Do Not Walk Out on Lebanon. We Still Have a Country To Rebuild Together | Opinion

We were alive. My parents and I stood staring at each other, shaking in a tight huddle. What just happened? Our family home was in wreckage.

We eventually had the courage to loosen our hold of each other's fleeting existence. It seemed we were safe, but far from sound.

I rushed to our balcony overlooking Beirut. All I could see was devastation. Streets filled with glass, fright, and panic. Ambulance sirens, car alarms, and screams interfolded in cacophonous confusion.

On Aug. 4, 2020, entire neighborhoods of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, were destroyed by 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate unsafely—but knowingly—stored in hangar 12 at the Beirut Port. Over 240 humans perished, with the final count possibly forever incomplete. More than 6,500 people were injured and 77,000 homes were razed or seriously damaged—an entire population with a lifetime of visible and invisible scars.

All of Beirut and Lebanon switched into crisis mode. We became one team of citizens and civil society organizations on a national mission. The international community watched us with stupefaction and stepped up announcing that Lebanon would not be abandoned.

Five days later, French President Emmanuel Macron hosted the international donor community to help Lebanon stand strong again. Citizens and civil society called for funding the people and warned about complicit funding that would re-empower the corrupt, and stitch back the country into a national Frankenstein—$298 million was pledged to Lebanon by the international community.

Five months later, the 3RF, the Recovery, Reform, and Reconstruction Framework was created to serve as a first-time globally innovative people-centered strategic investments coordination platform for international funding to Lebanon. For the first time in history, Lebanon had the chance of becoming the world's greatest success story on collaborative and community-based funding—a governance model that could inspire other global interventions for countries in crisis.

Finally, there was hope. And surely, the corrupt system that was overtly occupying our country was finally on the verge of crashing down, like so many of our homes and lives ... because how could it not?

Incredibly enough, the world's greatest non-nuclear explosion was not catastrophically monstruous enough to do so. And today, the Najib Mikati government, Lebanese Parliament, political pariah parties, and their financially and morally corrupted allies have never been on a clearer quest to continue criminally neglecting and destroying our country.

But what happened with the pledged funding following the blast? The almost $300 million pledges of solidarity never made it to Lebanon. Some pledges were recused. This is not the first time. Most donor pledges dedicated to CEDRE, a Paris-hosted international donor conference in 2018 for economic and reform development in Lebanon, have been reallocated out of Lebanon.

Why? Lebanon's ruling political forces have proven they are incapable of securing a credibility-building track record for the country. They demonstrated that the international community was right to become weary and anxious about funding.

Is it all the fault of the Lebanese government and political system?

Led by its three principals—the United Nations, World Bank, and the European Union—the 3RF includes local organizations in a consultative group with the Lebanese government as a key reform implementing actor. However, despite its spirit of shared power, action, and responsibility, the 3RF remains donor-led. Funding has shifted from being time-critical and straight to the people, to conditional funding based on slow-to-nothing reform progress.

Also, the 3F secretariat took more than two years to be fully funded and staffed by the principal. Its website took even longer to go public. It is still missing an impact and disbursement tracker that the principals are still promising will be published. Delays were especially due to bickering among the principals with disagreements on defining scope and roles, a weary sign that it would also become challenging to govern with clear governance.

On the website, the 3RF claims that the people-centered recovery is complete with a series of significant impact results. Some NGOs involved in the process do not agree with this position. Rather than be honest about how hard it has been to make ends meet, the website tells the story of a Lebanon that is investment and impact ready and happening. The people-centered recovery is far, far from over. For many, it has not yet even begun: No systemic reforms have been enacted by the Lebanese government for any structural recovery to kickstart.

Stakeholders, by pragmatic necessity, have had to shift from being a global-new-best-practice aspiration to a make-do-with-the-best-we-can-deliver approach. Some principals and funders are openly saying that this is not good enough for Lebanon.

What is painful is that in the last three years we have not learned to do better, because together, we could not harness a unique and historic international funding window to exercise or experience excellence. And so, Lebanon does not get to prove itself. Lebanon also does not get to give back to the world a much more grounded and ethical way of funding in the face of perpetual injustice.

There is a big difference between a failed system and a failed state. When it comes to Lebanon, we should not confuse both, but Lebanon needs an urgent reset. We cannot let our goodwill pledges disappear. Not only because the country is broke, but because we need funding to exit oppression, discover our own formula for nation-building, and reclaim a future worth living. This will require the goodwill and team spirit of our international friends more than ever before.

Lynn Zovighian is a philanthropist and co-founder of The Zovighian Partnership, working with communities facing humanitarian crises and genocide in the Middle East and South Caucasus.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.