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- Undefeated Riverside rallies past Neshannock to win 6th WPIAL baseball championship Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
- Mt. Lebanon’s David Shields throws a no-hitter in WPIAL Class 6A championship Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Perfection: Big 6th inning lifts Riverside to WPIAL Class 3A baseball title Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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Tag Archives: Lebanons
Hezbollah loses majority in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections
In the election held Sunday, Hezbollah and its allies ran against a Saudi-aligned bloc headed by politicians who came to prominence as warlords during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. That group is led by the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian party whose rallying cry is Hezbollah’s disarmament.
Neither bloc won a parliamentary majority, according to representatives from Hezbollah and the Lebanese Forces, though the Hezbollah-led alliance retained the larger share of seats, with 61 so far — down from at least 70 after the last parliamentary elections in 2018. Hezbollah could regain the majority if it persuaded some independent candidates to join its bloc.
The new parliament will select the country’s next prime minister and elect a new president after the term of Michel Aoun, a Hezbollah ally, ends in October. Analysts said a more even distribution of seats between the blocs would probably result in gridlock, delaying the government’s formation.
If the results hold, one fight in the new political landscape could be over who serves as the parliament’s speaker, said Maha Yahya, director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center. Hezbollah’s losses mean that the current speaker, Nabih Berri, who has held the position since 1992 and is one of Hezbollah’s closest allies, may lose his post.
Asked whether the Lebanese Forces would oppose Berri, a spokesman said, “It goes without saying that things cannot continue the way they were.”
Political squabbling could be disastrous for Lebanon, which urgently needs a government that can continue negotiations for financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund. Delays could also imperil pledges of aid from the international community, including governments such as France and Saudi Arabia that have been hesitant to fund a Hezbollah-controlled government.
More than a dozen seats in parliament went to independent candidates who sprang out of a protest movement two years ago against Lebanon’s political class, widely seen as corrupt and ineffective. Many of the independents had also promised to deliver justice to victims of an explosion in Beirut’s port in 2020 that killed moire than 200 people and destroyed much of the city’s center.
The victorious independents included Elias Jradi, an ophthalmologist who won a seat previously held by a Hezbollah ally in southern Lebanon, the group’s center of support, and Ibrahim Mneimneh, an architect from Beirut who made headlines when he said in an interview that he was in favor of removing laws that criminalize homosexuality.
The elections came amid claims by the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections, an independent monitor, of “blatant violations, pressure, intimidation and weak organization.” The recorded violations included violence against the LADE’s volunteer monitors; party supporters unlawfully following voters to booths; and ballot boxes missing accompanying records.
The European Union’s Election Observation Mission also said in a preliminary report that “elections were overshadowed by widespread practices of vote buying and clientelism.”
Turnout was low in cities across Lebanon, despite entreaties by politicians for citizens to go to the polls. In Beirut, Rania Safar, a 48-year-old schoolteacher, cast her vote against traditional parties, voicing cautious hope for change.
“The road will be long,” she said, “but I have hopes that there will be breakthroughs.”
Lebanon’s soul has been eviscerated by its financial crisis. Not even the children want to play
He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to join the other children decorating the tree we’ve brought in.
“Why not?” I ask.
“Maali khili’” he responds — he doesn’t have the energy for it.
“He’s always like this” his father explains, pulling him in closer and planting a gentle kiss on his forehead.
The child starts to cry big, fat, silent tears.
I try again to engage him. “What can we do to make you smile?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“What do you like to do?”
“Nothing.”
His father, a Syrian refugee in Lebanon, scrawls wishes on holiday decorations. “I want health,” he writes on one A-4 paper. “I want to feel safe.”
“Here you do it. Hold the pencil,” he says, placing a pencil in his son’s hand. The boy doesn’t even wrap his fingers around it. It clatters to the ground.
He’s the first child in INARA, which helps war-wounded children, who can’t be coaxed into engaging, who refuses to even eat a chocolate cake that’s in front of him.
A little later, the father and I move to another room. The father speaks breathlessly for 45 minutes. It all tumbles out: How he’s struggling to keep his family healthy and fed. He can’t keep up. He can’t win. He just watches his children fade before his eyes.
“They are disappearing in front of me and I don’t know what to do.”
This is one family in a nation that is filled with drowning souls. The Syrian refugee population here was always downtrodden. But they have been plunged into new depths, with 99% of Syrian refugee households without enough food, according to the United Nations. The Lebanese have fared better but not by much — the poverty rate in the country is around 80%.
‘They’ve destroyed us’
Beirut feels both familiar and utterly foreign. I’ve been coming in and out of here since 2003 and was based here from 2010 to 2014. In the Beirut of today, people go through the motions and the energy that once made the city vibrant has dissipated continuously since the start of a financial catastrophe that began in October 2019. It once had an energy of being alive, but now that’s all gone.
I grab a cab to meet a friend for dinner. The streets seem to be more crowded with beggars than with pedestrians.
“They’ve destroyed us. I swear people are thinking of suicide,” the cab driver says. He’s talking to me but also just to himself.
He’s referring to the country’s political elite. These days, they are referred to as “thieves,” “criminals” and “killers” who have decimated the country’s wealth, leaving it writhing in pain and shock, barely able to process its new reality.
“You know the other day I bought labneh (a kind of Arabic cream cheese) and white cheese, not the spicy one, that’s too expensive,” he says. “I bought a total of four things at the shop, and it cost me the same as what I used to pay to fill my whole fridge.”
“How are you explaining this to your children,” I ask.
“It burns my heart. To have your kids ask you for things you can’t buy. Small things. Jam and Nutella. I just tell them to be patient, that daddy is doing everything he can. I don’t lie to them.”
He had to pull his children out of private school and put them into a public one. But that school is now closed because the teachers have gone on strike.
“I swear to you, the other day I was just sitting, and I started to cry,” he says.
He drops me off at a lovely restaurant on a hill just outside the city. It feels surreal to be there. The privilege of knowing that I can eat is actually nauseating.
My close friend, Reina Sarkis, who is a psychoanalyst, is already at the table. She’s dropped a ton of weight and she’s pale.
“Thank you for coming all the way out here, I just get so tired,” she says as we hug.
Reina has a chronic health issue and just had a treatment session earlier that day.
“Can you believe I’m still out here? You know I haven’t cried yet,” she says.
Reina lost her beautifully renovated home in one of Beirut’s historic buildings in the August 2020 port blast, for which no one has yet been held accountable. She barely got out alive, a miracle in many ways. Like everyone else her savings are now worthless. She’s stuck.
“Just because we breathe, it’s not proof of life,” she tells me.
I see it in the faces of friends and strangers. A light has gone out. There is no real genuine laughter, no self-deprecating commentary typical of the Lebanese.
A nation that has always managed to plaster its wounds is now utterly crushed, its soul eviscerated.
The country didn’t deteriorate overnight. It’s been happening in slow motion for years. But the last two years have thrown it into a full speed collision.
The World Bank considers Lebanon’s economic catastrophe one of the world’s worst since the mid-19th century and has dubbed it a “deliberate depression.” The country has had discretionary capital controls since October 2019, meaning banks can choose who to allow to withdraw their money. Typically this has been restricted the country’s mega-powerful.
Most people’s life savings have vaporized, inflation has skyrocketed and the country’s currency has lost over 95% of its value in two years. The result is the mass pauperization of the population.
You drive for hours from pharmacy to pharmacy looking for a basic pain killer or medicine for your ailing father. Certain drugs and products aren’t even brought in anymore, not enough people can afford to buy them.
“To know about a crisis is different to living it organically on a daily basis,” Reina says to me.
I sit and listen, and I can’t say anything. Not to her, not to anyone else I spent the last few days talking to.
I have no frame of reference for what it’s like for a parent to have to explain to their children why they can’t eat meat anymore, let alone buy gifts for the holidays. Or even worse, why they have been pulled from school and sent to work. UNICEF’s most recent report says that child labor in Lebanon has doubled in the last year.
There is a rage that trembles through everyone, coupled with deep depression. The despair of adults has seeped into the children.
The next day, the car I am in rolls slowly past a small playground. I look out the window at the children. They seem to be moving in slow motion, like they’re on the sidelines of childhood. Kids don’t want to play anymore.
Fire at Lebanon’s Zahrani oil facility contained
A large fire that broke out in one of the tanks containing benzene at the Al-Zahrani oil facility in southern Lebanon on Monday has been brought under control, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA).
The cause of the fire is as of yet unknown. Firefighters are working to extinguish the blaze and prevent it from spreading to additional tanks.
The Lebanese Army worked to evacuate people from the area near the oil facility amid concerns of the fire spreading or causing an explosion.
Lebanon’s General Prosecutor in the South, Judge Rahif Ramadan, opened an investigation into the circumstances of the fire on Monday, according to NNA.
After a meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Monday, Lebanese Energy Minister Walid Fayyad stated that the oil tank belonged to the Lebanese Army and that the fire had been contained. The minister has requested a report on the incident and its causes in order to prevent such incidents in the future.
On Sunday, Fayyad announced that the electrical network in the country had returned to normal operation after totally crashing after fuel from the Lebanese Army was provided to the Deir Ammar and Al-Zahrani power plants.
The Al-Zahrani power plant is located in the vicinity of the oil facility where the fire broke out on Monday. It is unclear if the oil tank that caught fire contained fuel that was intended for the power plant.
In August, about 30 people were killed and about 80 were injured after a fuel tank exploded in the Akkar region of northern Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Maronite patriarch calls on army to handle Hezbollah
Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rahi called on Sunday for the Lebanese army to take control of the southern part of the country, Hezbollah’s stronghold, and strictly implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701, after recent clashes between Israel and Hezbollah.
“We call upon the Lebanese army, which is responsible with the international forces for the security of the south, to take control of the entire lands of the south, to strictly implement Resolution 1701, and to prevent the launching of missiles from Lebanese territory, not for the sake of Israel’s safety, but rather for the safety of Lebanon,” said al-Rahi during Sunday Mass, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA).
The Maronite patriarch stressed that he could not “accept, by virtue of equality before the law, that a party decides peace and war outside the decision of legality and the national decision entrusted to two-thirds of the members of the government.”
On Friday, 19 rockets were fired from southern Lebanon into northern Israel, with the Iron Dome intercepting 10 rockets and six rockets falling in open areas near Har Dov along the Lebanese border. The other rockets fell inside Lebanon. There were no injuries or casualties.
It was the sixth such attack in recent months and the first that Hezbollah admitted to being behind.
Alongside the stance against Hezbollah’s actions, al-Rahi condemned what he called “periodic Israeli violations against southern Lebanon, and the violation of Security Council Resolution No. 1701, as well as the heated tension in the border areas of residential villages and their surroundings,” according to NNA.
The patriarch stressed that “it is true that Lebanon has not signed peace with Israel, but it is also true that Lebanon has not decided war with it, and is officially committed to the 1949 truce,” adding “We do not want to involve Lebanon in military operations that provoke devastating Israeli reactions.”
Al-Rahi also claimed that the clashes were meant to “divert attention from the sanctity and glow of the Mass of the martyrs and victims of” the Beirut Port explosion when the one-year anniversary of the blast was marked last week.
The Maronite patriarch attacked the country’s leaders: “We ask officials and politicians: How will you convince the people that you are qualified to lead them towards salvation, and every day you plunge them into a new crisis? How will you convince the world that you are worthy of help while you do not care about the international conferences dedicated to the relief of the Lebanese and which are ready to save Lebanon? How will you convince yourselves that you were up to the level of responsibility and hopes? Is there any humanity in you to feel with people in their misery?
“We want to end the military logic and war and adopt the logic of peace and the interest of Lebanon and all the Lebanese,” stated the patriarch, according to NNA.
The head of Lebanon’s Kataeb Party and former MP, Sami Gemayel, expressed support for the patriarch on Monday, saying that the party is “convinced” that there are many Lebanese citizens who agree with the patriarch and Kataeb Party concerning sovereignty and removal of arms outside the military.
Hezbollah supporters expressed outrage at the patriarch’s comments on social media, using the hashtags “Patron of bias” and “patron of surrender.” Hezbollah-affiliated reporter Ali Shoaib addressed the patriarch in a tweet, writing “Just for once, ask the Lebanese army to prevent the Israeli attacks instead of asking it to prevent the firing of rockets!!”
Lebanese MP Ibrahim Kanaan, a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Christian party allied with Hezbollah, responded to the social media responses to al-Rahi’s statements, saying that “insulting what [al-Rahi] represents and who he represents is rejected by all standards,” according to NNA.
Kanaan called for dialogue between Hezbollah and al-Rahi and a “discussion of his concerns, which are national concerns, expressed by a wide segment of the Lebanese people, with its various components and colors, in terms of not keeping Lebanon an open arena for exchanging messages, heating the borders and opening battles that harm the country and its economy, especially since the Lebanese are going through the most difficult stage in their 100 year history.”
The MP stressed that the patriarch’s positions must be discussed with respect, far from any abuse or anger.
This isn’t the first time that al-Rahi has issued statements against Hezbollah’s control of southern Lebanon and existence as a paramilitary organization in the country.
In August of last year, after the Beirut port blast, the Maronite patriarch called for the state to take control over weapons in the country and to confine decisions of war and peace to the state. Al-Rahi called on all parties not to involve Lebanon in any conflict and to take Lebanon’s interest into consideration first, according to NNA.
The patriarch has also repeatedly called for Lebanon to focus on neutrality and not to enter international and regional wars which he said have nothing to do with the country.
In 2014, al-Rahi visited Israel during a visit by Pope Francis. Hezbollah and other groups in Lebanon expressed outrage at the decision at the time.