Tracy Dany Chamoun was the former Lebanese Ambassador to Jordan but resigned in protest following the Beirut Port Blast – citing her inability to continue representing the government she considers responsible for the explosion through their neglect, incompetence, and corruption.
Lebanon has now entered into the phase of chaos. Today’s protests are less political and more about the social hardships confronting the poor and the newly impoverished, and they are cries of anger against the present living conditions.
More and more incidents are being seen in supermarkets as people fight for what is left on the shelves. Scarcity is instilling fear everywhere. Scarcity of the Dollar, of food, gas, electricity, work, and the worst still, scarcity of hope is gripping the hearts of the Lebanese people and enraging them.
This dismay of the population is fueled by the fact that they are living under the governance of leaders who continually choose to ignore their demands, when they are also aware that there is a way out of this conundrum, and that the only thing holding up a solution in Lebanon today is the presence of this political class which is deliberately refusing to take action while playing the blame game with each other, in order to defer the responsibility of their incompetence.
What is more mind-boggling, is that there are steps that can be taken immediately to redress the situation.
The first of which is to form a Government of exceptional non-partisan specialists to carry out reforms in parallel with the start of the arrival of foreign aid.
The second of which is for Lebanon to restore all of its Arab relations without exception and to re-define its foreign policy and take into account the Syrian crisis and the problem of the Syrian refugees.
And finally, Lebanon needs a new defense strategy that excludes the existence of two parallel armies operating on its soil.
After the riots, the President accused the black market exchangers of the collapse of the Lebanese Lira instead of, firstly, forcing the immediate implementation of a Capital Control Law, (which has been talked about for over a year) and, secondly, contributing to the effective formation of an independent Government.
It is the lack of a respectable Government that is causing the complete absence of confidence in the future of the country and is leading to the withholding of the inflow of Dollars that are so badly needed, to keep the exchange rate at a reasonable level.
Truthfully, the crisis is purely political and the bulk of the blame lies with the Presidency and its strange unholy dance with the self-appointed Prime Minister-Designate.
Both being quite content to continue jousting in this ambiguous situation which conveniently allows them to keep holding onto their roles, even if these are empty of substance, while on the other side, the people suffer and starve.
They all oversaw the catastrophic financial engineering of the Central Bank without sounding an alarm about the impending collapse of the banking sector. They failed for years to implement the reforms called for by “The Cèdres” conference held in France, thus forfeiting 11 Billion Dollars of donor money for Lebanon.
And finally, they were in charge of the Government for 4 years while the Ammonium Nitrate was left in The Port of Beirut to decay and become extremely hazardous, leading to the explosion that destroyed over 300,000 homes and killed hundreds of people.
The Lebanese Pound has reached new lows and will continue to fall. The Governor of The Central Bank has issued dire warnings about the situation and will not be able to cover the subsidies for much longer, and the matter of the fuel supply is threatening a complete blackout of the whole nation.
What is happening now is a CRIME against the Lebanese people and is looking more and more like a deliberate and willful attempt to murder a nation as a result of personal malice, and the unlawful lack of exercise of public duty, resulting in the endangerment of people’s lives.
It is time for the PM Designate to recuse himself in order to make room for someone else after 7 wasted months of attempting to form a Government, a period which has only seen a catastrophic deterioration in the lives of the Lebanese.
Equally, under similar conditions in any decent country in the world, the President would be impeached on the grounds of gross misconduct and the continued failure to do his duty or he would resign.