BEIRUT: On Saturday, 60,933 Lebanese students took their intermediate certificate exams (Brevet) amid severe power cuts, water shortages and inflated transport costs.
However, the security forces provided a peaceful environment inside the exam centers while the Lebanese Army was deployed outside.
The Ministry of Education and Higher Education organized exams around where invigilators live to reduce transport costs. It also ensured that exams were only taken in centers that students and teachers could efficiently access.
Lebanon’s worsening financial crisis and the local currency’s depreciation meant that the ministry faced several challenges for holding the exams.
The ministry canceled the exams last year during the pandemic and struggled to organize them this year amid a teachers’ strike and parents grappling with the high costs of driving their children to centers.
Making matters worse for the students, an unusual end-of-June thunderstorm hit Lebanon on Saturday morning. Given the cloudy weather, the ministry had to plead with private generator owners to provide exam centers with power so students can clearly see their exam sheets.
In some centers in Diniyeh, northern Lebanon, exams were delayed for over two hours due to the power outage and the storm.
The second part of the Brevet exams will be held on Monday; just two days of exams are now required after subjects were reduced to five instead of nine.
The official exams of the Lebanese Baccalaureate Certificate of Secondary Education, which 43,000 students will take, are scheduled to start on Wednesday and last for three days.
A total of 12,000 teachers are supervising the official exams as the official education associations decided not to boycott exams at the last minute despite their demands to raise the allowance.
Imad Al-Ashkar, director general at the ministry, who heads the examining committees, said the suspension of studies as a result of the teachers’ strike and online schooling have been taken into account while setting exam papers.
The ministry has resorted to donors to secure additional funds to pay teachers for supervising and correcting official exams.
The teachers were promised an increase in financial allowances for supervisors and heads of exam centers; 160,000 LBP ($6.34) and 200,000 LBP respectively. They were also promised a $20 daily allowance provided by donor countries.
The currency depreciation means that the supervisor’s allowance is only enough to buy them a sandwich and a soda. Meanwhile, the price of a 20-liter gasoline canister is almost 700,000 LBP.
The struggle of education workers is being replicated by all the Lebanese, who are facing a living crisis that has reached unacceptable limits, as bakeries are running out of bread and water is barely reaching households since the Water Establishment cannot afford diesel to run its pump.
Power cuts are ongoing and more medicines are expected to go missing from pharmacies as subsidies will be lifted on more chronic disease medicines next week.
Traders are taking advantage of the crisis to make illegal profits; the cost of 10 barrels of household water has doubled to 1 million LBP.
Some bakery owners have reported that people in the southern suburb of Beirut are buying all the flour from the mills at a subsidized price before setting up stands near bakeries, selling flour bags at double their price while the security services stand idly by.
60,000 students take exams as Lebanon grapples with crises
https://arab.news/wvu22
60,000 students take exams as Lebanon grapples with crises
Trump warns US to end support for Iraq if Al-Maliki returns
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to end all US support for Iraq if Nouri Al-Maliki, a former prime minister with ties to Iran, returns to the post.
Trump, in his latest blatant intervention in another country’s politics, said that Iraq would make a “very bad choice” with Maliki, who has been nominated as prime minister by the largest Shiite bloc.
“Last time Al-Maliki was in power, the Country descended into poverty and total chaos. That should not be allowed to happen again,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
“Because of his insane policies and ideologies, if elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq,” he said.
“If we are not there to help, Iraq has ZERO chance of Success, Prosperity, or Freedom. MAKE IRAQ GREAT AGAIN!” he wrote, adopting his slogan at home.
Maliki left power in 2014 following pressure from the United States, which blamed his nakedly sectarian Shiite agenda for giving rise to the Daesh group of ultra-violent Sunni extremists.
The United States wields key leverage over Iraq as its oil export revenue is largely held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, in an arrangement reached after the 2003 US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
Oil sales account for around 90 percent of Iraqi government revenues.
Trump’s statement came days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio voiced similar concerns in a telephone call with the incumbent prime minister, Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani. The United States had also sent a letter to Iraqi politicians saying that Washington views Al-Maliki negatively, political sources said.
Delay in parliament
By convention, a Shiite Muslim has been prime minister since the fall of Saddam, who ruthlessly repressed the Shiite majority in Iraq.
On Saturday, the Coordination Framework, an alliance of Shiite parties with varying ties to Iran that holds a parliamentary majority, endorsed Maliki.
Normally he would then be nominated by the president, who holds a largely ceremonial role.
Iraq’s parliament was set to elect a president on Tuesday but the vote was abruptly delayed.
The presidency traditionally goes to a Kurd, and the official INA press agency said that the two main Kurdish parties had requested more time to come to a consensus on a candidate.
Before Trump’s open call to dump Maliki, an Iraqi political source said that the Coordination Framework was set on moving forward with the nomination, believing that Al-Maliki could eventually allay Washington’s concerns.
A pro-Iranian government in Iraq would be a rare boon for Tehran’s Shiite clerical state after it suffered major setbacks at home and in the region.
The Islamic republic has killed thousands of Iranians since mass protests erupted in late December in one of the largest threats to the clerics’ rule since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Since suffering the October 7, 2023 attacks, Israel has hit Iran both with strikes inside the country and heavy blows against Tehran’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah, while Iran lost its main Arab ally with the fall of Bashar Assad in Syria.
The United States has enjoyed smooth relations with Sudani, who has worked quietly to prevent violence by Iraqi Shiite armed groups tied to Iran.
Sudani has also cooperated with the United States to bring into Iraq a caravan of Islamic State prisoners from Syria, where the army recently moved on Kurdish fighters who had run the detention camps.
Even during Sudani’s term, Al-Maliki annoyed the then US administration of Joe Biden by helping push through a harsh anti-LGBTQ law.
The United States has long intervened in other countries, but Trump has broken precedent by meddling openly.
Trump has backed fellow right-wing candidates in elections in Poland, Romania and Honduras, where the Trump-backed winner was inaugurated Tuesday.
Trump earlier this month ordered a deadly military operation into Venezuela that removed leftist president Nicolas Maduro, a longtime US nemesis.
