Poor Akkar

I don’t plan to follow slavishly current Lebanese politics on this blog, especially since the outcomes are often endless reformulations of “no victor, no vanquished” before another round of political escalation or outbreak of fighting occurs. However, I have been doing a bit of reading on Akkar of late, especially as it has gained interest from development NGO organizations as a type of “new South” in terms of poverty and social marginalization from the rest of Lebanese society.

The story of Akkar, a governorate located in the far north of Lebanon, is one told by many of the peripheral areas of Lebanon, where development and public infrastructure investment was historically limited to Beirut and its surrounding environs with few funds reaching the South, the Bekaa, Baalbek-Hermel region, or Akkar. However, while the Shia, first under the leadership of Musa al-Sadr, and later Hezbollah, politically awakened and benefited from Hezbollah’s well-organized and generously Iranian-funded social services (along with increased Western aid in the form of UNIFIL projects and other NGOs), the Sunni-dominated Akkar region never sprouted their own self-help services, and governmental neglect continues to this day.

This article makes clear there are individual donors and a smattering of NGOs in Akkar, but these efforts are often directly connected to the endemic patron-client politics of Lebanon and nonetheless are too haphazard and limited to attack the poverty of the region in any structural way. Sadly, while there has been a recent flood of studies flowing from the UN and other aid organizations (see this recent one from the NGO Mada for example), the current political situation makes it unlikely the government will be undertaking massive efforts to build and expand public infrastructure, improve the dismal schooling conditions, and establish micro-lending programs to fisherman and farmers who were in some cases devastated by the back-to-back 2006 July War and the more damaging Nahr Al-Bard conflict in the summer of 2007.

For the amount of money involved, it seems short-sighted that the American government doesn’t step into the breach and put more thought into heavy investments in these types of areas. Where else could they invest in an area that would gladly welcome the aid, greatly assist in shoring up support from perhaps the only pro-American Sunni Arab population (and just barely so), and further foreign-policy goals by helping the pro-American ruling Lebanese government in winning over a politically contested region that was until recently pro-Syrian. Al-Jazeera just this morning showed a segment on the strength of salafist parties in Tripoli, and it is exactly these groups that will balloon in size through funding from Saudi Arabia and the international-crazies financial networks, just as they have emerged in the poverty-stricken and socially isolated Ain al-Helweh camp in Saida (documented by Bernard Rougier in a first-rate, recent sociological work). Of course, since the U.S. government’s development arm is represented at present only by the limited means of U.S. Aid (whose projects are limited to isolated sewage treatment facilities in the Shouf and selling olive oil from the South), I’m not exactly holding my breath, and neither should the residents of Akkar.