The Lebanese government’s last-minute decision to delay the start of daylight saving time by a month until the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan resulted in mass confusion on Sunday.
With some institutions implementing the change while others refused, many Lebanese have found themselves in the position of juggling work and school schedules in different time zones — in a country that is just 88km at its widest point.
In some cases, the debate took on a sectarian nature, with many Christian politicians and institutions, including the small nation’s largest church, the Maronite Church, rejecting the move.
Photo: Reuters
The small Mediterranean nation normally sets its clocks forward an hour on the last Sunday in March, which aligns with most European nations, but on Thursday last week, the government announced a decision by Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati to push the start of daylight saving to April 21.
No reason was given for the decision, but a video of a meeting between Mikati and Lebansese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri leaked to local media showed Berri asking Mikati to postpone the implementation of daylight saving time to allow Muslims to break their Ramadan fast an hour earlier.
Mikati responds that he had made a similar proposal, but goes on to say that implementing the change would be difficult as it would cause problems in airline flight schedules, to which Berri replies: “What flights?”
After the postponement of daylight saving was announced, Lebanon’s state airline, Middle East Airlines, said the departure times of all flights scheduled to leave from Beirut airport between Sunday and April 21 would be advanced by an hour.
The nation’s telecoms messaged people asking them to change the settings of their clocks to manual instead of automatic so the time would not change at midnight, although in many cases the time advanced anyway.
While public institutions, in theory, are bound by the government’s decision, many private institutions, including TV stations, schools and businesses, announced that they would ignore the decision and move to daylight saving on Sunday as previously scheduled.
Even some public agencies refused to comply.
Lebanese Minister of Education and Higher Education Abbas Halabi in a statement on Sunday evening said that the decision was not legally valid because it had not been taken in a meeting of the Cabinet.
If the government meets and approves the decision, he wrote, “we will be the first to implement it,” but until then, “daylight saving time remains approved and applied in the educational sector.”
Soha Yazbek, a professor at the American University of Beirut, is among many parents who have found themselves and their children now bound to different schedules.
“So now I drop my kids to school at 8am, but arrive to my work 42km away at 7:30am and then I leave work at 5pm, but I arrive home an hour later at 7pm,” Yazbek wrote on Twitter, adding for the benefit of her non-Lebanese friends, “I have not gone mad, I just live in Wonderland.”
Haruka Naito, a Japanese non-governmental organization worker living in Beirut, discovered she had to be in two places at the same time yesterday morning.
“I had an 8am appointment and a 9am class, which will now happen at the same time,” she said.
The 8am appointment for her residency paperwork is with a government agency following the official time, while her 9am Arabic class is with an institute that is expected to make the switch to daylight saving.
The schism has led to jokes about “Muslim time” and “Christian time,” while different Internet search engines early on Sunday morning came up with different results when queried about the current time in Lebanon.
Many see the issue as a distraction from the nation’s larger economic and political problems.
Lebanon is in the midst of the worst financial crisis in its modern history. Three-quarters of the population lives in poverty and IMF officials have warned that the nation could be headed for hyperinflation if no action is taken.
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