Is change on the horizon in Lebanon?

None of us will ever comprehend the fear Beirut felt at 6:08pm on August 4^th when a warehouse of ammonium nitrate erupted, wiping out half the city and leaving more than 300,000 homeless. Neither can we comprehend the grief and anger the Lebanese community — both locals and the diaspora — felt and still feel in the aftermath. Protestors immediately took to Beirut’s glass-cobbled streets to demand accountability for the negligence and corruption that have traumatised an already exhausted population beyond belief. One week after the blast, the government resigned. A step in the right direction? Sure. A meaningful solution? Probably not.

I’ve recently been re-reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, and came across a passage that is chillingly relevant to today’s Lebanon. In a section called “Long Live the Revolution!”, Harari explains a revolution’s success doesn’t depend on how many people take part, but on effective organisation. He uses the example of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the former communist dictator of Romania, to illustrate this. Ceaușescu, writes Harari, managed to remain in power because of three forms of effective organisation: loyal communists headed every arm of government, rival groups were suppressed and Ceaușescu had a support network of similar communist parties across eastern Europe.

But a revolutionary wave in the 1980s saw many communist states fall and Ceaușescu’s support network begin to collapse. The rise of anti-communist governments gave new impetus to anti-communist sentiment within Romania, with protests breaking out in the city of Timișoara. Ceaușescu, ignorant as all dictators are in the face of organisational cracks, thought he could withstand the storm. So on the December 21, 1989, he walked out onto a balcony in what is now known as Revolution Square to give a televised speech denouncing the Timișoara protests.

As Harari says, you can watch the speech on YouTube. Two minutes and forty seconds into the video, Ceaușescu stops mid-sentence. Someone in the crowd has booed. Within seconds, the whole crowd is jeering and chanting “Timișoara” over and over. The clip is fascinating, allowing us to peek through the window of the moment an entire dictatorship crumbled. After failed attempts at crowd control, Ceaușescu and his wife fled the building by helicopter just as crowds began to break in. A few days later, the couple were captured and, on the 25th December, executed. Communist Romania had fallen.

In a poignant BBC interview, László Tőkés, a pastor in Timișoara who was one of the first to speak out against the dictatorship, says it was “the most joyous day of our lives”. But although people like László caused Ceaușescu’s fall, they did not inherit the power left behind. Instead, Harari points out the revolution was hijacked by the National Salvation Front (‘FSN’), made up of ex-communist party members that had reinvented themselves as democratic politicians.

The FSN was able to seize the revolution because it effectively organised itself in the wake of Ceaușescu’s execution, whereas the protesting population could not. Pretty soon, the FSN and its network of cronies reverted to old tricks. They continued to loot the population, using the revolution to give them legitimacy to do so. Harari notes the ruling class in Romania, to this day, are descendants of former communists.

Harari gives us an intriguing commentary on the aftermath of a revolution, with strong parallels to Lebanon. In January, Lebanon formed a new government after widespread protests led to Saad Hariri’s resignation. But the word ‘new’ is deceptive. Lebanon’s current ministers were selected by the very political elite people were protesting against. President Michel Aoun and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri for example, were commanders in Lebanon’s violent 15-year-long civil war. Together with the rest of the government they have been accused, like the FSN in Romania, of pocketing the country’s resources. Beirut now only gets a few hours of electricity per day, whilst private generator suppliers — nicknamed the “generator mafia” — profit. The allocation of government funds is so dismal that, when wildfires gripped the country last year, the government sheepishly admitted it had not funded crucial firefighting equipment.

The government’s resignation won’t immediately cure these problems. In his resignation speech, Prime Minister Diab blamed endemic corruption that is “bigger than the state” for both the blast and Lebanon’s economic deterioration. It’s too optimistic to think this cycle of corruption can be broken when President Aoun — who, along with Diab, was warned in July the store of ammonium nitrate “could destroy Beirut” — picked Mustapha Adib as the new Prime Minister-designate. Adib, a French-educated lawyer, belongs to the same political class that has exhausted the Lebanese population’s patience and trust.

In his first foray into the murky world of Middle Eastern politics, French President Emmanuel Macron has taken it upon himself to steer Lebanon towards recovery and has drawn up a proposal for the country’s new government. Macron’s efforts, however, seem to be surface-level publicity stunts (like meeting Fairuz, a popular Lebanese singer) that come with strings attached. Just last week, Macron met with Hezbollah — the powerful militant group many hold responsible for causing the Beirut blast. Misguided moves like this risk alienating the Lebanese people even further, and for many are a sign that Macron is chiefly concerned with positioning France to profit commercially and politically from Lebanon’s tragedy,

Homo Deus doesn’t tell us how populations should effectively organise themselves to ensure they alone reap the benefits of a revolution they alone have fought for. Sadly, there isn’t a foolproof way to stop kleptocratic opportunists from reincarnating Lebanon’s recently resigned leadership under the guise of change. Even sadder, Lebanon’s history shows it’s the more probable outcome. France’s involvement in the political landscape muddies matters further. But I’m crossing all my fingers for Lebanon, and hope the result is a governing party that, for once, represents its people. As László said to the BBC with a hint of sadness, he “did not want to become a revolutionary.” Neither did the Lebanese. But circumstances have forced them to.