On Beirut now and then – Charles Glass in LRB:

“Ifound it dirty and coarse,’ the Lebanese scholar Edward Atiyah wrote of Beirut at the end of the First World War. ‘Rubbish heaps stank in the streets; the gutters looked as though they hadn’t been cleaned since my childhood ... Dead rats!’ Nearly a century later, in 2004, the journalist Hazim Saghie would say of Beirut in the 1980s: ‘I only recall darkness ... the roar of electricity generators ... while the garbage was mounting everywhere, spreading its putrid smell day after day after day.’ Both Atiyah and Saghie were remembering a dark past at a moment when prospects looked brighter. Atiyah was writing in 1946, as the French army was departing from newly independent Lebanon; Saghie in the early 2000s when Beirut was being rebuilt after fifteen years of civil war. Both imagined the worst was over, when it wasn’t, when it wasn’t likely to be. Now, in 2023, the rubbish is back and has been for several years. Political stasis and corruption have consigned Beirut to another dark age. A future in which any Lebanese can reflect on bad memories from a time of safety seems unimaginable.
It is fifty years since I went to live in Beirut for the first of several periods of residence, initially as a graduate student and then as a journalist recording Lebanon’s many deaths and resurrections. I arrived in a garbage-free year, 1972, when the country was experiencing both prosperity and revolutionary ferment. For me, Beirut unravelled 21 years of indoctrination at the hands of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, the Society of Jesus, the plutocrat-funded University of Southern California, Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The violence that my country employed to adjust the world to its requirements, which I had not questioned, looked different on the receiving end. I saw what a two-thousand-pound American high-explosive bomb, dropped from an Israeli jet, could do to a school in the Ain el-Helweh refugee camp, where my closest friend’s brothers and sisters studied. I abandoned the masters degree at the American University of Beirut, but I got an education.”

(…)

“It was a city for the international jet set, who anchored their yachts in St George Bay, as well as for revolutionary tourists, in town to show solidarity with the Palestinian commandos who had made Beirut their headquarters following their expulsion from Jordan by King Hussein after the Black September fighting of 1970. Miss Universe 1971 was a Lebanese Christian ingenue, Georgina Rizk, who brought some bikini glamour to progressive politics by marrying Ali Hassan Salameh, the PLO’s security chief. Throw in the spies and journalists swapping rumours at the St George Hotel bar (Kim Philby had been a regular), and you had a city that was never dull.
Younger Lebanese, in that era of the Vietcong, the soixante-huitards and America’s anti-war protesters, were impatient for change. The governing system was archaic, based on sectarian identities: hereditary chieftains ruled their communities and shared power among themselves. Tearing it down threatened to destroy everything, which no one wanted. Even so, the desperation of the homeless, both the half-million refugees expelled from Palestine and the internal exiles driven north by the Israeli-Palestinian war, inspired dissidence. The revolutionary-minded sought not a utopian future so much as a return to an idealised past before French colonial disfigurement and Israel’s seizure of Palestine.”

(…)

“When I returned last year, the garbage was piled so high on the pavements that pedestrians had to compete with lunatic drivers for right of way. The private electricity generators that Saghie remembered in the 1980s were mostly quiet – few can afford the fuel needed to run them. The Ponzi scheme that the Lebanese central bank had been running for years, paying commercial banks suspiciously high rates of interest on dollar deposits, along with unfunded government subsidies for electricity and bread, caused the private banks to collapse in 2019. Last month, European prosecutors arrived in Lebanon to determine whether Riad Salameh, who has been governor of the central bank for thirty years, is guilty, along with his brother, of having embezzled more than $300 million from the state. The evidence so far has been sufficiently compelling that the authorities in France have seized the Salameh brothers’ assets there. Salameh refuses to answer questions from European or Lebanese investigators. One of his former deputies tells me that leading politicians who have shared his good fortune have protected him in office. Yet he has just announced that he will retire when his latest term ends in July, forcing the power-brokers to agree on his successor. Meanwhile, the Lebanese pound has lost 98 per cent of its value since 2019 and bank depositors can’t access their money, though a few daring Robin Hoods have taken back their savings at gunpoint. This time, the Lebanese don’t blame the French, the Palestinians, the Israelis or the Syrians. They blame themselves. A headline in the business magazine Lebanon Opportunities captured the mood: ‘A Time for Suicide’.”

(…)

“Hezbollah and its fellow Shiite ally, the Amal Movement, took all 27 Shiite seats, and Druze voters returned all but one of Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party candidates. President Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement won sixteen seats, including one for the president’s son-in-law, the egregiously rich Gebran Bassil, who has been under American economic sanctions for corruption since November 2020 and is said to be the most unpopular man in the country. A local saying goes: ‘Most countries have a mafia. In Lebanon, the mafia has a country.’”

(…)

“In the meantime, no one seems to mind that the country has no president. So strong is the pull of family that, if I were a citizen, I would probably vote for the Frangiehs, just as I’d vote for the Jumblatts if I lived in the Shouf. I can’t justify or explain it, but there it is. Along with the garbage.”

Read the article here.

There it is, the melancholy of acceptance or the melancholy of the strong pull of family.

In the end, Lebanon will not be the only country where the Mafia found a homeland.