Lebanon has gone from being a middle-class country to a very poor one in last five years
Off the Lebanese coast about 60 km north of Beirut a 104-metre battleship stands vertically, with her bow and some 30 metres of her length plunged into the mud. The seabed is 140 metres down, but you can even scuba-dive on the stern if you are a technical diver. The ship is a bit like Lebanon, for reasons I'll explain later.
Five years ago Lebanon still looked like a middle-class country with a lot of poor people. Now it looks like a very poor country with a few rich people. Indeed, even the civil war of 1975-1990 did less damage to the economy, though it destroyed several hundred thousand lives and much of the country's infrastructure. The current disaster's roots are in that war. It drove the Lebanese back into the relative safety of their own sectarian communities, Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Shia Muslim, and warlords arose to protect those communities. By the end of the war in 1990, they were the new political and financial elite, with well-paid militias to enforce their will on their own communities — and they didn't go back to their day jobs. They became a corrupt and nepotistic club.
That system was visibly coming apart by the 2010s. There simply wasn't enough money to share out among the elites. Lebanon produces almost nothing, not even enough food for its own people, and its imports are paid for with remittances, foreign aid, and loans. With not enough money coming in to sustain their immense patronage networks, the elites started taxing the poorer sections, and in 2019 something snapped. Suddenly Beirut's streets were full of protesters demanding fundamental change.
Lebanon is a former French colony, so French President Emmanuel Macron flew in and offered the Lebanese government £11 billion in return for structural reforms that would root out the corruption at the heart of government. But the elites who benefit from that system are the government, in practice, so of course they said no, thanks. Then came the massive explosion in Beirut's port district last year. That got the International Monetary Fund involved, offering Lebanon huge loans if the corrupt system is reformed, but it's likely that the government will turn them away again.
It's getting close to the edge. Last Thursday Hezbollah staged a mass protest in Beirut, demanding the removal of the judge presiding over the inquiry into who was responsible for importing the 2,750 tonnes of fertiliser that caused last year's port blast. When the march entered a Christian district at least one sniper opened up on it. Seven Shias died, and the crowd (some of whom were armed) tried to storm Christian neighbourhoods in retaliation. And still the Lebanese political class refuses to bend.
So why does that political class resemble the captain of HMS Victoria, the defunct battleship that did a nose-dive in 1893? Because the officer commanding the British Mediterranean Fleet, Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, was one of the most stubborn men in history. He ordered a very complex manoeuvre in which two parallel lines of battleships would make simultaneous U-turns towards each other, winding up going in the opposite direction but with the parallel lines much closer together. And he got the distance wrong.
Everybody else on the bridge could see the ships were actually going to collide, and several of them spoke to Tryon about it, but he ignored their advice. The ship that was going to ram him also queried his orders, but he persevered. So they collided, and the admiral went down with his ship.
Think of Lebanon's political class as Admiral Tryon, and the country as HMS Lebanon. Technical divers only.
(Gwynne Dyer's new book is 'The Shortest History of War'. The views expressed are personal.)
