BEIRUT: Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement at the heart of the latest Middle East crisis, is a charismatic and skilled negotiator and arguably one of the most powerful people in Lebanon.
Regarded as Hezbollah’s military mastermind, Nasrallah has developed a personality cult among his supporters and earned a respected place in the Shia community.
But in Israel, which has the Hezbollah leader in its sights following the capture of two and killing of eight Israeli soldiers by his guerrillas in a daring border attack on Wednesday, one newspaper likened him to Adolf Hitler.
The attack dealt another embarrassing blow to the Israeli military and was hailed as a another victory for the fighters of Hezbollah, who were instrumental in causing Israel’s pullout from Lebanon in 2000.
On Wednesday, Nasrallah demanded that Israel free prisoners in exchange for the return of the two soldiers seized on Wednesday.
Although Israel has refused any swap, the Jewish state in January 2004 agreed to a massive prisoner exchange mediated by Germany. During his 14 years at the helm of Hezbollah, the leader of the Party of God who was born in a poor area of Beirut in August 1960, has also marked internal successes in Lebanon.
While his movement is seen still by many in the West as a terrorist group, it now has 14 MPs in the Lebanese parliament and a minister within the government.
Aged 45, Nasrallah is a skilled orator with a sense of humour unusual among fundamentalist movements in the Middle East.
He was elected Secretary-General of Hezbollah in 1992 after Israel killed his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi, his wife and three-year-old daughter in a air attack.
Nasrallah gained much of his early experience in the rival Amal movement but pulled out, with other officials, in 1982 in a dispute over ways to confront the situation resulting from the full-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
After praising his militia men’s success in capturing the two Israeli soldiers and killing eight others, Nasrallah said he did not want to “drag Lebanon into a war” but that “if the enemy wants escalation, we are ready”.
Israeli newspaper Maariv compared Nasrallah to Hitler, the man who exterminated six million Jews in the Holocaust, and said it left Israel with “one choice: To respond with might, in one fell swoop, unless it does not wish to live.”
With Israel vowing not to negotiate for the soldiers’ release, Nasrallah was equally firm, saying the two Israelis “will only return home through indirect negotiations and an exchange of prisoners”.
“This is the only available way to release” Lebanese prisoners held in Israel, said the bearded and bespectacled Hezbollah leader, insisting “the Israelis always first say they do not wish to negotiate, but eventually they accept.”
Nasrallah, who does not recognise the state of Israel, has a precedent.
In January 2004, Israel and Hezbollah carried out a swap through German mediation that saw hundreds of Arab and Palestinian detainees released, the return of the bodies of three soldiers, and the freeing of an Israeli businessman.
The Hezbollah chief, who is married with children, was personally involved in those negotiations and in earlier ones which included him seeing the return home of the body of his eldest son Hadi — killed in a clash with Israeli troops in 1997.
Hezbollah’s resistance to the Israeli “Grapes of Wrath” military operation in Lebanon in 1996, cemented Nasrallah’s role as symbol of the resistance and secured him a privileged place with Israel’s arch foe, Syria.
His stature reached a pinnacle with the deployment in force of Hezbollah fighters along the Lebanese-Israeli frontier during the Israeli pullout in May 2000.—AFP
