The day of the storming of Lebanon's banks... Chaos, warnings and anxiety about what's to come

Beirut

Lebanon has entered a new turning point in the crisis of depositors with banks, entitled "Attempt to recover deposits by force."

Observers fear the escalation of incidents in banks and weapons threats to a state that threatens more chaos, with the political elections racing with no prospect of a solution.

Today, Friday, witnessed a wave of storming of bank branches in different regions, carried out by a number of depositors, some of them armed, demanding to recover their money in dollars, and some took hostages of bank employees, and others poured gasoline, threatening to burn.

Lebanese depositors complain that they cannot recover their deposits (Reuters)

Continuous day events

The beginning was with the Lebanese depositor, Muhammad Korkmaz, who entered in the morning with his son to a branch of the Byblos Bank in southern Lebanon. He was carrying a plastic pistol, threatening to burn himself, until he recovered 19,200 dollars, then turned himself in to the security authorities.

Byblos Bank described the incident as an "armed robbery and the theft of a sum of money by force and by force of arms", while the depositor had popular support, and many denounced the accusation of those who recover his money of theft.

And the "contagion" moved to the movement of other depositors carrying their individual weapons, and at least 7 banks were stormed, their courtyards turned into yards guarded by security forces as a result of the influx of hundreds of angry citizens, who are demanding the recovery of their money seized by illegal procedures since the fall of 2019.

The Bank of Lebanon and the Gulf in the Ramlet al-Bayda area witnessed an armed intrusion into one of the depositors, as was the Bank of Lebanon and the Diaspora on the Jdeideh Road, which was stormed by an armed depositor demanding the recovery of even part of his money amounting to 300 thousand dollars.

The Association of Depositors reported that the branch of the Mediterranean Bank had been stormed in the Chehim area. Depositors also stormed the branches of SGBL Bank in Nabatieh, in addition to other banks.

These events recur two days after the Lebanese woman, Sally Khalaf, managed to recover about 13,000 dollars from her deposit to treat her sister, who suffers from cancer, from the branch of the BLOM Bank in the Sodeco area in Beirut.

The scene of her brandishing a weapon (before it turned out to be plastic) received widespread solidarity after she expressed her screams and anger about the pain of thousands of people deprived of getting their money back.

Before that, and in mid-August, the Lebanese depositor, Bassam Sheikh Hussein, managed by force of arms at the “Federal Bank” branch in Beirut to recover about $35,000 from his deposit for the treatment of his father.

Last January, one of the depositors detained bank employees in the Bekaa Valley and recovered his $50,000 deposit.

official blunder

While the ruling elite is unable to find just and equitable solutions for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, Arab and foreign bank depositors, the Association of Lebanese Banks announced the closure for a period of 3 days, starting next Monday, while the Lebanese Depositors Association called on the “Lebanese Army to protect depositors in front of bank branches. ".

For his part, Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi warned - after an emergency meeting of the Central Internal Security Council - against continuing to storm the banks, and said, "We have taken the necessary judicial steps, and on Monday the Discriminatory Public Prosecutor will issue a decision about the bank storming."

"We protect stability, not banks," he added.

Al-Jazeera Net data indicate that the holiday on Saturday and Sunday in Lebanon will witness high-level security, political and banking meetings, to discuss a mechanism to remedy security developments in front of banks, amid fears of their expansion and out of control.

These events constitute a concern for Lebanese political officials, who are accused by citizens of continuing their historical protection of banks and the Governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon, Riad Salameh, who is being pursued by lawsuits inside and outside.

Liabilities from banks in foreign currencies in the banking system amount to about 114 billion dollars, and in exchange for them there are about 35 billion dollars as liquidable investments, which means that more than 85 billion dollars do not exist, and a large part of it was transferred abroad prior to the outbreak of the banking crisis in 2019.

Lebanon is experiencing security turmoil, one of which is the storming of banks (Reuters)

Meanings and implications

The security turmoil in Lebanon’s banks is accompanied by the collapse of the lira in a way that it did not know throughout the crisis, as the dollar’s ​​exchange rate finally jumped for the first time to more than 38,000 pounds, which exacerbates inflation, raises commodity price indicators, deepens the class gap, and automatically affects the value of deposits. Which banks impose to withdraw in pounds according to an exchange rate that does not correspond to a quarter of its actual value.

The researcher and economic expert Mounir Younes notes that depositors’ anger intensified after the announcement of the government’s “financial recovery plan,” which, in his opinion, overthrows the rights of depositors by writing off some of them and another “lira” (converting deposits from dollars to pounds), or granting shares to depositors in banks. , "They realize that most of them are bankrupt judgment."

Younis tells Al Jazeera Net that depositors are in a state of shock, after it was found that about 80% of deposits will not be able to recover them or official solutions, "but they are twisted solutions at the expense of depositors and a continuous process of buying time."

Younes holds the Najib Mikati government - with its financial plan - responsible for the situation reaching this security stage.

He adds, "The bitter truth is that the liquidity that the Central Bank has with commercial banks and correspondence abroad implicitly, is not equal to 2% of depositors' liabilities."

For her part, Professor of Sociology at the Lebanese University, Adiba Hamdan, believes that what the banks are witnessing is not surprising, "after Lebanon has turned into a forest in which angry individuals seek to take their right into their own hands because the law is unable to protect them by recovering this right whatever."

Hamdan regrets that the phenomenon of militants appears on the Lebanese scene, "which brings us back to the days of the civil war, albeit in a different context, where intimidation, threats and threats in the conflict between the parties were the master of the situation."

In her description of the scene, the university professor says that these depositors ostensibly extract their rights by force of arms, and rely on popular sympathy and support on social media platforms, but in depth they are methods that violate the law and threaten the safety and security of citizens.

Financial and moral bankruptcy

And she considers that material bankruptcy has been added to moral bankruptcy, "which leads individuals to act violently against their injustice after despairing of the possibility of achieving justice and restoring their stolen rights."

However, she believes that Lebanon is still facing individual cases of violence, compared to tens of thousands of depositors who have not yet dared to violate laws and customs in this way.

What warrants concern, in her opinion, is the subsequent jump from the state of individual evasion to the level of evasion of forces, to become an organized chaos exploited by political, security and sectarian parties.

In the general scene, writer and political analyst Amin Qamouriya links what the banks are witnessing to the dangerous repercussions of the blockage of the horizon of political solutions, starting with obstructing the file demarcation of the border between Lebanon and Israel, passing through the failure to form a new government since the elections last May, to anticipating the presidential vacuum phase after the end of the presidential vacuum. President Michel Aoun's term of office on October 31, and the subsequent struggle over the manner and legitimacy of governing, in the presence of a resigned government.

While the outside is preoccupied with its affairs amid the absence of signs of progress in the Lebanese file regionally and internationally, Qammouria expects - in his speech to Al Jazeera Net - that the coming weeks, with the entry of the presidential vacuum, will witness many turmoil and crises, and that the “battle” of depositors with banks will be one of its aspects.

He describes the current Lebanese model as hybrid and unique in the world, "as it is a mixture of the Venezuelan model at the level of economic and financial collapse, the Somali model in terms of the disintegration of state institutions, and the Iraqi model in terms of security and political chaos and the struggle of governance and corruption."

The political analyst fears that political parties "stalking evil in Lebanon for their gains and position in power" will infiltrate depositors' movements, considering that whether exceptional security reinforcements are imposed in front of banks to the point of "militarizing" them, or banks are closed to people, this will have serious repercussions, popularly, economically and politically.