Lebanon’s Deadlock Fuels Seventh Street Protests

Date: 08 March 2021 - 21:58

News ID: ۸۸۳۵۷

BEIRUT (Dispatches) – Demonstrators continued to burn tires to block main roads all over Lebanon for the seventh straight day on Monday in anger at more than a year of economic crisis and six months of political paralysis.
Protests at the start of Lebanon’s financial crisis in 2019 brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets.
On Monday, three main roads leading south into the capital from Zouk, Jal al-Dib and al-Dawra were blocked while, in Beirut itself, protesters blocked a main road in front of the central bank.
"We’ve closed off all the roads today to tell everyone: It’s over, we have nothing left to lose. We’ve even lost our dignity,” said Pascale Nohra, a protester blocking the northern road into Beirut.
She said it was time to revive the mass protests of late 2019 against the political class.
"We want everybody to show solidarity and come out on the street to demand their rights,” said the former worker in real estate.
"We need to return to the streets and revive our revolution,” she said.
Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost in the crisis and bank accounts have been frozen.
After an explosion devastated whole tracts of Beirut in August, the next government resigned.
But the new prime minister-designate, Saad al-Hariri, is at loggerheads with President Michel Aoun and has been unable to form a new government to carry out the reforms that would unlock billions of dollars of international aid.
Since the Lebanese pound tumbled to a new low last Tuesday, protesters have been blocking roads daily.
On Saturday, caretaker prime minister Hassan Diab threatened to quit to raise the pressure on those blocking the formation of a new government.
Meanwhile, the Attorney General Judge Ghassan Oweidat directed the Lebanese security services, including the Military Intelligence, the Internal Security Forces, the General Security, the State Security and the customs officials, to pursue money-changers who tamper with the national currency and are involved in illicit foreign currency speculation.
This move is an attempt to dampen the widespread indignation that has continued for six days and intensified in street protests, which broke out after the dollar exchange rate hit 11,000 Lebanese pounds.