A stiff reminder for emigres to stay away as Lebanon seizes up

Going abroad to find work to send money home has become a Lebanese national service of sorts. Other countries put their men in uniform. But we give chaps a ticket to Australia, Canada or some central African outpost and tell them to get on with it, writes Michael Karam.

Rafik Hariri was killed in 2005, and with him died hopes for a genuine economic revolution in Lebanon. Mohamed Azakir / Reuters

Lebanon is one big bazaar. If there is activity people are happy; if there isn't they slope off home … or in our case abroad.

Messages from Lebanon (watch them on YouTube) are a series of viral ads for MyTV, a satellite platform, which provides the diaspora with their favourite channels from home. The short video clips are not only funny, they give an often raw insight into what we Lebanese think about those who have travelled abroad to find work, a tradition that stretches back for more than 100 years.

In one of the ads, a tailor from the coastal village of Batroun suggests each of the supposed 16 million Lebanese living abroad send him a dollar every month. "It's not a lot," he reasons.

All very quaint, but the more Lebanon slips into an economic coma, the more the diaspora will have to step up to the plate and send in more than a dollar each if they are to make up for the shortfall of a country in a tailspin.

It is a widely accepted rule of thumb that foreign remittances make up at least 25 per cent of GDP - that's about US$10 billion (Dh36.73bn). Going abroad to find work to send money home has become a national service of sorts. Other countries put their men in uniform. We give our chaps a ticket to Australia, Canada or some central African outpost and tell them to get on with it.

I sat next to a Lebanese businessman living in Germany on a flight from Frankfurt to Beirut. He had married a German, learned the language and had two kids. He had become a "kraut" - his word - and admitted he had no plans to come "home". "Despite what they say, [the politicians] are happy people like me are working abroad. We send money and we don't get involved. I live in Germany. I know what democracy is. Do you think if I came back I would stand for that lot? I wouldn't, and they know this. They want us to shut up and send money." It's a dark and not implausible theory.

If one could take a thermal image reading of Lebanon since the end of the civil war, there was a period during which we had the momentum to create enough optimism to keep our sons and daughters at home. It began in the mid-1990s after Rafik Hariri rode into town and told us he was going to rebuild Lebanon and make it a hub for rich Arabs to come and have a swell time.

He did some of it with his own money, which, even in Lebanon raised a few eyebrows - imagine if a Clement Atlee PLC set about rebuilding post-war Britain. But this is Lebanon, and Lebanon thrives on getting things done. Hariri threw down a marker but his mistake was to make the rebuilding process look like a sectarian project and so it soured somewhat.

Hizbollah could have taken up the slack in 2000 by laying down its weapons and exploiting the political capital, not to mention the downright popularity, it had accrued by booting the Israelis out of south Lebanon. It didn't, and the party's true Iranian colours have alienated at least 50 per cent of the country since.

Any hope of a genuine economic revolution died in 2005 when Hariri was murdered and the Syrians were forced out. That year was arguably the high point in modern Lebanese history but the optimism soon dissipated into a steady decline into the political, economic and social atrophy we have today.

As long as there are limited opportunities at home and as long as we vote in politicians who have not the slightest intention of creating jobs or boosting the economy, our best and brightest will always look abroad. It's our choice.

In the meantime, MyTV is likely to do good business.

Michael Karam is the associate editor-in-chief of Executive, a Lebanese regional business magazine