Letter From Lebanon

Look down from the mountains outside Beirut and, on most days, you’ll see a grey blanket of smog choking the city. The smog comes from diesel generators: almost every building in Lebanon is hooked up to one because of rolling power cuts. This isn’t because Israel bombed one of the country’s few power stations in 2006, though it did. Instead, the power cuts are a constant reminder to the Lebanese of their politicians’ greed, venality and incompetence. Successive governments have failed to build new power stations. Some are supposed to be finished next year, finally, but everyone knows they won’t be enough. The Lebanese will tell you that the ‘generator mafias’ are in business with the politicians and there’s so much money being made that things will never change. People shrug and accept this. Lebanon has been unable to generate enough electricity to meet its needs since the civil war ended in 1990.

The problem is that the war never really ended. The warlords in charge back then are still around. They race through Beirut in convoys of black SUVs with tinted windows, forcing traffic aside in a cacophony of sirens, prompting waves of resentful looks. The war’s divisions were frozen in place by a deal to carve up power between the country’s different confessions: the president has to be a Christian; the prime minister, a Sunni; the speaker of parliament, a Shia. Ministers get jobs in the same way and this means they are almost impossible to sack, even in cases of the most blatant corruption. A friend from one of Lebanon’s richest families told me about a minister who was demanding thousands of dollars to sign each one of the stream of permits required to do business here. My friend’s company was the local partner of a multinational and so he wasn’t allowed to pay the bribes.