From some angles, Beirut looks the same. Every morning, from dawn, the long, curved promenade along the Mediterranean known as the Corniche is crowded with people taking their daily exercise. Men desperately hoping to cancel out years of lavish Lebanese lunches sweat along at a fast walk. Younger guys sprint past them topless, displaying proud abs and tattoos. Appearance matters in Lebanon, a lot. Some noisily whack shuttlecocks at each other with wooden bats, as hard as physics will allow. The Corniche is unusual for the Middle East as a lot of women exercise there too. Some wear athletic versions of hijab. Others have the latest lycra from Lululemon. Nothing compares in any other Arab capital. In the evenings families treat the Corniche as a cross between a public park or a back garden. Children charge around and their parents set up folding chairs, picnic tables, charcoal for shisha and small camping stoves to make tea.
It could be a perfect advertisement for a long-held self-image of many Lebanese, who are proud that the peoples of their diverse country found a way to live alongside each other after a civil war that killed at least 90,000 people. (You would have to multiply by about 20 to get a British equivalent today, since Lebanon’s population in the 1970s and 1980s was less than three million.) But everyone I spoke to in Lebanon was deeply depressed about the future. Look a bit closer on the Corniche and the results of a thousand different failures of the state are showing. Murky brown water discharges into the sea; the idea that the government could regulate the sewers is laughable. Schools of small sardines called bizri congregate near the ooze from the outfalls. Men stand shoulder to shoulder to catch them, taking home buckets full. Some fish with a new urgency. It isn’t a hobby any more. It’s putting food on the table. Inflation and the collapse of the Lebanese pound have destroyed incomes, and made basic food and groceries a major expense. The United Nations estimates that 55 per cent of the population live in poverty; almost twice as many people as last year.
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