Lebanon has always suffered from corruption, but what is being attempted today risks something even more dangerous: the institutionalisation of forgetting. The proposal to write off the State’s dues to the Banque du Liban is not a technocratic fix. It is not financial realism. It is an attempt to dissolve accountability by dissolving reality itself. It seeks to erase the history of how public money was destroyed and who destroyed it.
Proponents of the write-off call it pragmatic. They say the debt is “notional,” that it cannot be paid anyway, that cleaning BDL’s balance sheet requires political courage. But beneath this veneer lies a devastating legal consequence:
If the State declares that it owes nothing, who, exactly, has been harmed?
If the Treasury did not suffer loss, where is the crime scene?
In every legal system worthy of the name, prosecuting the waste of public funds, abuse of office, and procurement corruption requires proving material damage to public money. Lebanon is no different. The Sonatrach affair, catastrophic energy subsidies, illegal advances to EDL, and the captured procurement ecosystem did not unfold in abstraction. They inflicted measurable injury to the State and to the Lebanese people.
Erase the debt, and you erase the damage.
Erase the damage, and you erase the legal basis for accountability.
Defenders will claim justice can still pursue bribery cases. Perhaps — in a few narrow instances. But Lebanon’s greatest crimes were systemic: the conversion of State policy into private rent, the normalisation of public loss, the weaponisation of public institutions against citizens. These require recognition of State harm. Remove that, and everything collapses into “unfortunate policy error.”
This is not reform. It is crime-scene tampering disguised as accounting.
Nor is it credible before the IMF. The IMF does not demand mythology; it demands truth, transparency, and burden-sharing grounded in reality. No serious partner will respect a State that pretends its bankruptcy never happened.
There is another path. Lebanon must recognise its debt to BDL. Recognition preserves truth. It preserves the causal chain between political decision and collapse. It preserves prosecutors’ ability to argue that public money was destroyed — and that someone must answer. The debt can then be structured, sequenced, and negotiated within an IMF-anchored framework. Many crisis-stricken states have done precisely this. The difference is not technique; it is moral clarity.
Recognising the debt while negotiating its treatment would:
• preserve the legal basis of accountability
• restore credibility rather than simulate it
• prevent history from being erased
Lebanon stands at a fork in the road. One path leads to carefully staged national amnesia, where losses vanish and those responsible emerge purified by decree. The other leads to a more difficult but honest confrontation with truth — the only foundation for justice, recovery, and dignity.
Writing off the State’s dues to BDL is not realism.
It is not courage.
It is not responsibility.
It is the artificial erasure of guilt through the artificial erasure of loss.
And it pushes Lebanon deeper into the condition that produced this catastrophe in the first place — a condition diagnosed years ago with unsettling precision in the study of Lebanon’s post-war settlement:
“…at both the institutional and political levels, [the post-war trajectory]seems to have been underpinned by a narrative which favors national forgetting in order to rebuild state institutions and to allow the former militia actors to enter the political stage and public administration.”
— Beirut’s Sunset: Civil War, Right to the Truth and Public Remembrance, Gianluca Siega Battel (2011)
Lebanon paid a devastating price for that politics of forgetting.
To repeat it now — this time with the State’s entire financial history — would not be healing.
It would be self-erasure.
And a nation that consents to forget condemns itself to relive its own disasters