Libanon: Dem totalen Kollaps von allem entgegen

(Bildquelle: BytheEast)

Um den Libanon ist es schlimm bestellt, das Land steht am Rande des Abgrundes und die dysfunktionalen Eliten sind unfähig und nicht willens, irgend etwas zu tun, um das Desaster aufzuhalten. Wie immer in solchen Situationen sind die Armen und vor allem die 1,5 Millionen Flüchtlinge am schlimmsten betroffen, aber inzwischen trifft es auch die Mittelschicht hart.

Eine lesenswerte Analyse über die desolate Lage des Landes aus der Washington Post:

The collapse is the result of decades of economic mismanagement, corruption and overspending. Hopes for a rescue are fading as the country’s ruling elites balk at the kind of reforms and outside scrutiny that would unlock international aid. Talks with the International Monetary Fund to secure a $10 billion loan have stalled. (...)

The Lebanese pound has lost over 60 percent of its value in just the past month, and 80 percent of its value since October. Prices are soaring and goods disappearing.

Bread, a staple of the Lebanese diet, is in short supply because the government can’t fund imports of wheat. Essential medicines are disappearing from pharmacies. Hospitals are laying off staff because the government isn’t paying its portion, and canceling surgeries because they don’t have electricity or the fuel to operate generators.(...)

“Lebanon is no longer on the brink of collapse. The economy of Lebanon has collapsed,” said Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “The Lebanese model established since the end of the civil war in 1990 has failed. It was a house of glass, and it has shattered beyond any hope of return.” (...)

“This isn’t your average small-country collapse,” said Mike Azar, a Beirut-based financial analyst.

Of the 6.8 million people living in the country, 1 in 5 is a refugee, most of them Syrians, giving Lebanon the highest per capita refugee population in the world, according to U.N. and World Bank figures. They will be hit hardest as prices soar beyond their meager means and as the work in the informal sector they rely upon dries up, said Nicolas Oberlin, deputy regional director of the U.N. World Food Program.

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are now expected to join them in poverty, he said. The WFP already feeds 750,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Now, for the first time since the 2006 war with Israel, the organization plans to start distributing food to hungry Lebanese with the expectation of reaching an equivalent number by the end of the year.