May 14, 2022
Garbage, blasted glass, and the women cleaning up political filth in Lebanon
This news has been received from: CNN
All trademarks, copyrights, videos, photos and logos are owned by respective news sources. News stories, videos and live streams are from trusted sources.
Contact Newsletter-online.com: [NewsMag]
(CNN)In 2015, I spent the summer protesting and getting tear-gassed. I wasn't protesting for anything grand. I was one of hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to demand an end to the garbage crisis.
We are obsessed with cleaning our homes in Lebanon. I think it is inter-generational, inherited from decades of war and conflict, and exacerbated by the fact that our country is so dirty. We live in one of the most polluted places in the region, with virtually zero public services. Not that our protests against the government's failure to effectively provide garbage collection changed much -- trash has been piling up ever since. Just this week the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights published a report essentially stating that Lebanon's current misery was avoidable. Lebanon is in the grip of one of the worst economic collapses of the century and is still reeling from the 2020 Beirut explosion, the world's largest non-nuclear blast. And this man-made disaster we find ourselves in, said the UN report, has "deep roots in a venal political system plagued with conflicts of interest."Because women suffer the most it also makes sense that we played a leading role in the 2019 so-called October Revolution that tried to bring about meaningful change.
Carmen Geha
The protests came as the country stood at a political crossroads. Demonstrators railed against corruption and demanded accountability from politicians who had deprived us of basic services for three decades. We called for the right to be recognized as citizens — not subjects to warlords who kept us captive as women under religious laws. The protests were also intersectional, showing solidarity with underprivileged women, and in doing so demanded the implementation of Lebanon's constitution that had been trampled on by the warlords.Indeed, Lebanese women have been at the forefront of every attempt to overhaul the policies and practices that discriminate against us. We shut down the university and joined our students — the streets became the classroom for weeks and months. Loyalists and thugs of political parties beat us up and called us traitors, police forces shot bullets and detained many of us. But the protests created and revived hope. We held hands from north to south in a human chain, we cleaned the streets, we resisted oppression and we chanted for unity.In the last election in 2018, one woman who ran as an independent won a seat in parliament. In her short tenure of two years, before she resigned in protest against the Beirut explosion, Paula Yacoubian worked on more draft laws than most men ever did in decades of sitting in parliament. After the 2022 elections, we will see new women enter parliament and they, too, will be pioneers and leaders in legislation. But numbers can be misleading. Looking only at the numbers of women renders us as tokens to be celebrated. The state too has its women and they are as sectarian and patriarchal as the men.Sign up for CNN Opinion's newsletter.
Join us on Twitter and Facebook
We must not celebrate the ones who made it to the top without fixing the way up and making the system open to all women. Our approach should be to care for the ones who couldn't make it, the women who died, the women who lost the roof over their heads, the non-gender conforming, the poor, the marginalized, and the women who were forcefully displaced. These women were and will remain the crushing majority in Lebanon, before and after this election. To them we must dedicate our attention and focus on bringing accountability to the men, the warlords, who destroyed their lives.Lebanon's problems are severe but not unique. Womens' inclusion in public life and dignified work are both prerequisites of freedom and wellbeing everywhere.News Source: CNN
Tags: parliamentary lebanon’s political system beirut explosion suffer the most women have been solidarity women have been number of women more women more women corruption as the country the women after the war in parliament and the women the women the protests the ones the protests women suffer women were human rights to break against the numbers the streets who made it
Pensioner in his 70s fighting for his life being attacked near famous London hotel, as suspect held by copsNext News:
Lebanon receives Interpol notice for auto tycoon Ghosn
BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanon received from Interpol a wanted notice for disgraced auto tycoon Carlos Ghosn on Thursday, four weeks after French prosecutors issued an international arrest warrant for him, Lebanese judicial officials said.
The officials did not give further details about the Interpol-issued Red Notice, which is a non-binding request to law enforcement agencies worldwide that they locate and provisionally arrest a fugitive. A Red Notice is not an arrest warrant and does not require Lebanon to arrest Ghosn.
It is the second Red Notice that Lebanon has received in the case, as the first was issued in January 2020, a few days after Ghosn fled Japan for Lebanon in a gripping escape.
The judicial officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said the notice was received Thursday by the prosecutor’s office in Beirut.
The new Red Notice came after the French prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Nanterre said last month that it issued the warrant for the former head of Nissan and Renault and four other people based on an investigation opened in 2019 into money laundering and abuse of company assets.
Prosecutors are investigating millions of dollars in alleged suspect payments made between the Renault-Nissan alliance and Suhail Bahwan Automobiles (SBA), a vehicle distributor company in Oman.
The former head of the Nissan-Renault alliance fled to Lebanon in 2019, while out on bail facing financial misconduct charges in Japan. He denies wrongdoing.
Ghosn noted last month after the arrest warrant was issued that he’s barred from leaving Lebanon anyway.
Lebanon does not extradite its citizens. Ghosn has citizenship in Lebanon, France and Brazil.
Copyright © 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.