I will tell you the story of my experience with the “financial gap”, that strange and puzzling term we, as non-economists, have come to repeat among ourselves, despite how harsh it sounds to our ears. It is also the story of my deposit, and of the bank to which I entrusted it.

I worked at the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat for more than twenty years. During that time, I gained a great deal of experience, skills, colleagues, and friends. But they were also demanding years, during which Al-Hayat sent me to cover most of the wars that took place between 1995 and 2015. We are talking about Lebanon, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Gaza, Syria, and Yemen.

In 2017, I decided to take my experience to a new platform by co-founding Daraj with other colleagues. I received my end-of-service compensation from the National Social Security Fund, amounting to around $100,000, as well as another compensation from the newspaper that was slightly less than half of the social security payout.

The exact same thing happened with my wife. The amounts were similar, so we combined them into a single deposit at one of Lebanon’s major banks. The rest of the story is known to all Lebanese, and suffered by more than one million of them.

Each of the one million deposits has a story that resembles mine. The bank did not merely seize the billions; it also seized the years I spent chasing al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Ba’ath Party in Iraq and Syria, and the occupation in Gaza. It seized the plans my wife and I had made for our son’s education and for our retirement, not to mention the severe health and medical exposure that most Lebanese now endure as a result of the theft of the century, carried out through the collusion of “resistance” governments and commercial banks, under the supervision and regulation of the Banque du Liban.

Today, the moment of truth has arrived. The draft law on the financial gap is looming, and what has emerged so far makes one thing clear: from my once-prized, now mummified deposit, I will receive $100,000, to be paid in installments over four years. This wretched deposit, born of years of love and hardship, was violated by the villains of the system of corruption and weapons. And now, the so-called reform government comes to crown what it has endured with a law that leaves me with no more than $1,000 a month.

Who Stole My Deposit? Do you remember Lenin’s phrase, “Who killed my brother?”, the line he repeated throughout his struggle against the Tsar of Russia? The Tsar killed Lenin’s brother, and the alliance of corruption and weapons with the banks stole my deposit. Lenin overthrew the Tsar; as for us, the depositors of these supposedly non-bankrupt banks, not a single person responsible for the “theft of the century” committed against us has been put on trial. Even Riad Salameh was never questioned about what he did to us; today, he is being prosecuted for a different theft altogether.

Invoking Lenin in this context may offer an opportunity for those who habitually accuse us of wanting to destroy the banking sector to nationalize it. But what actually happened was the nationalization of our deposits, a nationalization that did not serve the “nation,” as Lenin and his followers once claimed, but rather a corrupt political and banking class.

Is it conceivable that billionaires like Najib Mikati or Saad Hariri, and perhaps Nabih Berri, were given the chance to save their deposits, while we, small depositors who spent our lives trying to educate a child or secure a retirement, were denied that chance?

Our friends in the “reform government” ask us how we expect to be treated fairly when the money has disappeared into the vaults of corruption and into the foreign accounts of politicians and bankers.

They are probably right about the impossibility of recovering the funds and the inevitability of writing off the bulk of the deposits. But what about accountability? What about justice, Your Honor, Mr. Prime Minister, and you, our lawyer friend who holds the post of Minister of Justice? Is it reasonable that no politician or banker has yet been tried for a clear crime that the World Bank itself described as a “Ponzi scheme”?

So be it, the deposit is in God’s hands. But moral compensation is indispensable to ease the bitterness. The perpetrators are known by name and address, yet the draft law on the financial gap places them third in line when it comes to bearing responsibility: depositors first, through the haircut on their savings; the Lebanese people second, by burdening the state; and the banks third, by rescuing them and refusing to wipe out their capital.