4 days prior to a deadline that was suddenly imposed on every single Lebanese, it turns out that the passports we paid hundreds of thousands of Lebanese liras to renew recently are turning obsolete.
Note: Biometrics data on Lebanese passports will Not be available before August 2016, if they ever become real. In the meantime, what you pay will never be refunded for frequently outdated passports that you invested so much time, energy and money to renew, as a good citizen is supposed to behave.
The Why:
Our passports are ancient. They lack biometric data that have become standard all around the world. Moreover, renewal with handwritten notes is also against international regulations.
(Most Lebanese abroad are worried sick if their entry to other countries will be denied due to the utter inefficiency and lousy governing body we have)
Over the past year, Lebanon’s General Security stopped renewing passports and started issuing new ones instead. Of course, unless you knew someone doing a passport within the last year, there would have been no way for you to know of such regulation.
The How:
Starting January 10th, no Lebanese will be allowed to travel out of the country using a passport with handwritten renewal dates. That is to say if you paid 60,000 last year for renewal or 300,000 for a 5 year extension, you are out of luck: you will be stopped at the airport, your passport confiscated and you will be sent back home to get a new passport.
If you’re abroad and coming to Lebanon, your passport will be confiscated the moment you arrive at the airport and then your Lebanese stay will become a bureaucratic mess of you trying to get a new passport in time.
The Details:
If you’re Lebanese in Lebanon, just go and apply for a new passport. The money you paid for a renewal will be lost, as would happen when you try to renew and the officer at the General Security thinks your picture is too young or too different.
If you’re a Lebanese coming from abroad, get your family here to ready passport papers for you at the nearest Mokhtar in order to have an easy path. You will need new passport sized pictures and a recent ID card.
If your ID card is not new (it still has your childhood picture), you will need an Ekhraj Eid in order to get the passport procedure rolling. Yay!
If you are one of those lucky people with long duration visas, your old passport will be attached to your current one meaning the visas will remain functional.
It Will Get Worse:
The passport you’ll be getting is the same as the one you currently have, except it doesn’t have handwritten notes. In a few years, when they start using passports with biometric chips and data, they’ll force you to give up your old passport and pay another fee for a new one, a fee that promises to be higher than the exorbitant one we already pay.
Why This Is Unacceptable:
It’s not my fault as a Lebanese citizen that my government is so inadequate that they couldn’t even properly inform its citizens of such regulations until 4 days prior to the deadline.
They said that they issued statements before. But those statements have not been picked up by media outlets and as such we had no way to know and were also issued on Christmas. Maybe we should have asked for new passports for Christmas instead?
You’d think an institution that makes sure to bombard you with their birthday propaganda or with any form of self-indulgent material would actually bother informing you about such an important event. But no, as it stands: the average Lebanese citizen is getting the short end of the stick, as usual.
Why do I have to pay again for a passport that I already paid for when it’s not even my fault that my passport is useless to begin with?
Till when do we, as Lebanese people, have to constantly be screwed by our government just because they have no idea what they’re doing?
Mabrouk people. In case you have travel plans, start panicking about actually being allowed to leave the country because your perfectly decent passports will become obsolete in 4 days.
Adonis Diaries 
January 9, 2016 at 11:36 am
Reminds me of Zimbabwe 1990’s. Basically absolute control over citizens based on bureaucracy that ensured only few could leave the country and those had a limited amount of currency they could take with them. Lebanon is the exception, if I am right, to be haven for so many, over 1 million refugees from Syria. Urgent need to tackle the blight called bureaucracy which is a system of control. I include this quote from CS Lewis 1950’s. It is stifling MENA “I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.
” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”
[From the Preface]”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters