Conflict after conflict, and still Lebanon never learns

It’s hard to write anything this week without thinking about Gaza and the chronic, perhaps even terminal, condition we suffer from in this neck of the Middle East of putting an appetite for conflict before economic and social development.

I can speak first hand about what it feels like to be targeted by Israel. I was in Lebanon during the short-lived but intense conflicts of 1993, 1996 and, in particular, 2006. My wife lived through all these as well as the 1982 invasion, and most of the civil war.

The 2006 war, a month-long gutter fight that Hizbollah claimed to have won, cost Lebanon more than 1,000 dead, 1 million displaced and US$5 billion, roughly 12 per cent of GDP, in material damages.

Of course in the summer of 1982, it was worse. More than 19,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians, died during Israel’s four-month operation to get rid of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Financially, the cost was $2bn – quite an amount back then – in infrastructure with 40,000 homes and 85 per cent of schools destroyed.

In both conflicts, the fighting was provoked by parties that put their own agendas before the national good, and I fear that, for all its principles and martial fervour, and the fact that right is on its side, Hamas’s defiance will only lead to more death and destruction. Lebanon is liberal, wealthier and arguably more democratic than its Palestinian neighbours, but we are still in the grip of a seven-decade obsession with the Zionist state. This has resulted in important development initiatives being ignored and created deep rifts within Lebanese society, rifts that, in the continued absence of fully functioning basic services and a non-existent national economic strategy, are destined to only get deeper.

This sorry state of affairs was highlighted last week when someone in the Lebanese government blurted out to the media that it was considering buying water from Turkey to make up for the disastrous shortfall we are experiencing this year.

Those five words again: “make up the shortfall” and “Turkey”. Was it not the Turkish company Karadeniz Holding that the Lebanese state contracted to supply extra electricity to make up the “shortfall” in a deal said to be worth $370 million over three years”?

Anyway, our joy at the news that we’d be getting Turkish water was short-lived. The next day the deputy prime minister, Samir Moqbel told the media that, instead of buying water from the Turks, plans were being drafted to dig for new wells, while in the medium to long-term plans would be drawn up to create extra dams and lakes.

Someone must have sent him a memo reminding him of the numerous water studies gathering dust in various government offices. Indeed, only last February, the Civic Influence Hub, an NGO, unveiled its Blue Gold for Lebanon initiative, one that would create a privatised water company as well as lobby for new legislation to properly husband our considerable water resources. Blue Gold assured us that Lebanon could have a 500 million m3 surplus by 2020, rising to a 1 billion m3 surplus by 2030.

But the trouble with Lebanon, which puts partisan and sectarian self-interest before the basic requirements of state management, is that there is never any institutional “grip”. The latest deadline for 24-hour power is 2015, but that was before the population grew by 45 per cent in one year. In any case, nothing will ever happen, because there never is any genuine will. Instead we are left with a quick fix/quick please policy of spending rather than investing.

In 2006, the world called for a ceasefire in Lebanon just as they are calling for a ceasefire now in Gaza. When the guns eventually fell silent and we surveyed the rubble, Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, in what was admittedly a stunning bit of PR, claimed a “Divine Victory”.

Great. But exactly eight years later, we still have no electricity. If that was a victory, I would hate to be around for a defeat.

Michael Karam is a freelance writer based in Lebanon

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