For the last two months, Lebanon has endured a slew of bank robberies. What’s unusual is they’re not headed by hardened criminals trying to make a quick buck, but rather by ordinary people trying to obtain their savings to pay for things such as their medical bills.
On Aug. 12, a man walked into a bank with a gun demanding the money he held. His brother wanted to get $5,500 (8,343,500 in Lebanon currency) to pay for hospital bills for his family. However, strict limits on what people could take out of banks left him unable to find legal means to obtain his money. Eventually, he and the negotiators agreed to withdraw some of his savings and he was escorted away, cheered on by bystanders as he left. This was not an isolated incident, there was a similar attempt last January, and another woman did the same on Sept. 14 with a toy gun.
In response to the event, Dr. Maha Foster, DU’s Professor of Arabic said, “while her act was totally justified and begs the question whether or not it can be considered robbery [it was her own money after all!], it did incite other people to rob banks and this time with real guns that can take innocent people out. This is just a reflection of how bad Lebanon has fallen. I consider myself lucky to have grown up in Lebanon when I did and it hurts to see the deterioration that has taken place in the last several years that led to the bankruptcy of the country and the bankruptcy of the Lebanese who have to pay for the corruption of their ‘leaders.’”
The current Lebanese economic crisis has its roots in how the economy was built off of precarious financial engineering. Following the Lebanese Civil War in 1997, the Lebanese pound was pegged to the US dollar to avoid being heavily devalued. The issue with this system is that the economy needed high amounts of imported dollars to keep the exchange rate stable, propping the pound’s value up. Financial engineering with Eurobonds managed to keep the economy stable despite growing debts, but after nearly twenty years, it all came toppling down. Banks started restricting people’s ability to take out their currency in dollars and the black market exchange rate to the dollar continued to fall lower and lower.
Protests broke out against the government’s corruption and economic mismanagement. Finally, on March 9, 2020, Lebanon defaulted on its debts, making it harder to withdraw to the Lebanese pound with banks restricting the only options Lebanon’s people had left. The country has been in a constant state of crisis ever since, from the Beirut port explosion in late 2020 to the constant failures of the government to restructure the debt and put Lebanon on the path to recovery. This string of bank robberies is only the latest symptom.
