Every now and then, an event will remind us that Lebanon is a nation and not, as the rest of the world often sees us, a collection of squabbling tribes.
Before the current national concern for the safety of the Lebanese community in Ivory Coast, the last jolt to Lebanon's sense of gestalt was the, by all accounts avoidable, plane crash off the coast of Benin on Christmas Day 2003, when a privately chartered commercial jet belonging to Union des Transports Aeriens de Guinee plunged into the sea soon after taking off from Cotonou Airport.
Accident investigators determined that the aircraft was overloaded. Rumours in the days that followed hinted that the pilot had told this to the plane owner's son, who was on the plane, but was "ordered" to take off anyway. The inevitable happened: 151 passengers, most of them Lebanese, perished in the Bight of Benin and a nation was plunged into mourning.
The Africa connection came back to haunt us at the end of last week, when most of the 90,000 Lebanese who live and work in Ivory Coast were stranded after heavy fighting between troops loyal to the disputed president Laurent Gbagbo and supporters of Alassane Outarra, his rival and presidential opponent. On Sunday, relatives of Lebanese nationals in Ivory Coast protested in front of the foreign ministry in Beirut, demanding that the state act to bring them home.
It is not the first, and it will not be the last time, Lebanese have been caught in the middle of an African power struggle. More than most expatriate communities, they tend to be heavily invested in the countries they have lived in for generations. Come the inevitable revolution, their wealth and influence with the former regime makes them obvious targets.
The Lebanese are not a nation of intellectuals. Our artists are respected (especially those who have amassed wealth) but they are not role models, and few are the Lebanese fathers who will actively encourage their children to devote their lives to, say, playing the flute, fine art or poetry.
We speak proudly of the legacy of Gibran Khalil Gibran, but I wager that fewer than 5 per cent of the population has actually read The Prophet; I certainly haven't.
But what we can do, and what is almost a national pastime, is to set up shop at the drop of a hat virtually anywhere in the world and make a go of it. It is a tradition established at the tail end of the Ottoman Empire, when thousands of Lebanese used the Age of Steam to go to Africa and the Americas to find a better life, and one that was honed during the 1975-1990 civil war, when many more thousands fled the fighting to start afresh in Canada and Australia.
At the end of the 19th century, Brazil was the most popular destination. Today, there are understood to be about 5 million people of Lebanese descent in Brazil, although many cannot speak a word of Arabic and have never set foot on Lebanese soil. The total diaspora is said to number 15 million (nearly four times Lebanon's population), but the number of Lebanese who maintain integral economic ties with home is probably closer to 1 million. The bulk of them work in Africa or the GCC and have family in Lebanon. They are the ones who are responsible for contributing to about US$6 billion (Dh22.03bn) - roughly 25 per cent of GDP - in remittances.
In fact, Lebanon has the fifth biggest remittance contribution to GDP. According to migrationinformation.org, the largest chunk of annual inflows comes from the US, where 31 per cent of immigrants send back 37 per cent of the money. The site calculates that remittances to Lebanon from Africa, where about 10 per cent of the diaspora lives, stand at a measly 2 per cent of the annual inflows. (Although this does not include the undeclared cash and diamonds that enter the country, and are understood currently to be driving up land prices.)
I have a second cousin with whom I spent time during my school holidays in Lebanon before the civil war. I would arrive from England still under the spell of the cricket and Wimbledon and imbued with an acute sense of fair play. Georges was not burdened by such ideals.
He wanted to be successful, and by successful I mean rich. One summer, he decided that dentistry was just the ticket, and for years I assumed that this was what he did.
But in the late 1980s, when I met him in London, he was a stockbroker. Still, he was on the right track. Two weeks ago, we reconnected, after a 20-year hiatus, via - yes, you guessed it - Facebook.
Georges is now a bitumen king with business in the Congo, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, and the Central African Republic, where he produces, distributes and sells the sticky, black stuff used to pave roads. Reading between the lines, it is clear that Georges had made it in spades. But the Lebanese sense of adventure, and the ability to succeed in the most hostile of environments, countries where fortunes can change from one revolution to the next, and where stability is an elastic concept, never ceases to amaze.
Michael Karam is a publishing and communications consultant based in Beirut
