BEIRUT: A new way of calculating the escalating crisis that has engulfed Lebanon since former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated has emerged on the streets of Beirut.
It is not to be found in the sizes of the rival demonstrations that have blocked Beirut’s streets, but in the price of an AK 47 assault rifle.
Before Hariri’s murder blamed by many Lebanese on Syria, whose army and intelligence services have lingered in the country for 30 years you could buy one for $100. These days, say Lebanese, you would be lucky to find a weapon for $700. It is not a sign that violence is imminent. Rather it is an indication that a nation that has already experienced the abyss of civil war from 1975 to 1991, has looked over the edge again and is afraid. That fear is being driven by a spiralling distrust in a society whose rival parts — Christians, Sunnis, Shias and Druze — have lived in wary coexistence since the war’s end. And it is fuelled by wild rumours.
It is a sense of foreboding that was redoubled last week by the dramatic decision of Lebanon’s most powerful group, the Shia Hezbollah, to refuse to support a newly united “opposition” in demanding Syria’s departure, instead staking its leadership of a rival bloc with last Tuesday’s massive pro-Syrian and pro-government demonstration called by its charismatic leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
Suddenly, after weeks of the “Cedar Revolution”, peopled largely by Lebanon’s well groomed middle classes, which has forced the resignation of one pro-Syria government and helped to propel Syrian forces towards a final withdrawal, the faces on the streets were of the Shia poor.
As President Bashar al-Assad reaffirmed to UN envoy Terje Roed Larsen his commitment to the complete withdrawal of all Syrian forces from Lebanon, the faultlines in the Lebanese political settlement appeared to be deepening as, in barely a week, the question of who killed Rafik Hariri has been eclipsed by a more divisive issue: the future of Hezbollah, and of resistance to Israel.
After three weeks in which Hezbollah has stood on the sidelines, its officials have launched a series of bitterly critical attacks on the “opposition”, accusing it of being a tool of the US, France and Israel set on undermining Lebanon’s fragile post-war settlement and plunging it into a new chaos.
“The opposition is living under an illusion if it considers itself a spokesman for Lebanon,” Mustapha Haj Ali, head of Hezbollah’s political analysis committee and a member of its politburo, said last week.
“It is a forgery and that is why we called last week’s demonstration. We wanted to show that the ‘opposition’ is not the real or the only voice. We did not organize the demonstration to show our force. We wanted to show we were the voice of Lebanon’s conscience. We wanted to sound the alarm.”
What alarms Hezbollah is the knowledge that as the Syrian forces in Lebanon have been forced out by international pressure, there are those, in Washington, who wish to see Hezbollah’s days equally numbered. That threat is explicit in UN resolution 1559, which the US and France used to pressure Syria into beginning its withdrawal, and which also calls for the disarming of the Lebanese militias. Hezbollah, permitted to keep its weapons under the Taif Accords of 1989 that ended the civil war, is convinced Washington has the organization in its sights.
Hezbollah denies it is a “militia”. Instead it insists that there is a distinction between the militias that prosecuted the civil war, and the “resistance” that forced the Israeli military to leave southern Lebanon under fire, gaining it huge admiration across the Middle East. But in the US and elsewhere including most recently in a non-binding vote of the European Parliament the word used for Hezbollah is not resistance but “terrorist”, a definition that is confounded by the complex realities Hezbollah presents on the ground, not least its existence as a legitimate political party with nine MPs.
In its power bases in the south and in the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah is more than its armed wing, more too than the money that Israel and the US say it funnels to other groups. In Shia areas Hezbollah is an integral part of a society that comprises perhaps 40 percent of Lebanese, pouring vast sums of money into the poorest sections of society from an income derived from its own fund-raising and from charitable foundations from its ally Iran.
It wields economic power too, controlling enterprises from real estate development to travel agencies. And with those funds it keeps around 60,000 people largely in a south deprived of long term investment on a payroll from which full time fighters and administrators can earn $300 to $600 a month.
It is a relationship starkly in evidence on the drive through the Bekaa Valley where Hezbollah’s flags line every street, and where every other shop boasts collection boxes for its charitable’ wing. In these towns people appear happy to pay Hezbollah’s voluntary tithe of one fifth of income in return for the knowledge that it keeps Israel at bay.
Hussein Hashoosh’s baker’s shop in Chtaura boasts a Hezbollah calendar and collecting box. Hashoosh, aged 65, says that he gives around $100 a month to Hezbollah. With a family home in Nabatiyeh, nine miles from the Israeli border, Hashoosh says what many of those who attended Tuesday’s rally say: that he is afraid Lebanon will no longer be safe if Hezbollah is disarmed.
Mahmoud Jaber, aged 36, who owns a nearby restaurant, is more explicit even though he is happy to see Syria go. If it were not for Hezbollah, he says, he would have not had the confidence to return in 1996 and rebuild his business.
At the American University of Beirut, Nizar Hamzeh, author of “In the Path of Hezbollah”, believes that even if the figures for the Hezbollah-led demonstration were inflated, it remains his country’s largest, a mark of both Hezbollah’s remarkable organizational skills, and its popular support.
“What we saw was a reflection of Hezbollah’s fear that a new opposition that it does not trust might control a future government that may one day ban Hezbollah. It sees it as a question of its survival.”
And unlike its detractors, Hamzeh believes that even on questions like its eventual disarmament, Hezbollah might be more flexible if allowed time and circumstances to make the transition to a purely political force, a view that is shared by some European governments who have long resisted US lobbying to designate it “terrorist”.
“Indeed, its history has been one of subtle repositioning from an organization originally dedicated to replicating Iran’s theocracy in Lebanon and Israel’s destruction. Hezbollah has a reputation for being rigid but it has a record of changing its objectives and it has a flexible dynamic. No one in the 1980s could imagine Hezbollah would end up in parliament. And if the only thing Hezbollah is about is the resistance it is hard to explain the decline in operations since 2000 and its increasing visibility on the political scene,” Hamzeh said.
That continuing shift was underlined on Friday by Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general Naim Qassem, who insisted that Hezbollah intended to play a more active political role in the country’s internal politics in the run-up to May’s election, but while retaining its weapons.
Even on the question of resistance, says Hamzeh, there has been a transformation from its early advocacy of marching on Jerusalem, to being “guardian” force in the south, and limiting its operations to the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms.
Indeed the future of the resistance was touched on by Sheikh Nasrallah himself last weekend in a speech to mark the festival of Ashura, suggesting that a “national dialogue” could initiate discussion of whether a resistance was still needed.
And while Hezbollah’s demonstration has been seen as provocative by many, behind the scenes it has discreetly attempted to maintain its contacts with the opposition, including the Maronite patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, to attempt to defuse the sense of confrontation.
But while those like Hamzeh saw last week’s show of force as a reminder by Hezbollah to Lebanon that it remains a potent force that cannot be ignored, others were infuriated by what they regard as the organization’s “disdain” for the rest of Lebanese society.
Among them is Michael Young, the Lebanese opinion editor of Beirut’s Daily Star who challenged Hezbollah’s show of force in a trenchant polemic.
What to Hezbollah must have seemed like a subtle message did not seem so to a lot of Lebanese society, says Young. “What a lot of people saw was an awful lot of poor Shias. I don’t think Hezbollah calculated the sectarian counter-reaction that it would produce.”
For Young the demonstration represented “a contempt for local Lebanese politics”, a “hubristic gesture” that one party was above the interests of the state.
“I think we are going to enter a period of protracted tension between the party and the state. I am so bitter about the rally because it has poisoned the well of consensual Lebanese politics. What Hezbollah indicated on Tuesday was that it had the power to break that consensus.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
