BEIRUT (Dispatches) – Caretaker Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab appealed on Tuesday to the international community to help his country avert an imminent disaster, saying any instability in Lebanon would affect the stability of the whole region, National News Agency reported.
At a meeting with heads of diplomatic missions in Beirut, Diab said, “I call on the world to save Lebanon, and I appeal to brothers and friends to stand by the Lebanese people.”
Lebanon’s stability is necessary for the stability of the whole region as the country hosts around 1.5 million Syrian refugees and thousands of Palestinian refugees, the prime minister noted.
Diab urged the international community to help Lebanon even before the implementation of any reform measures as leaders are still struggling to form a government and the country cannot bear further delays.
Diab has been serving in a caretaker capacity since resigning in the wake of the catastrophic Beirut port explosion last August. Since then, Lebanese political groups have failed to resolve their differences and form a government.
The World Bank has called Lebanon’s crisis one of the worst depressions of modern history.
The double blow of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Beirut port explosion has made the difficult situation even worse in the country.
Diab said only a new cabinet could resume talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a bid to find a way out of the current economic crisis.
“This government does not have the right to resume negotiations with the IMF to implement the recovery plan set by the cabinet, for this entails obligations on the next government that it may not endorse,” he told the foreign envoys.
Last month, the secretary-general of the Hezbollah resistance movement, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said the only way out of Lebanon’s financial crisis was the formation of a viable cabinet.
“The only realistic thing for the Lebanese today is that the prime minister-designate, in cooperation with the president, forms a government,” he said.
Nasrallah had earlier warned against attempts by certain groups to foment a civil war in the cash-strapped country on economic, racial, and religious grounds, emphasizing that Hezbollah will not allow anyone to realize such a fiendish plot.