February 1997, when Hamra was blocked with shoppers and traffic was but a distant memory. The ads on international and regional satellite TV for the Lebanon’s February shopping festival may have become less frequent in the recent years, but few could have predicted its outright cancellation, hot on the back of record tourism figures and a new wave of modern massive shopping malls opening. To make matters worse, the decision came with no official explanation. “Political instability was the cause behind the cancellation,” said a source at the ministry of tourism. “The government didn’t want to allocate any resources to prepare for it.” Merchants, however, will go ahead with the month long extravaganza as planned. “We prefer not to make any cancellations,” said Mohammed al-Khatib, President of Beirut’s Hamra shop owners. “Anyway they [government] didn’t do much last year,” he added. The government’s role in the shopping festival, the first
