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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Sending hordes of supporters into the Beirut streets, Hezbollah upstaged the opposition. But can the militant group decide what part it wants to play?
Mar 11, 2005 | The Cedar Revolution is turning out to be a lot dicier than many of its proponents thought. The idealized image of a popular uprising from across the spectrum of Lebanese society was shattered Tuesday when Hezbollah, the militant Shiite organization, and several other groups loyal to the current government turned out in the hundreds of thousands, dwarfing even the largest anti-government protests.
In the weeks after a mysterious explosion killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, thousands of people took to the streets, defying the Syrian-controlled government and blaming Syria for the killing. Over the weeks, the protests gained momentum, eventually forcing the resignation of pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami.
But then Hezbollah, which relies on Syrian support for its military wing (it remains engaged in a low-intensity struggle with the Israelis on Lebanon's southern border), reversed its policy of neutrality and threw its lot squarely with the Syrian presence in Lebanon and against U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559. The resolution not only calls for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon but also demands that all militias disarm -- a direct threat to Hezbollah's existence, or at least its current double existence as both political party and armed force. (Hezbollah was the only non-governmental organization allowed to keep weapons after the long Lebanese civil war ended.)
Hezbollah's intervention revealed that the anti-Syrian movement does not represent all of the Lebanese. Upper- and middle-class Christians and Sunni from Beirut, along with the most powerful Druze group, make up the opposition. But the poorer, largely rural Shiites are aligned with Hezbollah, which has taken the position that the anti-Syria campaign is an act of foreign interference by Israel, the United States and France to divide up Lebanon and weaken both Hezbollah and Israel's opponents to its north. Hezbollah is presenting itself as a national-minded party (during the demonstration its trademark yellow flags were banned, replaced by Lebanese flags) working to keep the country together in the face of subversive foreign attempts to foment unrest.
"Lebanon is open to a major threat," says Mustafa Hajaralli, the head of Hezbollah's political analysis committee and a member of its Politburo. "[Resolution] 1559 is a project intended to cause internal divisions within Lebanon and undermine the civil peace," he says, sitting in Hezbollah's main public relations office, a huge portrait of the late Grand Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran staring down upon his guests. "We will strongly defend against this threat, which we know is a foreign-backed movement to divide Lebanon and send it back to civil war. Lebanon has paid a dear price economically, socially and politically to keep the civil peace and we must continue to protect it because of the strategic threat that is facing the countries of the region."
Every day, it seems, President George W. Bush talks of the need for the people of the Middle East to be free to speak their opinions and be free and democratic. But it is unlikely that Hezbollah's freely expressed ideas -- denouncing the United States, calling for "death to Israel," defending the armed struggle, and asking Lebanese to express gratitude for Syria's help -- were what he had in mind.
Until Tuesday's enormous demonstration, the Bush administration had insisted that Hezbollah was a terrorist group and refused to deal with it. The demonstration revealed the futility of that approach: Like it or not -- and the neocons in the Bush administration hate it -- Hezbollah is a major player in Lebanon, and it cannot be ignored. That reality was reflected in the administration's decision, reported in Thursday's New York Times, to work with Hezbollah.
"The main players are making Hezbollah a lower priority," a diplomat told the Times. "There is a realization by France and the United States that if you tackle Hezbollah now, you array the Shiites against you. With elections coming in Lebanon, you don't want the entire Shiite community against you." Shiites make up 40 percent of the Lebanese population.
Complicating matters further, on Thursday the Lebanese Parliament reappointed Karami as caretaker until the parliamentary elections, scheduled for May.
As for Syria, it is moving slowly. The Syrians have begun a superficial pullout of some troops and are redeploying others to distant mountaintops near the border. However, the opposition insists that unless the Syrians withdraw their pervasive intelligence services, which have actively harassed opposition members, no honest Lebanese discussion of the critical issues can take place.
Hezbollah, or the "Party of God," was formed in the 1980s with funding by Iran. In its early days it staged numerous terrorist attacks against U.S. and Western targets in Lebanon, pioneering the use of the suicide car bomb. Since then it has moved away from the use of such tactics, although the United States and Israel accuse it of involvement in several terror attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets in Argentina. Hezbollah considers itself a legitimate resistance group -- it formed in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon -- and denies engaging in acts of terrorism against civilian targets. Hezbollah effectively argues that it fought a clean war against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and that outside the occasional clash in the still occupied Shebba Farms region on the border, it has refrained from violence since the Israeli pullout in 2000.
Hezbollah's military success against the Israelis, and its extensive social and welfare programs, have made it hugely popular among many Lebanese. Even among those who don't support its militant stance, few are willing to publicly criticize it, fearing they would appear to be pro-Israeli or pro-American. And even if many of the hundreds of thousands that took to Beirut's downtown area Tuesday had been cajoled, bribed or threatened by Syria and its Lebanese allies to attend, the massive size of the rally established Hezbollah's clout beyond all doubt.
