Shock Doctrine: Klein Discusses Hezbollah

Some Insight into Hariri Assassination?

It is too bad that Naomi Klein is so circumspect with regard to Israeli issues when she is so willing to reject US common wisdom about Lebanon.

From The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, pp 489-492:

A striking example of growing resistance [to Friedmanite Neoliberal shock therapy] is the response of millions of Lebanese to attempts by international lenders to impose free-market "reforms" as a condition of reconstruction aid after the Israeli attacks in 2006. By all rights, that scheme should have worked: the country could not have been more desperate for funds. Even before the war, Lebanon had one of the heaviest debts in the world, while the new losses from attacks on roads, bridges and airport runways were estimated at $9 billion. So when delegates from thirty wealthy nations got together in Paris in January 2007 to pledge $7.6 billion in reconstruction loans and grants, they naturally assumed that Lebanon's government would accept whatever strings they attached to the aid. The conditions were the usual ones: phone and electricity privatizations, price increases on fuel, cuts to the public service and an increase to an already controversial tax on consumer purchases. Kamal Hamdan, a Lebanese economist, estimated that, as a result, "household bills [would] increase by 15 percent because of increased taxes and adjusted prices" -- a classic peace penalty. As for the reconstruction itself, the jobs would of course go to the giants of disaster capitalism, with no requirement to hire or subcontract locally.

The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was questioned about whether such sweeping demands constituted foreign interference in Lebanon's affairs. She replied, "Lebanon is a democracy. That said, Lebanon is also undertaking some important economic reforms that are critical to making any of this work." Fouad Siniora, Lebanon's prime minister, backed by the West, easily agreed to the terms, shrugging and saying that "Lebanon did not invent privatization." Further demonstrating his willingness to play ball, he hired the Bush-connected surveillance giant Booz Allen Hamilton to broker Lebanon's telecom privatization.

Many Lebanese citizens, however, were distinctly less cooperative. Despite the fact that a lot of their homes still lay in ruins, thousands participated in a general strike, organized by a coalition of unions and political parties, including the Islamist party Hezbollah. The demonstrators insisted that if receiving reconstruction funds meant raising the cost of living for a war-ravaged people, it hardly deserved to be called aid. So while Siniora was reassuring donors in Paris, strikes and road blockades brought the country to a halt -- the first national revolt specifically targeting postwar disaster capitalism. Demonstrators also staged a sit-in, which went on for two months, turning downtown Beirut into a cross between a tent city and a street carnival. Most reporters characterized these events as shows of strength by Hezbollah, but Mohamad Bazzi, the Middle East bureau chief for New York's Newsday, said that this interpretation missed their true significance: "The biggest motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn't Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It's the economic inequality that has haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It's a poor and working-class people's revolt."

The location of the sit-in provided the most eloquent explanation for why Lebanon was proving so shock resistant. The protest was in the part of downtown Beirut that residents refer to as Solidere, after the private development company that built and owns almost everything in its confines. Solidere is the result of Lebanon's last reconstruction effort. In the early nineties, after the fifteen-year civil war, the country was shattered and the state was in debt, with no money to rebuild. The billionaire businessman (and later prime minister) Rafiq Hariri made a proposal: give him the land rights to the entire downtown core and let him and his new real estate company, Solidere, turn it into the "Singapore of the Middle East." Hariri, who was killed in a care bombing in February 2005, bulldozed almost all the standing structures, turning the city into a blank slate. Marinas, luxurious condominiums (some with elevators for limousines) and lavish shopping malls replaced the ancient souks. Almost everything the business district -- buildings, plazas, security forces -- is owned by Solidere.

To the outside world, Solidere was the shining symbol of Lebanon's post-war rebirth, but for many Lebanese it had always been a kind of holograph. Outside the ultramodern downtown core, much of Beirut lacked basis infrastructure, from electricity to public transit, and the bullet holes inflicted during the civil war were never repaired on the facades of many buildings. It was in those neglected slums surrounding the gleaming center that Hezbollah built its loyal base, rigging up generators and transmitters, organizing trash removal, providing security -- becoming the vilified "state within a state." When the residents of the run-down suburbs ventured into the Solidere enclave, they were often thrown out by Hariri's private security guards; their presence frightened the tourists.

Raida Hatoum, a social justice activist in Beirut, told me that when Solidere began its reconstruction, "people were so happy the war was over and the streets were being rebuild. By the time we became aware that the streets had been sold, that they were privately owned, it was too late. We didn't know that the money was a loan and we'd have to pay it back later." That rude awakening of finding out that the least advantaged people had been stuck with the bill for a makeover that benefited only a small elite has made the Lebanese experts in the mechanics of disaster capitalism. It is this experience that helped keep the country oriented and organized after the 2006 war. By choosing to hold their mass sit-in inside the Solidere bubble, with Palestinian refugees camped outside the Virgin megastore and high-end latte joints ("If I ate a sandwich here, I'd be broke for a week," one protester remarked), the demonstrators were sending a clear message. They did not want another reconstruction of Solidere-style bubbles and rotting suburbs -- of fortressed green zones and raging red zones -- but a reconstruction for the entire country. "How can we still accept this government that steals?" one demonstrator asked. "This government that built this downtown and accumulated this huge debt? Who's going to pay for it? I have to pay for it, and my son is going to pay for it after me."

Lebanon's shock resistance went beyond protest. It was also expressed through a far-reaching parallel reconstruction effort. Within days of the cease-fire, Hezbollah's neighborhood committees had visited many of the homes hit by the air attacks, assessed the damage and were already handing out $12,000 in cash to displace families to cover a year's worth of rent and furnishings. As the independent journalists Ana Nogueira and Saseen Kawzally observed from Beirut, "That is six times the dollar amount that survivors of Hurricane Katrina received from FEMA." And in what would have been music to the ears of Katrina survivors, the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, promised the country in a televised address, "You won't need to ask a favor of anyone, queue up anywhere." Hezbollah's version of aid did not filter through the government or foreign NGOs. It did not go to build five-star hotels, as in Kabul or Olympic swimming pools for police trainers, as in Iraq. Instead, Hezbollah did what Renuka, the Sri Lankan tsunami survivor, told me she wished someone would do for her family: put the help in their hands. Hezbollah also included community members in the reconstruction -- it hired local construction crews (working in exchange for the scrap metal they collected), mobilized fifteen hundred engineers and organized teams of volunteers. All that help meant that a week after the bombing stopped, the reconstruction was already well under way.

In the U.S. press, these initiatives were almost universally derided as bribery or clientelism -- Hezbollah's attempt to purchase popular support after it had provoked the attack from which the country was reeling (David Frum even suggested that the bills Hezbollah was handing out were counterfeit). There is no question that Hezbollah is engaged in politics as well as charity, and that Iranian funds made Hezbollah's generosity possible. Equally important to its efficiency, however, was Hezbollah's status as a local, indigenous organization, one that rose up from the neighborhoods being rebuilt. Unlike the alien corporate reconstruction agencies imposing their designs from far-off bureaucracies via imported management, private security and translators, Hezbollah could act fast because it knew every back alley and every jury-rigged transmitter, as well as who could be trusted to get the work done. If the residents of Lebanon were grateful for the results, it was because they knew the alternative. The alternative was Solidere.

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