Anger, long suppressed, explodes. Five punching actions were carried out by depositors on Friday, September 16, against banks in Beirut and other Lebanese localities. Armed with a dummy weapon, a real revolver or a shotgun, each of these customers burst into their bank branch to claim their own money.
This series of robberies is a bad omen for the political and financial leaders who are betting, in order to get out of the game of the extremely serious crisis in Lebanon, on the prostration of an exhausted population and worried about generalized chaos.
The profile of the five men, whose adventures held the country in suspense, is varied: taxi driver, shopkeeper, policeman… Two days earlier, two similar attacks occurred. During one of them, an interior designer, Sali Hafez, obtained several thousand dollars, intended for the care of her sister, sick with cancer. The images of the activist have gone around the Web.
Activists admitted to having coordinated the operation with the young woman. But no one claimed the planning of the robberies on Friday. One of these confrontations failed: in Beirut, Abed Soubra, a debt-ridden trader, emerged penniless from the bank branch after long hours. He was stopped.
Several local dailies see in these radical gestures the beginning of a ” revolution ” depositors against banks. Since the fall of 2019, when Lebanon’s bankruptcy was revealed in broad daylight, financial institutions have multiplied, without any legal framework, draconian restrictions against their ordinary customers. The latter have only a dropper access to their savings, the value of which has collapsed.
“The risk of slippage exists”
Verbal disputes between savers and bank employees have become regular. But until the recent robberies, only two Lebanese had taken the employees hostage, with a weapon and a can of gasoline, to demand their funds: one because he was in debt, the other to treat his father.
The country’s banks barricade themselves behind metal panels. On Friday, they denounced “repeated attacks” and announced, in response, their closure for three days. Some have warned their customers that they will now have to make an appointment to access the counters.
Does the series of robberies usher in a new, more violent era? “The risk of slippage existsconsiders Fouad Debs, lawyer and co-founder of the Union of Depositors, an association which defends complainants against banks. This is the result of the economic and social violence to which the Lebanese have been subjected for three years by the politico-financial oligarchy. »
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