What’s the best way to spend Lebanon’s upcoming oil wealth? The race for ideas has begun.
Is there anything better for a highly indebted country with creaking infrastructure than the prospect of earning substantial amounts of cash from newly discovered natural resources? Repaying the national debt, building more schools and improving the roads can all be nothing but unalloyed good, right? Continue reading
Attacking a good idea for political expediency..
There’s a new talking point in Beirut: An electoral law based on proportional representation is evil because it reinstates Damascus’ influence by increasing the power of its allies in Lebanon.
I understand when people like MP Walid Jumblatt peddle such rubbish. After all, he stands to significantly lose influence if such a law was to be enacted. But MP Hariri’s reiteration of this argument yesterday is very worrying to me. Continue reading
Of all the responses I read to Sibai’s now infamous article in Outlook (responses listed here) , my favorite is the one written by Raja. I’ll get back to why a little later.
As someone who had a relatively conservative upbringing in Tripoli, I grew up sharing a lot of Mr. Sibai’s ideas. Whether out of intellectual laziness or habit, it was the only way to reconcile a religious view of the world with the existence of homosexuals.
(photo credit, Lilianne)
If you’re someone who truly cares about secularism in Lebanon, you can do a lot worse than read Walid El Houri’s insightful critique of the Laïque Pride movement and how it is failing to make progress in Lebanon’s pathologically sectarian system
His key argument (which also applies to many NGOs and their causes), is that in order to achieve true mobilization and make a real difference, Lebanon’s secularists should get out of their middle-class activist bubble, have an economic plan, form a political party and try their best Continue reading
I started this morning the process of registering to vote in the 2013 Lebanese Parliamentary elections. I figured I’ll share here some info and tips that you might find useful if you too are planning to vote. I’ll be using a questions and answer format (f.a.q) because I found it the best way to organize the different issues about the subject. Continue reading
I am not quite sure why a video blogger is getting so much opprobrium from Lebanese bloggers. I’m slightly bothered that most of the criticism is about her physical appearance and the fact that she had what appears to be a botched plastic surgery.
Perhaps what she says or does is not our cup of tea. Maybe you find her work shallow, mediocre, and even pointless. But it’s YouTube for Peet’s sake. Only freaks make it on YouTube and don’t be surprised if she eventually gets more views than all of our blogs’ readership combined.
By criticizing her we’re making the same mistake of those who criticize our blogs and ask “who on earth reads this stuff?”. As we have discovered, there’s a place for all kinds of content online. So give Lara a break and let her do her thing..
The Israeli army has begun building a wall that will run several kilometres along part of its border with Lebanon [...] the wall would be more than 2km long and 10 metres high
Many people hate walls. They are the opposite of communication and exchange and are associated with separation, oppression and imprisonment. The Berlin wall and the Israeli west bank barrier are notorious examples of how inhumane such walls can be. But is the one planned alongside the Lebanese border that big of a deal? Continue reading
I was reading with interest Nadine’s post today, aimed at inspiring the “angry disenfranchised people” in Lebanon:
I have a feeling that our time has come. We, the people on the margins. The angry, disenfranchised people who pay too much for bread and fuel and rent and water and parking. We, the kids who grew up in the 80s. We, who are unamused by boring media and mindless entertainment. We, who’ve been struggling for years trying to create small, important projects that go nowhere and achieve nothing. Civil marriage. Women’s rights. Green spaces. Anti-corruption. Renewable energy. Equal pay. Migrant rights. Bicycle lanes. Refugee rights. Public schools. Public universities. Social security. Protect our beaches. Protect our workers. Protect our Internet. Protect love. Save our animals. Save our forests. Save our heritage. End torture. End the civil war. Build a public transportation system that works already!
As a general vision of what is wrong in the country and needs to be fixed, this is a wonderful paragraph. It can be the basis for a manifesto and a program for a new left-wing party. It can be a to-do list for journalists and reporters who are looking for material for their next investigation. It could even be a checklist for politicians who are seriously thinking of ways to improve their constituencies’ lots.
The problem though is that the post is not meant to be any of the above. It is meant to be a call to action:
I have a feeling that thousands of you agree that enough is enough. And what’s different this time is that I have a feeling thousands of you want to do something about it. What better thing to do than take back Parliament?
I’m not exactly sure what she means by “take back Parliament”. If she means “form new parties that are voted in to replace those bums”, then great, go for it. But if this an attempt to “occupy parliament”, to somehow resurrect the “revolution against sectarianism”, ie a street action meant to replace the entire political class and system, then she is in for another disappointment.
There’s a general fallacy in the minds of some Lebanese activists that goes along these lines: “There are many, many people out there who are unhappy with the system and want real change. If only we could find a way to get them all together on the street to overthrow the system in a people’s revolt”.
That is a mirage that is refusing to die. There are a lot of things that the Lebanese don’t like (look again at Nadine’s list above), but it is misguided to assume that together these people form a homogenous group. Many people who “grew up in the 80s” don’t give a damn about renewable energy or equal pay. People who want to save our heritage don’t necessarily care about public transportation or animal welfare. Some of these objectives are even at odds with each other: Money used to create bicycle lanes (which although very important, are a luxury) is money taken away from “public schools, public universities and social security”.
The problem with Nadine’s “Our time has come” is that the “our” doesn’t exist.
The system is not perfect but a lot of people are okay with it. What we need is gradual, long term and focused activism, the kind of activism that Nadine dismisses as “small, important projects that go nowhere and achieve nothing”. Groups like the Civil Campaign for Electoral Reform (CCER), My Nationality is A Right (Jinsiyati), KAFA, Ontornet, the Anti Racism Movement and even Nasawiya itself (in which Nadine is a major pole) are doing the admirable work of slowly shifting people’s attitudes and effecting, with time, real change. One can even argue that we live in the golden age of these NGOs because of the new technologies that make their work faster and more efficient.
To assume that there’s some sort of shortcut to the hard work these groups are doing would be to delude ourselves. There will be no “Lebanon Spring”, no magical moment in which everything suddenly becomes better (an ironic statement from a blog called “Beirut Spring”). Democratic systems in which there’s a modicum of popular representation can only be slowly perfected through the ballot and through gradual attitude shifts.
There will be no revolution, and no, “our” time has not come.
Make sure you don’t miss Habib’s excellent report on why Lebanon’s internet is the way it is. What struck me most is this part:
So why not buy more bandwidth? “Because we don’t need it,” [a Lebanese official] said in an interview with Bold. “We are not seeing a lot of people requesting upgrades. People are happy with 1mbps.”
For anyone who has lived or worked outside Sub-Saharan Africa [...] that assessment may be a little hard to digest.
Those two paragraphs struck me in two ways: First for how callous, condescending and clueless the official (and by extension the government) is. People have been going crazy with frustration over how slow the government is at improving the connection’s speed.
And second for the fact that even the author, Habib, is not completely aware of how bad the problem is: Sub-Saharan Africa is also better than Lebanon. I live and work in Sub Saharan Africa, and we have much better internet connection than Lebanon. I’m writing this post from a 20Mb/s connection with unlimited downloads (it even says so in my ISP’s website) that is available for slightly less than $100/month (with cheaper options available that are all better and cheaper than what the Lebanese get) .
There are many reasons why the internet in Lebanon is bad, but to me the chief one is the fact that the ministry of telecommunications is involved in running the show. Telecommunications is the Lebanese government’s cash-cow, and a cheap fast internet connection (like a cheap call rate) is a threat to the government’s margins. This is why competition is nipped in the bud and a policy of artificial scarcity (re-read the official’s interview statement) will remain the government’s line no matter what politicians say.
Moreover, because of all the politics involved, Lebanon can’t just sell its entire communications infrastructures to companies like Vodafone and Orange the way many African countries have done (to the consumers’ advantage). Privatization in Lebanon is given a bad name because it involves laying off a lot of people, people who don’t do any work and are paid by the taxpayer simply because they are some politician’s protegé. And worse, the privatizations that did take place were exploited by politically connected businessmen who enriched themselves without benefiting the consumers.
That was the long version. The short version is that we’re all screwed.
The bad guy in this story (Photo source: The Daily Star)
So the public transportation unions are angry that the Lebanese government cannot afford to subsidize their fuel. It sucks for them and they want to make their displeasure felt. Fine, but why do the rest of us have to pay for their whiny tantrums?
It’s one thing for taxi and bus bus drivers to decide willfully to stop work and stay at home for the day, maybe people will appreciate their service more and pressure the government to respond to their demands. But it is quite another to block the roads and prevent other Lebanese from making a living. That is an act of tyranny and aggression.
There’s a big difference between: “Look at us, we’re being treated unfairly” and “we’re going to make everyone else’s life miserable until we get what we want”. The unionists are even forcing other taxi and bus drivers who are not taking part of their action to evacuate their passengers. Apparently any apostate who challenges the fatwas issued by Unionistan will be whipped to shape by its religious police.
Maybe the drivers did get a raw deal and maybe their cause is fair. But you know what? Other Lebanese have problems too, problems that they can only solve by going to work and getting paid by the day, or by going to school and acquiring new skills, both things the union’s entitled posturing is preventing from happening.
The unions don’t want your sympathy. They are trying to force your hand. You should be angry.
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