Beirut
DAMASCUS WITHDREW ITS REMAINING TROOPS from Lebanon last week, ending a 29-year-long occupation and a week’s worth of festivities. While senior officers from both countries pinned medals on each others’ chests and shared one last warriors’ banquet, dozens of Lebanese mothers demonstrated in front of the parliament to know the fate of their sons, many from the Lebanese army, long held in Syrian jails. Hezbollah’s general secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, presented the chief of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, Rustom Ghazaleh, a figure largely responsible for imprisoning those young men, with a farewell gift, a captured Israeli rifle.
That Hezbollah feted Ghazaleh, a man deeply implicated in the murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, suggests that of all the nation’s political groups, the armed Islamist Shiite militia may have the hardest time adjusting to post-occupation Lebanon. With parliamentary elections anticipated for the end of May, the rest of the country’s political order is falling into place. The exiled military chief General Michael Aoun is due to return early in May from 15 years of exile in Paris; the release of Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces, after 11 years of imprisonment seems imminent; and after getting what he wanted from Washington, the erstwhile Arab-world neocon Walid Jumblatt is once again promoting the sacred cause of Arabism and warning against foreign, i.e., Western, intervention.
Still, that won’t keep Jumblatt from working with Saad Eddine Hariri, second son of the late prime minister and a political novice, who announced he would stand in the elections, then set off on a whirlwind campaign tour of Europe and the United States, meeting with his late father’s friend Jacques Chirac and Vice President Dick Cheney. Whatever blessing Paris and Washington may have bestowed on the 37-year-old Hariri, he is conspicuously the pet project of Saudi crown prince Abdullah.
“The Saudis essentially invented him,” says Michael Young, opinion page editor of Lebanon’s English-language Daily Star. “It’s the Saudis’ way of reimposing influence in Lebanon, and protecting their considerable financial interests here. And it’s also Riyadh issuing a very strong warning to the Syrians. They’re saying, ‘You thought you were killing our Sunni, but this is our guy even more than his father was.'”
Cheney’s granting an audience to Hariri, a man with no political credentials besides his birth certificate, can be read both as encouragement to the Saudis and as a warning to Hezbollah and Syria. If anything, Riyadh’s hostility to Damascus is even greater than Washington’s. “Definitely the Saudis would like to have that [Syrian] regime changed,” Lebanese analyst Elie Fawaz told me. “They see the Shiites in power in Iraq, and they want that balanced out with the Sunni majority coming to power in Syria, but the U.S. isn’t going to do it for them.”
Thus, while it might seem that the Syrian withdrawal would leave Hezbollah in an enviable position in Lebanon, the balance of power in the region is shifting against it in subtle ways. Hezbollah is still obsessed with its historic role “resisting” Israel, but that credential may be a wasting asset.
As many Western journalists and researchers have noted, and a recent Zogby poll seems to verify, Hezbollah enjoys wide cross-sectarian support for its role in forcing Israel to withdraw from south Lebanon in 2000. What these same observers typically fail to explain is how dangerous it has been for Lebanon’s politicians to withhold praise from the country’s only armed political party, never mind criticize it. Hezbollah often claims that it would never turn its weapons against the Lebanese, but that is precisely what it did during the civil war, killing and kidnapping Christians. Since the Israeli retreat five years ago, Hezbollah’s popularity has been on the wane, and not just in the Christian communities. Indeed, many here credit Nasrallah’s pro-Syrian rally with galvanizing the opposition to Damascus; only after that demonstration were Sunnis angry enough to take to the streets in force alongside Christians and Druze.
If Shiite adherence to Hezbollah has till now been that community’s only way of articulating its support for the political gains won over the last 30 years, the Syrian withdrawal has given rise to new possibilities. The Lebanese Shiite Gathering, a so-called “third way” free of Syrian tutelage, unlike Hezbollah, has emerged under the leadership of Muhammad Hassan al-Amin.
Lebanon’s Shiites, says al-Amin, “should not be isolated from the national consensus.” That is, Hezbollah does not represent all of the country’s Shiites, which is very good news, since many Lebanese have no wish to negotiate their new political system with an armed party. “Nothing suggests to me that people are keen they keep their weapons,” says Young. “It looks like the U.N. and the international community expect that the Lebanese parliament elected in May will be made up of people willing to turn to Hezbollah and say we have a problem and we need to resolve it. How [Hezbollah responds] is another question.”
Political figures, including Saad Hariri, are quick to praise Hezbollah’s past role. But many also recognize that they are faced with a very dangerous transition. President Bush has held out hope that Nasrallah might choose to lay down his arms in favor of joining the political process, but elsewhere across the region Islamist groups that have opted for moderation, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, have done so only after they were defeated and then repressed by the states they challenged. Hezbollah may be cornered, but they are also armed, influential, and dangerous. Most Lebanese say that disarming Hezbollah is an internal matter, but none have a persuasive explanation for how it can be accomplished.
Lee Smith is writing a book on Arab culture.
