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Any sensible individual would refrain from mentioning the most recent – and useless – presidential election session. It would be fair to say that Lebanon is no longer a State, but rather a territory for the active promotion of legal crime, so to speak. Today’s organized crime is the work of the elite in power that recruits its handymen from the city’s underbelly.
“They have arrived, they have all come,
When they heard this shout:
She will die, our momma”
These are the first words of Charles Aznavour’s famous song.
Indeed, they have all come for the 12th presidential election. All 128 representatives have come, not to save a dying mother-state, but to prepare for the ensuing funeral. At the end of the polls, only 127 votes were cast, the remaining one having served as a last sigh before the lifeless body of a long-gone State.
Votes were counted, and counted again. Some chose to contest, briefly. Others gestured disapprovingly in front of the media’s cameras. Then, nothing. All was left to the mercy of corrupt politicians and mafiosi terrorists who have long ago seized control of the country.
The current crisis in Lebanon is not to be analyzed by self-aggrandizing, hypocritical politicians. It must be studied using a twin approach, a moral and a legal one. We are no longer tackling bad political ethics. We are rather facing a deliberate and organized strategy that favours crime and little else. Corruption simply does not explain everything, as the Lebanese people have been robbed fairly legally.
This dismal 12th session is in no way different than the previous ones. Elected officials are far from being the origin of all evil here. In fact, the essential problem lies within the very electoral law that so insidiously prohibits all forms of democracy by giving way to cartels of a sectarian nature.
Certainly, there is the undividable Amal-Hezbollah tandem that blocks everything. And, on the other side of the fence lies a heterogenous bloc within which operate two rival Christian groups that agreed to cooperate for the sake of the elections. But to what political end? None. One of these two groups is responsible for USD 40 billion worth of wasted money in the electricity sector. Here, people turn a blind eye to crime. Here, people accept an alliance that is too ashamed to mention its own name. Here, no one dares to utter words pertaining to the most recent sectarian divide within the parliament itself. Is this the swan song of democracy? One may very well believe it. The tragedy of Lebanon reveals a much more universal phenomenon. Systemic corruption is generally characterized by illicit activity, such as bribes, commissions, embezzlement, etc. Strangely, there are also legal ways to promote corruption. In January 2010, the United States Supreme Court made a historic ruling: companies and unions can now spend unlimited funds to finance electoral campaigns (Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission). Thus, by deregulating the funding process, the chief justice gives a powerful weapon to the private sector that the latter can use against democracy. Given all of the above, the elite’s wrongdoings are no longer surprising.
In his book Geostrategy of Crime, French writer Jean-François Gayraud issues a warning: “Remaining blind to criminal activities is conducive to rooting them.”
Is it too late for Lebanon? Will this country be able to free itself from the grip of Hezbollah and its diverse allies? Once a prosperous nation, Lebanon is the perfect example that criminals are not all “damned.” Not all of them are the vanguard of the revolution either, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm once said. In our world, organized crime is nurtured by the upper class that recruits its henchmen from the city’s underbelly.
However, what makes Lebanon stand out is the fact that it uses religion as a vehicle for organized crime, in order to avoid public prosecution. With this in mind, it becomes easier to understand the idleness of many Lebanese citizens who cannot dissociate themselves from their sects. The problems I have enumerated could clearly be felt during the most recent electoral session.
- Does a country without a sovereign State really need a leader?
- Can the election of a president delay the inevitable?
- Can the president – the State’s keystone – play their role if no stone has been laid?
These are the three fundamental axes that politicians use as a benchmark to position themselves. All things considered, this 12th session can be considered democratic, but in name only. In fact, it is the manifestation of a horrific, quasi-metaphysical reality, one in which foreign – and local – militias hold the State hostage and hinder all forms of democracy.
