After holding bank employees hostage at gunpoint to retrieve the frozen funds she needed for her sister’s cancer treatment, Sali Hafiz had a message for her fellow Lebanese citizens.
“People are committing suicide,” she told a local TV station this week of those who, like her, have grown increasingly desperate three years into a crippling financial crisis. “I tell them: don’t pick up the gun and shoot yourselves. Go get your money, even if it costs you your life.”
Hafiz was not the first person to storm a bank and demand their money but her actions this week caught the public imagination, emboldening those disillusioned by the state and financial institutions they blame for the crisis.
On Friday at least five more people stormed banks with rifles, replica and pellet guns. They demanded their money from bank employees, before being taken into custody in front of cheering crowds.
“People are growing more and more desperate, with fewer avenues for justice: they can’t go to the judiciary, since judges are on indefinite strike [over pay], and they can’t go to the security forces who are in the pocket of our banks and our politicians,” said Fouad Debs, a co-founder of the Depositors Union, a group of lawyers and activists lobbying for depositors’ rights. “What are they supposed to do?”
Debs, a lawyer whose…
