 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we'll be talking about the situation in Lebanon, where it's been over one month since popular protests broke out across the country. The protests initially broke out against attacks on VoIP calls over various apps and soon transformed into a larger movement demanding systemic change. To talk more about this, we are joined by Jana Nakal, a Central Committee member of the Lebanese Communist Party. Thank you, Jana, for joining us. Thank you for having me. Yes, so could you first start by talking a bit about the current situation on the ground? There have been mass protests and so one month after these protests began, and I understand that there have also been a number of arrests in recent times, including members of your party. So what exactly is the situation in Beirut and the other major cities as far as the protests are concerned? So the protests are continuing. There have been less and less road blockades, but people in all regions, including Beirut, including the big cities as well as smaller towns, have been witnessing daily protests, and so the protests have been now concentrated in specific public spaces, public piazzas in each of the towns where people have set tents, where people are having discussions about the situation, and every couple of days they have been joining certain actions targeted specifically towards certain ministries and state institutions which are immediately linked to the current crisis, including the Ministry of the Central Banks around Lebanon, including the Ministry of Justice, including the Palace of Justice, as well as other state institutions which are known to be corrupt or having a direct connection, as I said, to the crisis. There have also been organizations that have also been actions concerning environmental issues, specifically what is known as the Bistri Dam, one of the biggest and most destructive dams that is planned and pushed by the IMF and the World Bank for the past two years, and which most of the people, the majority of people of Lebanon have been refusing, and so now the protests have been directed towards the Bistri Dam which has closed off a huge part of a plain in the south of Lebanon, and so the protests have organized marches there and have occupied the plain and forced the contractors to leave the place, the location there. So the protests have been growing and informed and have become more and more diverse. Right, and what about the extent of police repression? Does it continue in the same way or are there other ways of suppression that you're seeing? Let's say they have also been diversifying their ways. We're talking about both political parties, because political parties in Lebanon are armed, so we're talking about political parties attacking and beating up demonstrators and protesters around Lebanon and threatening the people who are joining, specifically that Lebanon as a small country, each person knows who's demonstrating and who's not, and so they have been sending messages and threatening them and their families, and also they have been huge attacks and threats towards the journalists who are covering the protests. One of the journalists' mothers have suffered, unfortunately, from a brain stroke, and she is now in hospital because of the attacks and threats that she received because of her daughter's work, so this is, let's say, in a non-official way, but the official attacks from the state itself through the army and the armed force in general, we have been witnessing attacks, arrests, including, of course, comrades all over Lebanon, but also we have been witnessing what is called as disappearances. Yesterday night, a young comrade from Tripoli, from the north, he has disappeared. We know that the armed forces have taken him to unknown places, an unknown place, so this is part of what we are facing right now in the different regions and not only in Lebanon, not only in Beirut, sorry. So, moving on to the state response, you mentioned the repression, of course, but we also see a crisis of the state because Saad Hariri resigned shortly after the protests began, and since then, the Lebanese political establishment seems to have completely failed to arrive at any kind of consensus regarding what should be the way ahead, so there was a billionaire businessman who tried to propose his name, then he had to withdraw it because the protests, so how do you see the political establishment actually trying to come to terms with this crisis? Do they have any path ahead or is it just chaos? Right. So, first of all, the resignation of Hariri and the resignation of Safodi after, before he even got to become a prime minister or actual achievements of the of the Antifodo, the way the state is dealing with it can be read in two ways, so first of all, the president has been talking to us every couple of days, giving us speeches, we haven't heard of him since he got into power, and the speeches are all having this kind of paternal attitude, I understand you, I hear you, I know you're suffering, etc., but at the same time, he is in the most patriarchal way telling us what not to do, how to act, how not to threaten our own existence as if the protests are the ones that are threatening us and not the economic situation and the military or let's say security situation which is threatening us, and he is proposing solutions which are in no way solutions because first of all, he is giving us promises which in no sense are possible, he is promising that Lebanon is going to become an oil producing country in two months which is in no sense possible because we will need eight to ten years to become productive of oil, and second of all, he is suggesting to turn Lebanon into a technology producing economy which is in no sense not only possible but it was not even in the demands of the Intifada, we want a country that is productive from the perspective or at the level of agriculture, of industry, of arts, of crafts, in sectors that are meaningful for its people themselves and not for the West which is what technology is about, so they are trying to propose pseudo solutions, let's say solutions that would appear like, things that would appear like solutions but they are in no sense solutions, and at the same time they're facing us with violence, arrests, attacks, threats, and McCarthyism, non-stop McCarthyism calling us agents of the West, calling us agents of embassies, calling us agents of chaos meaning if people go into the streets and ask and demand for their rights to live and for their rights to eat and have basic basic rights and demands, we are immediately called related and connected to the West. So but there's been no attempt to reach out directly to the organizations involved in the protests, nothing of that sort. Not at all, we don't want them to reach out to us, we have clear demand, if these demands are met this is good, if they're not there's nothing else to discuss because this is the state's way to co-opt the system, to co-opt sorry, the intifada to say we want to reach out to you, we want to negotiate, we don't want any negotiations, our demands are clear. So from a global geopolitical perspective, our question actually because we have a situation where today there is a US-Iran conflict, there's a particular kind of crisis and Lebanon has a particular role to play, especially the Hezbollah and other forces. So some of the analysis has also been in that direction saying how do the protests affect the future of Lebanon and the whole region from an imperialist perspective. So how do you on the left in Lebanon actually see this issue? Right, the funniest thing is that they don't have trust in people and we know and we have been working and organizing on the ground and we see how aware people are of their own rights and their own position and positionality in the region. So we're saying that the intifada itself is cleaning itself up, so definitely there are groups in the intifada which are liberal, which are supporters of let's say the West etc., but people are aware of who these are and these groups are not representative of the majority of what's going on on the ground and for the past let's say week we have been witnessing more and more refusal of members of individuals and groups which are liberal, which are linked or which have a less radical position vis-à-vis the West. So we think that we need to do two things, have trust in people's awareness vis-à-vis their own rights and to who their enemy really is and second of all organize in the streets in the direction which is supportive of real resistance vis-à-vis imperialism in the region and in general in the world. And finally right now especially from the side of the left what would be the concrete say goals as well as a path that the organization see as a way ahead? So we're thinking about two parallel let's say chores. First of all a decentralized organizing because all the time just linking people to Beirut is really in I mean it's unfair to actually work and we're doing this we're organizing in all the regions trying to connect trying to see what each of the regions needs from a local perspective from a more you know in the field perspective with individuals and groups trying to see what the demands are that the the let's say sub-demands of the regions are this is one two creating communal alternatives. What we have discovered in this in Tifado is that people are really aware of what community is and what solidarity is and what communal support and activity is. I'm talking about organizing at the level of because we're expecting a food crisis we're expecting an economic crisis in general so we're talking about organizing at the level of something that looks like a cooperative like cooperatives unions groups of professionals and people have similar interests from around the regions connecting and working together in order for us to whenever the economic crisis is going to take place whenever the leader is going to be hit in order for us to have a communal an actual communal network in the on the ground in the regions to support the most disenfranchised who are going to be facing this this blow more more directly. And the main demand I understand still remains the complete new constitution in the complete re-envisioning of the system. So what kind of a system is being envisioned by the left? We're talking about a system that approaches the situation from a social justice perspective. We're talking about a system which is which does not support privatization. We're talking about a system which is not neoliberal in its essence. So this is the kind of state and the kind of economic social system that we're trying to push forward to. And you would like these aspects to be specifically written into the constitution. Definitely definitely we're talking in terms of in terms of institutions but we know that this is a long-term thing. So the first step we're talking about is a an interim government which is which which will change first and foremost the current election law electoral law because this is electoral law that is continuously reproducing the same elite in power. So we need a new electoral law that would would allow the the reproduction of the antifada into the parliament that the antifada is represented in the parliament so it can actually then impose changes in the institution as well as in the existing law at all levels. And this is what we think that would be the first let's say the first two steps into the changes of of the system in Lebanon. Thank you so much Janna. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.