All of the above finally led citizens to take the streets in protest on October 17, 2019 as a reaction to express their refusal of what’s happening. This will be the topic of this discussion’s second and final part.
Amidst the tragedies that have afflicted the Syrian society, after the tragedy afflicted the Iraqi society and the Libyan society, and which now presents clouds over the Lebanese society, and without forgetting the terrible injustice that has afflicted the Palestinian society, where does Lebanon stand?
Our society is su ocating and we need to intervene collectively and immediately.
But the exodus also deprived the country of its most-qualified professionals, something Mr Nahas feared would happen again now as employment opportunities disappeared. “This would mean maybe for 40 [or] 50 years a dramatic change in the structure of the society,” said Mr Nahas. “This is much more severe and persistent than accounting losses.”
Catching up with him a year and a half later, he corrects me. His party Mouwatinoun wa Mouwatinat fi Dawla (Citizens in a State) aren’t waiting for Lebanon to collapse – they are expecting it.
He said “waiting” seemed passive.
“Only in moments of crisis, political or economic, can you change the power structure,” he told me during our meeting in Beirut in 2019.
I remember nodding politely, perhaps in my own naivety as a fresh journalist only in her first few months working in Beirut, with a shallow understanding of the depth of the country’s problems or the fragility of the political bedrock.
Poor Hassan Diab’s government: Bankruptcy was announced in its time. The capital control law fell on its shoulders, and when the enormity of its effects emerged, its authors renounced it and from it. The smuggling of Amer al-Fakhouri fell on its head, and the coming Corona tragedies will hit it.
In the past few days, we have witnessed an increase in violence in the streets: violence by security forces against the protestors; violence by groups claiming allegiance to political parties in positions of authority against the uprising; and violence by certain groups claiming to be part of the uprising against the security forces. This scene ranged from Jal El Dib to Riad El Solh and Martyrs’ squares, and to Sidon, Nabatieh, Kfar-Roumman, and other areas.