FIRST PERSON BY MARC J. SIROIS
One of the only certainties regarding Sunday night's bloodshed in Beirut's southern suburbs is that Lebanon is infected with a culture of impunity, the economic, political and social equivalent of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. When HIV causes a patient to develop what is known as "full-blown" AIDS, his or her susceptibility to all manner of ailments - from cancer to pneumonia - is progressively worsened because the disease destroys the immune system's ability to respond. Even with treatment, AIDS is eventually fatal, but modern medicine has allowed many patients to survive a decade or more, lending hope that at least some of the people living with AIDS today might be around long enough to receive an eventual cure.
Lebanon's condition is so worrisome because while its case of impunity has yet to escalate into full-blown chaos, almost nothing is being done in terms of either controlling the virus or formulating a cure. Worse yet, those who gain from the prevalence of impunity have found a way to use Lebanon's other insidious affliction, sectarianism, to prevent useful treatment.
Both generally and specifically, Sunday's rioting exhibited all the hallmarks of societal illness. The immediate cause of the initial disturbances, for example, appears to have been popular exasperation at prolonged power cuts. According to some accounts, there are neighborhoods on the edge of Beirut that had no electricity for three entire days last week. People who live outside the capital have received even poorer service for years, but most of them have apparently given up hope: Protests took place in some of those areas as well on Sunday, but these were seen as side-effects of events in and around Beirut.
The perennial power shortages and their recent intensification are the product of Electricite du Liban (EDL), a failed public utility that has defied repeated attempts to improve it. Despite considerable investment under then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in the 1990s and official rates that rank with the highest in the region, EDL manages both to cost the Treasury hundreds of millions of dollars a year and to deprive its customers of reliable service.
The conventional wisdom is that EDL loses so much money because so many people tap into its distribution network and/or refuse to pay their bills. These problems have not been rectified, so the argument goes, because certain neighborhoods are so lawless that the company's meter-readers, inspectors and bill-collectors cannot even enter them, let alone impose their authority. These areas, we are told, are all impoverished and mostly Shiite.
When one digs a little deeper, though, one finds that while there are in fact many places where private citizens regularly steal electricity and get away with it, the real losses stem from impunity of a very different sort. One cause is EDL's own incomprehensible billing system, which is known to be capable of tabulating the same monthly charge for residences of equal size even if one of them happens to be occupied by a tenth as many people - or none at all. Another is the ability of some politicians and their cronies to simply ignore their bills. A third involves companies that land instant "discounts" on their bills, presumably by ensuring a "commission" for a "salesman" somewhere in EDL's labyrinthine bureaucracy. Almost never are such people named and shamed.
Of course, EDL has other problems, too. The company's newest generating equipment, for example, is designed to be gas-fired but is instead fed cheap fuel oil because attempts to secure a regular supply of gas have never succeeded. This is widely blamed on the Syrians, who are accused, during the period of their "tutelage" over Lebanon, of having prevented Hariri from lining up any sort of agreement that did not ensure them a cut of the proceeds. But powerful domestic interests were at work, too, namely the folks (well-connected in both Beirut and Damascus) who get rich from selling EDL its current fuel supplies - the use of which, by the by, is irreversibly shortening the lifespans of the generating facilities as I write.
Even when times are relatively good and EDL is meeting something like a respectable portion of demand, unscrupulous sorts still find a way to fleece the public by arranging for the lights to go out in some neighborhoods with just enough frequency to frighten residents into maintaining their subscriptions to private providers. Many of the victims of this subtle extortion know they are being taken for a ride, but since there is no way to punish the perpetrators, their only alternative is to shop every single day or risk having perishables spoil on a regular basis. In the short term, therefore, it is cheaper for them to be quiet and fork over their cash, demonstrating just how much a market will bear when it is distorted by what amounts to organized crime. In the long term, though, it is precisely the ability of the extortionists to avoid any consequences for raking in ill-gotten gains that gives them a vested interest in the status quo, an interest they will do much to protect.
The one thing that all these factors have in common is that no one is held to account except for consumers, many of whom are now complaining that they have to pay two power bills: one to EDL and another to the operator of a local generator. Most of them, however, forget the third bill, the one that is paid out of their taxes to make up for EDL's staggering annual losses.
For the powers that be, serving the public interest by taking on these problems would involve inconveniencing their friends and supporters, and, in some cases, giving up their own illegitimate privileges. Also, there would likely be both administrative and physical sabotage aimed at derailing reform, undermining their electoral prospects. Rather than opening Pandora's box, it is simpler to do nothing and let the poor take the blame for their own predicament.
The cluster-fiasco at EDL is but a single example, although admittedly a very large one, of the long list of self-sustaining injustices that confront most of the Lebanese public every hour of every day. Throw in a 14-month political power struggle with a strong sectarian component, and what happened on Sunday was all but inevitable.
Sorting out responsibility for the loss of life that occurred will be an important test for the authorities, one they have failed repeatedly in the past. Predictably, irresponsible politicians on both sides have already blamed one another and/or their respective foreign backers before knowing much about the facts. This sets up a new quandary: If justice is not seen to be done, revenge killings like those stemming from last January's riots are a very strong possibility; and even if an investigation results in charges and convictions, one or both camps will question the credibility of the verdict.
Herein lies the pernicious quality that makes impunity so dangerous and so resistant to the political medicines required. It would take years of radically improved governance to rebuild the trust of the public and its various communities in the state and in one another - and thus far the treatment has yet to begin.
Marc J. Sirois is managing editor of THE DAILY STAR.
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