After the Generals

ENAR

In early September, the daily Al-Anwar, citing “financial circles,” wrote that investigators looking into the accounts of the four generals arrested on the recommendation of United Nations investigator Detlev Mehlis, had found that, together, they held some half a billion dollars in liquidity. Nor was this necessarily everything they own. Very soon afterwards, the Lebanese began calculating what that came out to in monthly, weekly and daily revenues, and generally agreed the generals had lived well. The money incident provokes sundry thoughts related to Lebanon’s embrace of a capitalist culture, one characterized by free minds and free markets. More importantly, it prompts a warning: in acting against its financial abusers, the state should not go too far in limiting freedom. Most people hardly blinked as investigators pushed aside Lebanon’s banking secrecy laws to delve into the generals’ accounts. The debate over financial transparency has been a sustained one in recent