[Beirut, Lebanon] Hizbullah claims to be willing to reconcile its militant regional role with a more constructive internal approach. But recent statements emanating from the group do not support these claims.
Following its hot war against Israel a little more than a month ago, Hizbullah appears to be getting ready for a cold war inside Lebanon. The new enemy is not the Israel Defense Forces, but the so-called March 14 Forces, an alliance of political groups named after the date of the biggest anti-Syrian demonstration in March 2005. With Sunni Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and the youngest son of slain former prime minister Rafik Hariri at its head, they have governed the country since the summer of last year.
“The March 14 Forces aligned themselves with the Israeli enemy from the start,” Hizbullah MP Ali Ammar lashed out on September 12. “They planned the assassination of the resistance in collaboration with the Americans and the Israelis,” he claimed, demanding nothing less than, “The government must go.”
This is a somewhat ambiguous position, taking into account that the “Party of God” [Hizbullah] has two ministers inside Siniora’s 24-member cabinet. But since 1992, when the first candidates of the Iranian-sponsored Shi’a group were elected to parliament, Hizbullah has always seen itself as larger than the political system, with its petty deal-making and religious compromises.
Thus, the rhetoric of integration and conciliation practiced by its leaders has always been flawed by radical statements provoking the leaders of other sects in Lebanon’s complex constitutional set-up.
Government power and positions here are distributed on the basis of religious background, with 18 sects officially recognized. Despite being the most important political representative of the largest sect, Hizbullah will never be able to play as dominant a role in government or parliament as Hamas managed to in the more or less mono-ethnic Palestinian territories earlier this year.
The unwritten National Pact of 1943, concluded at the end of the French Mandate, was signed only between Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims, giving the most power to a Maronite Christian president and a Sunni Muslim prime minister; only the marginal position of speaker of parliament was handed to a Shi’a Muslim.
This uneven distribution of power was also not altered in the Taef Accord that ended the civil war in 1989. Hizbullah’s claim that the Shi’ites are marginalized thus has a considerable amount of credibility to it.
Led since 1992 by its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah has come a long way from being a mere guerrilla force fighting the Israeli occupation in the south of this country of four million.
When the first post-war elections were held in 1992, many of the former militias which had swiftly transformed into parties, participated, as did Hizbullah. Its stated intention then was to work within the existing Lebanese political system, while at the same time keeping its weapons to continue its armed campaign against the Israeli occupation in the south. Eight of its candidates made it into the parliament, laying the foundation for its reputation as being a non-corrupt, citizen-serving party.
This process started years earlier, with the weak central government officially recognizing Hizbullah’s social wings in 1988. A counterpart of Iran’s construction organization, Jihad al-Binaa (JAB) was established by Hizbullah in 1984 and the Islamic Health Committee (IHC) was launched the same year.
In 1987 Iran’s home-grown social welfare operation, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khumeini’ Relief Committee (RCIK), opened a branch in the Hret Hreik neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Beirut, also taking over the role the state was not able or willing to play in the Shi’a “Belt of Misery,” where many southern inhabitants had fled after the Israeli invasion of 1982.
With more than 160,000 homes destroyed or damaged, Hizbullah’s Jihad al-Binaa has again taken the lead in providing the victims of the recent war with the aid Siniora’s government is not willing, or is too slow to provide.
Defying accusations by leaders of the March 14 Forces that he was placing Hizbullah outside the system, Nasrallah has always pointed out that his alliance with the popular Catholic Maronite leader, and former head of the Lebanese army and former prime minister, Michel Aoun, was the basis for a strong Lebanon.
In the fall of 2007, when Aoun will probably run for president, Nasrallah might throw all the weight his 14 Shi’a deputies in parliament have to offer behind Aoun, giving him the needed majority he cannot reach by Maronite votes alone. But who knows if new, now unplanned elections might not come about in the aftermath of the 34-day-war.
“This government did not stop the war or protect Lebanon,” Nasrallah said in an interview with TV station, Al Jazeera, on September 12. “The day will come when we will be forced to reveal via the news or in a direct speech what really happened during this war,” he threatened, hinting that his group has been practicing self-restraint against what he has described as “back-stabbing and provocation” by politicians.
In the same interview he attacked Siniora for inviting Great Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair to Beirut.
“If there was an invitation extended to Tony Blair to visit, then this is a national disaster,” he said.