https://www.thearabweekly.com/international-absurdity-cannot-help-lebanons-failed-state
There is an absolute political and moral imperative to protect the Lebanese civilian population, through concrete action such as individual sanctions, from the acts of its own political and business elite.
Multidimensional poverty in Lebanon rose from 53% (pre-2019) to 82% in 2019, because of what the World Bank described as a deliberate depression orchestrated by the country’s elite and one of the top three most severe economic collapses worldwide since the 1850s.
Moreover, it has been more than two years during which this same elite has obstructed the investigation into one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in recent history that killed more than 200 people, injured 7,000 and caused an estimated $15 billion of damage. Yet, all the while the international community continues with a criminal “softly-softly” approach towards Lebanon.
Holding the community of nations solely responsible for Lebanon’s mess is not only unfair, but essentially preposterous. It is clear by now that some Lebanese citizens easily qualify as perpetrators, while the rest are either unwilling or unfit to be part of a solution, are held hostage by the current elite, or just idle babblers, too politically immature to conceive and execute a way out of the quagmire.
Despite the absence of a precise legal definition of a “failed state”, along with the controversy over the term’s usage, the concept has become, since it emerged in the 1990’s, increasingly important in international law, as it can have significant implications for international security and humanitarian intervention. It usually refers to a state that has lost effective control over its territory, government and population and is unable to provide basic services, maintain law and order and protect its citizens’ rights and freedoms.
Overtime, frameworks for identifying and dealing with failed states have been developed by international organisations capturing various buckets of state failure indicators, most of which do apply to Lebanon.
With the largest number of refugees per capita, Lebanon is a country with significant demographic pressure, human flight and brain drain as well as collective social grievances. The country faces increasing poverty and continuous economic decline, along with eroded state legitimacy and dwindling public services, as well as a poor record on human rights and the rule of law. The factionalised security apparatus is unable to deter crime, protect the public and does not possess a monopoly on the use of force.
Peacekeepers of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) stand next to flags during a handover ceremony from Italian Major-General Stefano Del Col to Spanish Major-General Aroldo Lazaro Saenz of the command of Lebanon’s UN peacekeeping forces
Most of the liquid assets of the population are stuck in a barely-functioning banking system and thus not accessible, while the country has defaulted on its sovereign debt since March 2020. After the end of the presidential mandate in October 2022 and the failure of the parliament to elect a successor to the outgoing President Michel Aoun, the caretaker government remains paralysed due to political bickering and constitutional ambiguity about the legality of its meetings. Until a new president is elected, besides executive power being incapacitated, the parliament’s activity is restricted by the constitution to being simply an “electoral college”, thus depriving the country of much-needed legislative and oversight activity.
Lebanon’s judiciary has always been instrumentalised by the political and business elites. However, the implosion within the criminal justice system in the last few months is unprecedented, not even under the Syrian occupation of Lebanon between 1990 and 2005. Various rankings show Lebanon as one of the most corrupt 30 countries in the world. With a severely deficient regulatory framework for judicial accountability, Lebanon faces the consequences of decades of compounded impunity.
In brief, Lebanon is a country with endemic corruption, dysfunctional legislative, executive and judiciary powers, where services are hardly accessible and poverty rates are alarming. Since protecting its people is a fundamental part of the exercise of the national sovereignty of a state, it is clear that the Lebanese authorities do not have the political will nor the ability to fulfil this critical mission. Nevertheless, the international community has failed to target the country’s criminal political elite beyond mere rhetoric and sporadic empty threats of individual sanctions that were never put into action, with rare exceptions.
Long gone is the time when a similar situation would have been considered by world powers as sufficiently alarming to enact the “responsibility to protect” principle and bring about some sort of international tutelage over a given country. Lebanon may not be as fortunate as Namibia (1968), Cambodia (1992), East Croatia (1996), Kosovo (1999) or East Timor (1999) and it may be too naïve to expect a revival of the inert UN Trusteeship Council mechanism, inactive since 1994.
Some Lebanon pundits have even been contemplating, for a while now, a possible match between what is happening in Lebanon and the international legal definition of “genocide’ or “crimes against humanity”. Legal experts generally concur that characterising the events in Lebanon as an “atrocity” as defined in international law is somehow fanciful from a purely legalistic perspective.
However, the normative framework of the “responsibility to protect” requires all states to protect another state’s own people when their government is incapable or unwilling to do so. The Canadian International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) challenged the absolute nature of state sovereignty, looking at the state along with sovereignty not as the absolute sum of its parts, but as conditional upon the fulfilment of obligations toward all of its parts. Furthermore, ICISS stated that the notion of sovereignty is conditional upon the security of populations. This concept, labelled as “state-centred” sovereignty assumes the state does and will continue to represent the will of its people and that the will of all its people is respected, either through some sort of special representation or benevolent rule, or for an agreed-upon democratic arrangement.
Practically speaking, the current geopolitical realities and constraints of the international community do not allow for Lebanon to be treated as a “failed state” nor putting it under international tutelage. However, there is no political nor moral justification for abandoning the Lebanese population to a fateful destiny. The question is therefore whether there could be other measures that would protect the Lebanese population from its own political and business elite, even though this same elite has been embraced by part of the population.
A range of measures, such as visa and travel bans, assets freeze, diplomatic boycotts and others, has been applied to identify and sanction corrupt individuals or organisations in the world. Obviously, the impact of these measures depends on the context and timing. But given Lebanon’s gradual collapse and even though not every measure will lead to the desired outcome, it is certainly relevant to apply some of them. This is especially so, since Lebanon’s elites are known to be quite transactional and obsessed with preserving whatever benefits they have access to. Moreover, the majority of these perpetrators continues to enjoy freedom of movement and owns real estate and business organisations in several EU countries, the US, Canada, Australia and other locations.
Women deploy a banner that reads in Arabic: “open wound”, during a demonstration by activists and relatives of the 2020 Beirut port blast victims, near the parliament building in the downtown district of the Lebanese capital. (AFP)
Most of the sanction regimes in these countries include, amongst other criteria, provisions to sanction individuals responsible for, or complicit in, gross violations of internationally-recognised human rights (such as obstructing justice in the port explosion case) or those responsible for, or complicit in, acts of corruption including bribery, misappropriation of private or public assets for personal gain or other acts of corruption.
When asked about why their countries continue a “business as usual” approach with Lebanon’s political and business elites, some Western diplomats mention the current power dynamics in the world and how impossible it is to get a UN Security Council resolution voted without being vetoed by one of the P5, or an EU resolution that requires unanimity among the 27 member states.
What these and others do not mention though is why their own governments continue to give agency to perpetrators, do not impose travel bans, diplomatic boycotts and other financial sanctions on Lebanese politicians and corrupt business elites, known to be quite mercantilist, as stipulated in their own national legislation. What else needs to happen before the international community recognises that even though Lebanon’s predicament is mostly self-inflicted, its approach to the country is absurd and that there is an absolute political and moral imperative to protect the Lebanese civilian population, through concrete action such as individual sanctions, from the acts of its own political and business elite?