شارل الياس شرتوني: لبنان ينهار من الداخل Lebanon is imploding Charles Elias Chartouni/April 26/2022
The cascading humanitarian tragedies, the deliberate sabotaging of financial reforms since 2019, the skewed electoral process, the vocal promotion of civil war by Hezbollah and its knaves, and the unleashing of mundane violence are of bad omen. The successive shadow cabinets attest their subsidiary nature and highlight their mere instrumentalisation by the criminal power brokers who are in control. The state of obstruction is no accident, it’s an intentional policy course aimed at breaking down Lebanese Statehood, upending political, socio-economic, demographic and urban dynamics and ushering the rise of a new political era controlled by Shiite Islamist politics mandated by the imperial agenda of the Islamic regime in Iran. There is no argument or pretext that justify two and a half years of political stonewalling, circumventing negotiations with multilateral financial institutions and evading the mandated reforms of governance. The only rationale behind this calculated obstruction is to oversee the progressive unraveling of the country, induce massive migration, and destroy the social capital and the operational infrastructures built over the centennial.
Hezbollah’s agenda is no more mystery and is openly flaunted through its rhetoric (challenge Lebanon’s national legitimacy, consensual political culture, geopolitical, institutional and financial stability…,.). Its structured relationships with the oligarchic power configuration and strategic commonalities are based on: the plundering of private and public resources through the rigged Ponzi Scheme, the transmogrification of the Lebanese economy into a criminal one, the discretionary use of power and the patrimonialization of the public domain. The hermetic foreclosures on the levers of governance are no hazard, it’s a premeditated plan which aims at dismantling democratic institutions, and setting the path of political and legal disenfranchisement and ultimate control of power.
Lebanon has no chance to extricate itself from this tangled web of domination strategies, destructive oligarchic entrenchments and competing regional power politics, unless the internationalization of its compounded crises takes over and helps Lebanese recover their political prerogatives, plundered public and private treasuries, and address the monumental tasks of reconstruction. The implementation of international resolutions (1559, 1680, 1701, 2591) is, at this juncture, prelude to the enforcement of the UN chapter 7 and its ancillaries 8 and 9, if Lebanon is ever to restore its battered sovereignty, and the Lebanese regain their moral and political autonomy usurped by thirty two years of overlapping internal and external political arrogation of power and moral dispossession. The political interims are no more functional in our case, there is need for a renegotiated Social Contract, if this country is ever to survive and avoid its transformation into a surrogate landscape for proxy conflicts, an extension to the bolting strategic voids of an imploding Middle East, and an auxiliary threat to European and Western security and World peace.
