumbling of generators fills the night to its very depths.

  You get used to it, it becomes part of the texture of darkness. Some generators stop at midnight, some don’t. In any case, from midnight onward the streets become bottomless canyons, black ink punctuated by the red taillights of the cars speeding by.

  The collapse of the electricity sector is the most telling symbol of the complete failure of the state. For thirty years none of the successive governments has modernized the grid or reformed the administration of the sector as a whole, or even made any attempt to do so. And yet, plans were proposed and funds often made available, but never with the objective of resolving the industry’s problems once and for all, but just of applying quick fixes while waiting for an agreement between the leaders of the various powers on how to divvy up this seemingly undividable cake. According to the figures in circulation, forty billion dollars apparently vanished into the construction of power plants later found to be inoperable, as well as into the nontransparent importation of electricity from Syria and the leasing of mobile power plants from Turkey at uncontrollable prices. Forty billion dollars which could have given light to half of Africa, and which weren’t enough, in thirty years, to offer more than a few miserable hours of electricity a day to a country as small as Lebanon. In the meant
ime, of course, people had to come up with a solution. This explains why a private market of neighborhood generators supplying homes and businesses gradually developed. The height of absurdity was reached in 2019, when one of the long series of governments decided that it should take control of these private enterprises. In other words, a government started to regulate and tax an illegal service set up as a stopgap for its own deficiencies. It was a kind of recognition of its own failures caused by stupidity or cynicism, and a way to use them to fill the public coffers emptied by these same failures.

  And so for a few days now the electricity supply has completely dried up. The money is gone and getting a loan to buy fuel oil is now impossible. Whenever the relevant authorities finally acquire any, it vanishes. “We’re not sure where the fuel that we are buying is going,” says the astonished minister in charge. In other words, in the midst of the crisis, another few tens of millions of dollars that were found by scraping the bottom of the coffers have evaporated—again.

  In the late afternoon, I was caught up in a huge traffic jam on my way home from seeing the lawyer with whom I’m working on the contract to buy that plot of land in the mountains. The driver of a car moving at walking pace to my left was vehemently discussing something, making grand gestures, talking to three people who were sitting in the back, perhaps because of coronavirus. The driver had pulled down his mask to be more comfortable in his diatribe, or in the lively story he was telling—I couldn’t hear what he was saying. At one point, he hit one of the levers by the steering wheel without realizing it and his windshield wipers started going back and forth at high speed, as if they had adopted the rhythm of his speech, or as if they were ironically keeping time under his nose. Obviously this reminded me of Jacques Tati. I was sure that the man’s conversation was about the economic crisis, his money locked up at the bank, inflation, and Covid-19. That’s all anyone ever talks about, all day, every day, at home, in offices, in taxis. Day before yesterday, Nadim asked us if it might be possible, for an hour at least, to talk about something else.

  But then again, what can I really be sure of? All our gestures and now restricted activities are projected onto an infernal backdrop, with poverty increasing before our very eyes, mass layoffs, suicides, all continuously being shown to us, virtually, through social media, the rumor mill, or the press. The only real evidence I have that something is actually going on is the direct impact it has on my daily life. And that impact is palpable in my worry and anxiety, my mind being permanently occupied by catastrophic scenarios, sudden doubts about the validity of my choices in this situation, with our bank accounts emptied out because we spent everything on purchases or even investments that will be worth nothing in a few years, and so how do we now face our future and our children’s future in this ruin of a country? As I sit on my terrace, writing these lines, facing the mountains, in the scent of gardenias and the gusts of July wind, I could almost believe that nothing has changed, that everything is the same as it was in other Julys past. The noise of cicadas in the trees and of a construction site in the distance are those of the world’s eternal daily routine. Optimistic thoughts rise up from the depths to which I had pushed them down, and the temptation of denial arises again, that same denial that allowed us to live so cheerfully for thirty years. We’re still going to the pub after all, still having dinner with friends, my wife has lots of work, my own salary hasn’t changed, even if it’s worth six times less than it was six months ago. But I just have to go out during the day to see the erosive effect of the recession, and this makes my black thoughts start to rise up again: the stores we pass that are usually open for business—those places that are part of our habitual environment even if we never set foot in them—are closed one day, then the next, then the day after that, before we finally understand that they will never reopen again; the young salespeople in the stores we do go into, the bank employees with whom we had built up an almost friendly relationship, all those people who make up a familiar world and who are no longer in their rightful place either, and will never reappear there because they have all been laid off. It feels like a bereavement, a muffled, almost muted bereavement, repetitive, exhausting.

  I remember the moment it all happened, at the beginning of last fall. There were already worryingly insistent rumors circulating about the government going bankrupt and possibly seizing all bank deposits. Then the suspicions gradually turned to the banks themselves. But it was like one of those distant catastrophes you read about in the newspaper and are sure will never reach you. The final outcome of thirty years of denial. Eventually I did go to the bank one morning, but feeling skeptical, unsure, unconsciously refusing to admit that the predicted disaster was actually upon us. At the counter, as usual, without any hesitation, with even something like amusement or certitude, I asked to withdraw what was hardly an exorbitant sum (six thousand dollars, I remember, three thousand from each of my children’s savings accounts). I didn’t need it, but it was just to reassure myself, to confirm that it was still possible. I was even expecting the teller’s usual smile, and a momentary shared look of complicity to show that we were not duped, he and I, by the dangerous rumors circulating, and that money was still available, and in quantity, as per usual, of course. Yet, instead of all that, I heard the young guy reply with some embarrassment but an attempt to sound as natural as possible, as if letting me know about a little transient annoyance, a technical difficulty, a computer glitch or a mix-up with the cashier, that alas, this was not possible, six thousand dollars was a lot of money, he wouldn’t be able to give me the total sum, he would prefer that I take it out in several withdrawals, spaced out if at all possible, and at that moment I understood that we really had entered into what until now I had refused to see as anything but a nasty fabrication.

  In the beginning the bank customers, deprived of their money and confronted with the denial of their unassailable right to withdraw their money as they needed or saw fit, were sometimes incapable of understanding or listening to reason and flew into rages that were filmed by other customers and posted on social media. You can still watch these scenes, which filled our daily lives, on various activists’ and protestors’ Web sites. All day long, there were cries of powerless fury, threats against the employees, attacks on the offices of the branch managers, attempts at self-immolation by fire, then endless negotiations with retirees and desperate small-time savings holders, with mothers, farmers, laborers. Gradually the banks gave themselves an escape hatch by authorizing small withdrawals, only in local currency, at a rate that was higher than the official rate but lower by half than the black market rate, which is in fact the only real criterion of exchange. In other words, in every transaction, the citizens lost and are still losing half their money, either directly if they exchange it immediately, which is what all the business owners and shopkeepers who buy raw materials or products in US dollars have to do, or indirectly, since this situation means everything for sale has doubled in price.

  According to the Financial Times, the Economist, and other specialist magazines and newspapers, over the last three decades the Lebanese banks have set up dizzying Ponzi schemes, those illegal financial mechanisms that consist in offering customers huge rates of interest, which are entirely and exclusively drawn from the deposits of the following customers, in other words without any investment policies whatsoever. The system works as long as there are depositors who entrust their money to the banks operating these kinds of scams, while never declaring them and lying to their customers. But as soon as the depositors are no longer there, the system cracks open, takes on water, and inevitably sinks. The catastrophe apparently started when the great monarchies of the Gulf no longer added to their prodigious accounts in Lebanese banks, then when international aid stopped flowing in because of the obvious corruption in political circles. The banks had also given huge loans to the government, which was then incapable of repaying them, since the borrowed money was never used for the public good, but systematically vanished into t
he black holes of shell companies and off-book accounts controlled by the men in power and their political clients. Then the whole banking system collapsed.

  The same sources confirm that as soon as the first cracks could be heard, billions of dollars were taken out of private accounts, most of which were associated with fortunes created through corruption and self-serving business practices. Even after the banks forbade outgoing international transfers, trapping the deposits and savings of the least well-off customers, and while thousands of people were standing around the hostile tellers begging for one or two hundred dollars of their own money, six billion dollars were still being fraudulently sent to tax havens. No one will ever know whose money it was, or who authorized those withdrawals.

  Today on the ridge of Mazraa, a large city council truck, a monstrous beast carrying a tank and perched on huge rotating brushes, was moving slowly and ceremoniously, spraying and sweeping circles on the edge of the sidewalk. Or, to be more accurate, on the edge of the old flowerbeds in the middle of the road where nothing has been planted for eons—one more piece of evidence of the incompetence or corruption of the municipal authorities. It reminded me of the first days of the civil war. We could hear machine gun fire not far from our home, and rumbling explosions would make the walls shudder every once in a while—a sign that there was fighting over by the Tayyouné roundabout, only a hundred yards away as the crow flies—but the night watchman was still doing his rounds through the neighborhood, walking past our windows in his uniform, with his old double-barreled shotgun and his whistle.