The powerful Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah on Tuesday threw its weight behind mass protests calling for the Lebanese government’s resignation, deepening a crisis that started over piles of uncollected garbage in the streets of the capital, but has tapped into a much deeper malaise.
The explosion of anger targets the endemic corruption, hapless government and sectarian divisions of a brittle country once torn by civil war and now struggling with a wave of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.
A grassroots youth movement calling itself “You Stink” mobilized thousands of people in two rallies over the weekend, and has called for another large protest on Saturday.
Photo: AP
The Hezbollah announcement of support for the protests is likely to fuel concerns that the Iranian-backed group will try to hijack a rare, non-political movement for its own gain.
Hezbollah ministers and their allies on Tuesday walked out of a Cabinet meeting meant to discuss the worsening garbage crisis.
Lebanese Prime Minister Tammam Salam called the emergency session after the weekend clashes between security forces and demonstrators protesting corruption and poor public services.
The six ministers withdrew four hours into the meeting. Lebanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Gibran Bassil, whose Free Patriotic Movement is aligned with Hezbollah, said he was pulling out because of the political “theater” surrounding the trash issue.
During the Cabinet session, ministers unanimously rejected the winning bidders to manage Beirut’s trash collection, citing high costs and a bidding procedure some said was questionable. The Cabinet tasked a ministerial committee with restarting the bidding, meaning no imminent solution to the crisis was likely.
Salam suggested dumping the garbage in the remote, impoverished region of Akkar, which has been neglected for decades, in exchange for US$100 million in development projects as an incentive.
That statement further riled the protesters.
“Akkar is not a garbage dump!” read the slogan on one protester’s T-shirt.
The trash crisis has exacerbated the long-existing fault lines in Lebanon that in recent years have pitted the Iranian-backed Hezbollah against the country’s Western-aligned, pro-Saudi camp. Those divisions mirror the larger regional Shiite-Sunni divide and have long paralyzed the government.
Hezbollah said in a statement that the garbage crisis reflected the “endemic and accumulated corruption of the past two decades” and policies that only serve “personal and political interests at the expense of citizens.”
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