Goodwill gesture sows discord in Lebanon
beirut — It was supposed to be a goodwill gesture from an energy company in Turkey.
This summer, the Karadeniz Energy Group lent Lebanon a floating power station to generate electricity at below-market rates to help ease the strain on the country’s woefully undermaintained power sector.
Instead, the barge’s arrival opened a Pandora’s box of partisan mudslinging in a country hobbled by political sectarianism and dysfunction. There have been rows over where it should dock, how to allocate its 235 megawatts of power, and even what to call the barge. It has even driven a wedge between Amal and Hezbollah.
Amal revealed sensationally last week it had refused to allow the boat to dock in a port in the predominantly
Shia south, even though it is one of the most underserved regions of Lebanon.
Hezbollah issued a statement that it had nothing to do with the matter of the barge at Zahrani port. A Hezbollah lawmaker went further to say his party disagreed on the issue with Amal. Critics seized on the statement as confirmation that Amal’s
leaders were in bed with the operators of private generators, who have been making fortunes selling electricity during blackouts at many times the state price.
“For decades there’s been nothing stopping them from building a power plant,” said Mohammed Obeid, a former Amal party official.
Energy Minister Cesar Abi Khalil, a Christian, lashed out at Amal, saying the ministry even changed the barge’s name from Ayse, Turkish for Aisha, a name associated in Lebanon with Sunnis, to Esra Sultan, which does not carry any Shia or Sunni connotations, to try to get it to dock in Zahrani.
On July 18, the barge docked in Jiyeh, a harbour in a religiously mixed area. But two weeks later it was unmoored again, after the energy minister said the infrastructure at Jiyeh could only handle 30mw of the Esra Sultan’s 235 capacity.
With Zahrani closed to the Esra Sultan, it could only go to Zouq Mikhael, a port in the Christiandominated Kesrouan region, where it was plugged to the grid on Tuesday night, giving the region almost 24 hours of electricity a day.