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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
The powerful Shiite militia flexes its muscles, warning the Lebanese opposition not to do the bidding of Israel or the United States.
Mar 5, 2005 | The "Cedar Revolution" ran into the complex realities of Lebanese politics Sunday. Hezbollah, the country's only armed militia and one of its most potent political forces, broke a lengthy silence and declared its full support for Syria. The group's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called for Lebanese to "express their gratitude" to Syria by attending a demonstration Tuesday against U.N. Resolution 1559, which calls for Syria to withdraw from Lebanon and for Hezbollah to disarm. While expressing support for the Lebanese opposition's goals, and framing the demonstrations not as pro-Syrian but pro-Lebanese, he accused the opposition of serving American and Israeli interests by tacitly accepting the resolution.
Nasrallah reaffirmed that Hezbollah would not disarm, saying that "Lebanon needs the resistance to defend it." The Shiite-dominated group, which drove the Israeli army out of Lebanon after a 15-year guerrilla war, has been locked in a low-intensity battle with Israel along Lebanon's southern border.
Nasrallah's intervention revealed the deep political fault lines in Lebanon, which were responsible for the nation's bloody civil war but were covered up by the mass protests against Syria that followed the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Although those protests represented a sea-change in Lebanese politics because they united the previously fractious Sunni, Druze and Christian communities, the Shiites -- who make up 40 percent of the country -- were largely absent. Now they have spoken, and they cannot be ignored.
"Many [opposition leaders] are following U.S. demands," Nasrallah said in a meeting with reporters at his headquarters in southern Beirut. "But I ask them to take a minute and contemplate that the U.S. demands are a photocopy of Israeli demands."
Nasrallah is a famously shrewd political operator, and Hezbollah is a potent force not just militarily but politically and socially. It holds 13 seats in Lebanon's Parliament, and delivers social services for tens of thousands of mostly-impoverished Shiites. By casting the opposition's anti-Syria position as opening the door to Israeli and U.S. interference, while not opposing Syria's announced withdrawal, he played a potent card in a country where any hint of accomodation with Israel evokes bitter memories of the civil war and Israel's 1982 invasion.
A massive turnout by Hezbollah supporters Tuesday would be a pointed warning to the opposition not to go too far too fast.
The euphoric comparisons by some Western commentators of the "Cedar Revolution" to the Ukrainian "Orange Revolution" were exaggerated and reflected wishful thinking more than historical knowledge of Lebanon. Although many Shiites in Beirut have joined the opposition, it remains a movement fueled by two Christian movements that have opposed Syria's presence since 1990, by a Druze warlord once favored by Syria, and by the Sunni supporters of Hariri, who represent the rich and powerful business establishment.
One face of the opposition is displayed at Lila Brown's, a dark Beirut nightclub in the elegant, mostly-Christian Achrafiyeh district. On '80s night, the string of cheesy top-40 hits comes to a halt and the strains of the Lebanese national anthem begin. Immediately the crowd of well-heeled Lebanese patrons raise their glasses and begin to drunkenly sing, "We are all for the country, all for the glory, all for the flag."
Stuffed into a corner of Monot Street, the famous strip of bars and clubs that fill several blocks less than a half mile from slain former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's grave and the scene of the "Cedar Revolution," the club reflects the face the world has seen of Lebanon this week: unified in a common goal that has the Syrian-dominated government on the ropes.
But even on a quick trip to the southern Beirut suburb of Ouzai, a squalid neighborhood that feels as distant from Achrafiyeh as Baghdad's Sadr City, there is a far different feeling. The Lebanese flags and signs that say "Independence 05" are not flying as in the rest of Beirut, and while a few portraits of Hariri can be seen, far more posters show the bearded and turbaned image of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.
Other posters celebrate the struggle, not against Syrian oppression, but against Israel. They bear the faces of "martyrs" killed in the struggle against the "Zionist entity" as its enemies here call it, unable to even say the name of the nation they started fighting after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and with which they remain in a low-intensity conflict to this day over the tiny, disputed Shebaa Farms region. (Israel has sent signals that it may soon withdraw from the Shebaa Farms, which would be a shrewd move because it would end Hezbollah's ostensible reason for retaining a military capacity.)
Hezbollah, or "the Party of God," formed in the wake of that invasion as a more radical and militant offshoot of the mainstream Shiite party AMAL. A highly disciplined resistance group, Hezbollah, or some of its supporters who were controlled directly by Iran, used terrorism in support of its political goals. It was responsible for destroying the U.S. embassy, kidnapping dozens of Westerners (including AP bureau chief Terry Anderson and the CIA's station chief, who was tortured to death) and car-bombing the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut airport, which killed more than 240 Americans and forced U.S. troops out of the country.
In order to understand the role both Hezbollah and Syria play in Lebanon, and the centrality of Israel to Lebanese politics, it is essential to have some knowledge of the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The civil war in Lebanon broke out in 1975, pitting the Maronite Christians, who were afraid of losing their traditional powers, against the Palestinians, the Sunni Muslims, and the Druze, a nonorthodox Muslim sect. In danger of being defeated, the Christians appealed to Syria for help. Although it would seem illogical that the hardline, anti-Israeli Syrians would support the largely pro-Israeli Christians, the prospect of a Palestinian victory was anathema to Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, who feared that Palestinian attacks on Israel would lead to Syria's being drawn into a war with Israel. Syria also viewed Lebanon as part of its historic territory (in 1920 the French carved Lebanon off from various Ottoman Empire provinces that had made up what are now Syria and Lebanon). Accordingly, with U.S. and Israeli consent, Syria sent 40,000 troops across the border to prop up the Maronites and preserve a balance of power. In 1989, again with American consent, the Syrians defeated and exiled a renegade Christian general, Michel Aoun, ending the civil war.
Since then Syrian forces have remained, although the 1989 Taif Accord between the two nations called for their phased withdrawal from Lebanon. Syria has continued to treat Lebanon as a quasi-protectorate. There are currently 14,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon, as well as a pervasive intelligence network.
