Last week The Journal visited Beirut. The Lebanese capital fizzles with energy, but is suffering in a perfect storm of crippling inflation, power cuts and the impossible anxiety of perpetual political mismanagement.
Image: Xinhua News Agency/PA Images Image: Xinhua News Agency/PA Images BEIRUT’S GENERAL de Gaulle is a coastal road hugging the picturesque shore of the vast Mediterranean.
To the east, looking inland, there are the pockmarked high rises and simmering food vendors and deeper in, the arid peaks of mountains rising high above the city. They will tell you of crippling inflation, repeated power cuts throughout the day and the impossible anxiety of perpetual political mismanagement.Walk the streets at night and they are pitch black – there is no electricity to light the boulevards. The hum of generators fills the neighbourhoods as crippled infrastructure is starved in a fuel crisis that makes our Irish concerns of turf cutting look like the musings of clueless privilege.
“It is the inflation, the electricity problems, the fuel, the corruption – it is everything here,” he says. Tracy Makhlouf is a proud Lebanese woman who is working with French aid agency Medécins sans Frontieres in their Beirut base.Tracy Makhlouf is a Lebanese woman working with Médecins sans Frontieres. Source: Niall O'Connor/The Journal
“For the first time we have noticed that the amount of people in Lebanon seeking our services, our primary healthcare, has increased where more Lebanese are using it than the Syrian refugees,” she said. Fernandez said the country, not just Beirut, is crippled by the burden of the collapse of the financial economy but it had its genesis in the failed political apparatus.
What it has given the country, since the end of the Civil War in the late 1990s, is a quagmire of political inertia. However, in the last two years, since the beginning of this big, deep crisis, political and economic crisis in the country, we start to see an increased number of Lebanese patient. “For example two years ago and three years ago, 70% of our patients in Becca Valley were mainly Syrians, and 25/30% were Lebanese. This year, 2022, is the first time in the history of MSF working here with refugees, that we have more Lebanese patients than Syrian patients.
Medical professionals, who could help, have emigrated while such is the loss in wage value that healthcare is now seen as a luxury. “We are now seeing a reduction of the vaccination coverage from 30% to 40% – it is growing. The kids are not vaccinated, you have high risk of an outbreak like so polio could arise very soon, because it’s extremely expensive.
The United States also will not co-operate as long as Hezbollah have influence on political leadership.Fernandez is fighting his natural empathy to try and make strategic decisions that best serve the response to the crisis.
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