Lebanon is going through a situation that has led its citizens to use toy guns to get their money out of the bank. Unofficial controls prevent money from moving, denying access to savings and foreign exchange. The country is going through a very complicated position where citizens cannot cover basic needs.
Lebanon is in a crisis that the World Bank (WB) has described as one of the worst since the 19th century. A World Bank report accused the country’s authorities of operating under a huge Ponzi scheme – a kind of pyramid scheme – that has caused “unprecedented social and economic pain.” The report stated that public finances were used to capture state resources for political patronage, leading the country into a “deliberate” depression. It added that an important part of the population’s savings had been “misused and misspent in last 30 years”.
On September 19, a delegation from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will arrive in Beirut to discuss the delays in the agreed reforms. Its implementation would make possible a loan of 3,000 million dollars. The measures range from an externally assisted assessment of each of the largest lenders to an audit of the central bank and the lifting of bank secrecy laws.
From savers to bandits
This situation is leading the population to pick up a toy gun to try to recover part of their savings. This is what Sali Hafiz did to recover the money she needed for her sister’s cancer treatment. “People are committing suicide,” this woman alleged on local television and sent a message to the rest of the population: “don’t take the gun and shoot yourself. Go get your money, even if it costs your life.” She thus managed to withdraw $13,000 from her account, when cash withdrawals are limited to $400 a month.
This woman is not the first person who decides to take the law into her own hands and recover part of her money. In the last week the cases have skyrocketed. This Friday at least five people have taken her example, and have robbed banks with rifles, replica weapons and pellet guns. “People are increasingly desperate, with fewer avenues of access to justice: they cannot go to the judiciary, since the judges are on indefinite strike -for salaries-, and they cannot go to the security forces that are bought by our banks and our politicians,” said Fouad Debs, co-founder of the Depositors’ Union, a group of lawyers and activists lobbying for depositors’ rights.
Faced with this wave of violence, the Lebanese Banking Association has called a three-day strike, starting on the 19th, to protest “repeated attacks on banks” and their employees, they said in a statement.
The delicate situation of the Lebanese economy has led the country to lose 90% of the market value of its currency and three quarters of its population to poverty.
Marwan Kheireddine, president of the Al-Mawarid Bank, blames the situation squarely on the Lebanese government, complaining that “anyone who walks into a bank in Lebanon and seizes the funds the way these people did is jumping the line, disregarding other depositors. In my opinion, that’s not fair.”
Lawyer Debs laments that “this is the only country in the world where you have to threaten a bank with guns to get your own money. As (Hafiz) said: people have nothing to lose.”
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