Poverty stalks Lebanon
Despair rife
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, May 13, (AP): Living in a slum built precariously on the banks of a sewage-tainted river in Lebanon, Faiqqa Homsi feels her family being pushed closer and closer to the edge.
A mother of five, she was already struggling, relying on donations to care for a baby daughter with cancer. The coronavirus shutdown cost her husband his meager income driving a school bus. She hoped to earn some change selling carrot juice after a charity gave her a juicer. But as Lebanon’s currency collapsed, carrots became too expensive.
“It is all closing in our face,” Homsi said.
Lebanese are growing more desperate as jobs disappear and their money’s value evaporates in a terrifying confluence of events. An unprecedented economic crisis, nationwide protests and coronavirus pose the biggest threat to stability since the end of the civil war in 1990, and there are fears of a new slide into violence.
Nowhere is the despair deeper than in Tripoli, Homsi’s hometown and Lebanon’s poorest city. Overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim and home to over 700,000 people, Tripoli has suffered years of neglect and is stigmatized with violence and extremism. Mounting poverty is turning it into a powder keg.
Even before the crises, almost the entire city’s workforce depended on day-to-day income, and 60% of them made less than $1 a day. More than half of the families were in the poorest classification, lacking basic services, education and health care, said Suheir Ghali, a university professor who carried out a study of Tripoli.
Things will get worse as Lebanon’s economy contracts. Already 45% of the country’s population is below the poverty line. The currency has lost nearly 60% of its value to the dollar. Unemployment has risen to 35%, nearly double the current US figures rivaling the Great Depression.
Divisions among Lebanon’s sectarian leadership hamper attempts to address the crisis. Hezbollah, which dominates the government, reluctantly supported plans to seek help from the International Monetary Fund, a sign of its concern about widening hardships. IMF support will likely mean cuts in the public sector, the largest employer, likely to cause squabbling among political factions. The prime minister, a Sunni, has Hezbollah’s backing but little within his own sect or in Tripoli.
Tripoli was thrust into the forefront of the anti-government protests that first broke out in October. Its boisterous rallies inspired other protesters, who called it the “bride” of the uprising.
Protests returned late last month, more furious and violent, targeting banks. A protester was killed in Tripoli when the army broke up a rally.
“The risk that things might go on a downward spiral (in Tripoli) is real,” said Nasser Yassin, a professor of policy planning at the American University of Beirut.
Tripoli has been the scene of some of Lebanon’s worst violence since the civil war’s end. For weeks in 2007, Islamists battled troops north of the city. The uprising in Syria reignited a bloody rivalry between some of Tripoli’s Sunni and Alawite residents, who belong to the same sect as Syria’s leadership.