Lebanon’s Youth Need Hope and Princess Leia
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire…During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet…Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy.”
So began the opening crawl (signature) of the 1977 epic space movie Star Wars released in the second year of another civil war, in Lebanon, with its heroes — many unsung — and villains aplenty.
In the movie version, the good guys won and saved the day.
On Planet Earth, the Middle Eastern country’s war never really ended.
While the guns fell silent to a brokered deal 15 years after the conflict erupted, warring factions held on to their grudges and passed them to the next generation (or two), notably among the militias, chieftains and charlatans who led the destructive DEATH STAR that severely damaged the country, its people, its economy, and continue to do so with a vengeance.
Many held on to their guns, as did their children and grandchildren into 2021, while others acquired or re-acquired weapons and remained trigger happy, but few seemed to fully appreciate the severity of what their actions did and would continue doing to Lebanon’s youth.
Back in the heady pre-civil war years, the Lebanese Lira, the national currency, traded at about 3 to the U.S. Dollar. One could live on a 500-lira salary and save a few on the side. Then as the fighting spread, the lira hit some nasty bumps and shot up to 2,500 against the greenback.
Inflation, the civil war, a fluctuating state of instability due to internal squabbling, external interference, and the impact of regional upheavals, sprouted new denominations of the lira.
In 1997, the central bank set the exchange rate at 1,507.5 to the dollar and kept it there for a little over two decades in a bid to ensure “financial and economic stability.” But it was an unsustainable artificial peg for a variety of reasons that could fill a whole magazine issue.
The dam burst in October 2019 with the start of a financial meltdown that opened the floodgates to successive catastrophes.
It was followed by the spread of the coronavirus, a massive explosion at the Beirut port in August 2020 that killed more than 200 people, injured thousands, left untold thousands homeless and damaged a sizable chunk of Lebanon’s capital.
The downward spiral picked up speed with galloping hyperinflation, a sharp rise in unemployment, a frightening number of people falling under the poverty line and a severe slide of the lira, losing 107 percent of its value — hovering at 18,000 to the dollar (and climbing) at this writing. The minimum wage is now below $40/month.
The lira’s losses will cause a nasty nosebleed in the weeks and months ahead with more subsidies being lifted on basic goods and banks continuing to bar clients from accessing their deposits.
Lebanon is known for its émigrés and young people are among the countless Lebanese seeking greener pastures, but the sequence of events of the last two years has accelerated their desire to jump ship before their Titanic goes under.
An ominous Spring 2021 World Bank report entitled “Lebanon Sinking (to the Top 3)” ranked the country’s financial and economic crisis “in the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century.”
A section of the study focuses on the large-scale interruptions to vital public services: electricity, water supply, sanitation and education.
All that in the wake of the pandemic, mass layoffs, shoddy Internet service at best to which not everyone is connected or necessarily has adequate devices to run businesses, keep government functioning, and enable students to engage in distance learning.
Among young people making a beeline for the exits are doctors, lawyers, artists, journalists, teachers and despairing employees in the hospitality and restaurant industries who see no future in a country based on invasive sectarianism, clientelism, rampant corruption and mind-blowing political intrigue.
But less educated and unskilled young people are also seeking a way out, often in irregular fashion on “death boats” run by smugglers out to capitalize on the migrants’ miseries.
Someone tweeted this week: “It’s sad to live in a country where you only dream of leaving it.”
To which a tweep replied: “Unfortunately, this country isn’t for us; whoever wants to live his life must leave this country.”
“Seventy-five percent of the youth in Lebanon think of emigrating,” Nasser Yassin, a professor of policy planning at the American University of Beirut (AUB), said on an evening TV talk show.
“Youth in Lebanon: Policy Narratives, Attitudes, and Forms of Mobilization” by Mona Harb, a professor of urban studies and politics at AUB, points to public officials’ descriptions that pigeon-hole young people either as educated success stories and expats with the potential to invest money in their homeland, or poorly educated and unskilled youth who can be manipulated politically and economically, and who are also potential security risks that can be controlled.
In her insightful policy paper, Harb wrote:
The socioeconomic inequalities that are established at the national scale are therefore reproduced among young people. In both narratives, youth are gendered into single young women, who will marry late or not at all — thus generating social angst — and single young men, perceived as a burden on society (given their unemployability) and as a security threat (given their propensity to become radicalized). Accordingly, the public policy understanding of Lebanese youth is dominated by a generic and normative idea of youth exclusion, one focused on issues of unemployment, emigration, and a skewed female-male balance.
In the conclusion, Harb said young people either conform to mainstream sectarian politics, hetero-normative social structures, and pious norms, or integrate into professional NGO groups, or engage in progressive activist platforms — which have more potential for political change, albeit tenuous.
But she noted that activist networks also face tremendous odds against “a hegemonic sectarian political system keen on protecting its assets, an ineffective political representation system, and a fraught geopolitical context in which wars, conflicts, crises, and disasters keep unfolding.”
As if that wasn’t enough, young people are also part of pockets of poor marginalized Lebanese, Palestinian refugees and displaced Syrians. Different figures show many wish to emigrate, other statistics indicate they turn to crime and illicit activities to survive or support their families, and ultimately the prospects are bleak.
The largest groups of Palestinians came to Lebanon when the state of Israel was created in 1948 — they were either chased out of their homeland or fled — and subsequent to the 1967 Arab-Israeli (Six-Day) War.
Lebanon has also hosted over a million displaced and refugee Syrians — figures vary, depending on the sources — since a civil war broke out in their country, adding to an already large community of Syrian migrant workers who have been part of the Lebanese economic ecosystem for decades.
Earlier this year, the AUB Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) launched a webinar series in partnership with the Lebanese Association for Educational Studies (LAES) entitled “Youth in Marginalized Settings in Lebanon: Lebanese Poverty Pockets, Palestinian Camps, and Syrian Gatherings.”
The seven webinars running through November 2021 deal with the educational, professional, familial, social, identity, future aspects of youth life and youth policies. They’re based on findings of a 2018–2021 study conducted by LAES.
A dystopian projection by Synaps dubbed “Lebanon 2.0.2.2: The Future We Are Bracing For” catapults readers six months forward and paints a forbidding picture.
Lebanon’s slow-burn crisis also means that a full-blown humanitarian response has yet to materialize, even as poverty deepens and spreads. If anything, donor fatigue is increasing: Lebanon is consolidating its reputation as a basket case of self-inflicted misery, where politicians capture resources while doing little for their people.
So much so, that people in Lebanon are taking matters into their own hands, and onto the next level.
“Violence has seeped into daily Lebanese life due to the country’s severe economic crisis and a breakdown in official security, with fights and even shooting at gas stations,” wrote Najia Houssari in Arab News.
There are shortages of essential items such as fuel and medicine, while bread — the most basic daily item on Lebanese tables — shot up in price after the government halted subsidies on sugar and yeast, she said, adding that motorists line up for hours at gas stations and fistfights often turn into deadly shootouts “as people clash over who gets to fill their tank first.”
A World Bank note entitled “Foundations for Building Forward Better: An Education Reform Path for Lebanon” presents an alarming analysis of the country’s educational landscape. The executive summary is disturbing, notably for a country that once prided itself on being the education center of the Middle East.
Human capital development is a critical determinant of economic growth, equity, and prosperity, but outcomes in this domain are worryingly low in Lebanon, risking the future of generations of children. Lebanese children lag behind their peers in human capital development — measured according to the World Bank (2020c) Human Capital Index — suggesting that the future productivity of the labor force and the country’s trajectory for equitable growth is at risk (World Bank 2020b). The Human Capital Index indicates that children born in Lebanon today will reach, on average, only 52 percent of their potential productivity when they grow up. This is lower than the average estimates for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (57 percent) and upper-middle-income countries (56 percent). Lebanon’s poor performance on the Human Capital Index is largely attributed to the education outcomes calculated for the index. If actual years of schooling, which average approximately 10.2 years in Lebanon, are adjusted for actual learning, effective years of schooling are 40 percent less — on average, only 6.3 years of actual learning (World Bank 2020b). The most recent school closures were due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with schools being closed over 75 percent of the school year between January 2020 and February 2021. This will likely lead to a further and significant decrease in learning: effectively, students are facing a lost year of learning (Azevedo et al. 2021).
While it acknowledged the adverse effects of the economic crisis, the pandemic and the Beirut port explosion on funding for education, it called for additional investments in that sector and change through “a comprehensive reform agenda that rests on political will and stakeholder commitment.”
A tall order to be sure.
It brings us full circle to a Lebanon the late crooner Wadih El Safi described as “a piece of heaven” in a song. That piece is fighting an evil Galactic Empire of hung-over insatiable militias, feudal lords, business interests and political sharks helming a DEATH STAR.
Lebanon needs Princess Leia to give hope to youth in a galaxy not so far, far away. She and her heroic mates must be part of the country’s youth fabric.