Pursuing his Bekaa-Baalbek tour on Sunday, Free Patriotic Movement Chief, MP Gebran Bassil, visited the town of Al-Qaa where he inaugurated a well for drinking water, and laid a wreath on the shrines of the town’s martyrs, after which he took part a Mass service held at the Church of Saint Elias Al-Qaa. Bassil then moved to the town of Jdeidet Al-Fakha, where he attended a luncheon banquet held in his honor by the Free Patriotic Movement in the region. In his delivered word before the attendees, Bassil touched mainly on the displacement file and its alarming consequences, which foretell an ‘inevitable existential threat to Lebanon’. ‘Thousands of displaced have flocked to the border through illegal and well-known crossings, with international encouragement and internal complicity, and they became illegal immigrants searching for work opportunities in place of the Lebanese, in a country that has collapsed financially and is forbidden to witness reform,’ said Bassil. ‘The numbers of displaced people have become greater than the land’s capacity to accommodate them, not to mention electricity, water, sewage, and roads…Politically, we stood firm and endured all the pressures to the point of sanctions, but Lebanon can no longer tolerate this and the danger has become huge,’ the FPM Chief strongly underlined. He continued to express fear that this new type of displacement, constituting a youth majority, will have a security impact and severe consequences; thus moving from a forced economic and security displacement to abolition, i.e. the abolition of Lebanon. ‘Once again, we warn of an inevitable existential threat to Lebanon, and we demand that the borders be closed,’ emphasized Bassil. He warned that the Lebanese existence is threatened, considering that the responsibility does not lie with the displaced person who was defeated or driven by incitement, promises, or need; but rather, the responsibility lies with the conspirators. ‘Lebanon’s enemies are the international parties that draw disintegration and displacement maps in the region, undermine the idea of a state in it, and work to impoverish us and protect the system of internal plunder that stole our money,’ Bassil confirmed. He deplored the system that has submitted its decision to the outside world, chaining Lebanon with corruption and pushing Lebanese citizens towards migration instead of keeping them deeply-rooted in their land through production projects. ‘The system has perpetuated the development disparity between regions through the centralization of administrative and financial decision-making.,’ he went on, noting that all Lebanese regions enjoy differential advantages, human capabilities, and natural resources, where decentralization, when applied, serves to assign a role, function, and economic identity to each region. ‘Baalbek-Hermel has great capabilities that render it, through decentralization, one of the strongest regions economically,’ Bassil affirmed. He reiterated the FPM’s suggestions for practical solutions that protect the unity of Lebanon and strengthen the central state by relieving it of the regions’ burdens while simultaneously developing these regions, citing the Movement’s call for implementing the decentralization law mentioned in the Taif Accord as a crucial step at this stage. ‘We are proposing, within Taif, the decentralization law, and we are in dialogue with Hezbollah about it, and we are ready to engage in dialogue with everyone…We are also putting forward, within the rescue plan, the trust fund, whose benefits are much more important than the debts of the International Monetary Fund,’ Bassil asserted. ‘Our goal is to move Lebanon to a new financial economic system that includes production and individual initiative, and to get out of the current model based on rentierism and political clientelism,’ he maintained. Finally, Bassil considered that all this requires the election of a president of the republic who is committed to such a new model and to structural reform of the state.

Source: National News Agency – Lebanon