Post by Bozur on Mar 13, 2005 18:43:24 GMT -5
Hezbollah Leader's New Fray: Lebanese Politics
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: March 13, 2005
BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 12 - When Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah organization, addressed the hundreds of thousands of party faithful who gathered in the largest rally in Lebanon's modern history on Tuesday, his usual theme of liberating Jerusalem went unmentioned.
Instead, Sheik Nasrallah, a 44-year-old bearded cleric, focused, uncharacteristically, on the future of Lebanon.
The speech was also remarkable for its venue - downtown Beirut - and the absence of the trademark Hezbollah backdrop, its green and yellow banner with a fist brandishing a Kalashnikov rifle. Manar Television, the organization's satellite channel, ended its somewhat triumphant reporting with a tight shot of Sheik Nasrallah, standing on the balcony of a sparkling white sandstone building and in front of a Lebanese flag.
"Today Sayyid Nasrallah has become a national leader," the announcer intoned.
With the Feb. 14 assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, Lebanon lost a rare man who succeeded in appealing to some extent across the patchwork of often murderous sects who compete for the spoils in this tiny and mountainous country. The question is whether anyone can fill his shoes as a kind of national arbitrator. The huge march on Tuesday served as Sheik Nasrallah's opening bid for the job.
"This is the first time that Nasrallah played the role of statesman; we have never seen him as a Lebanese leader," said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University and author of a book on Hezbollah's politics and religion. "Hezbollah might emerge as the new power broker in Lebanon outside Syria."
Sheik Nasrallah's bid is a major gamble. To some extent, he has stayed above the endlessly bickering fray of Lebanese politics. He gained national stature by directing Hezbollah's considerable firepower and thousands of armed men against the Israeli Army, winning admiration across the Arab world for ending the 22-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000.
Once he plunges fully into the political fray, however, he becomes less of a pan-Arab, pan-Islamic figurehead and may be considered just one more Lebanese ward boss, albeit representing the largest Shiite bloc. It is also questionable how his support for Syria - his speech on Tuesday was laced with glowing references to Syria's Assad dynasty and ended with the line "Long live Syria!" - will play in a country where many are sick of what they see as its exploitive neighbor.
But becoming "more Lebanese" could well prove necessary. With the anticipated departure of Hezbollah's Syrian protectors, it will be harder for the group to pursue its emphasis on maintaining Lebanon as a battlefield for the Palestinian cause. It is only by flexing the muscles of the Shiite community that Sheik Nasrallah can ensure that Hezbollah retains a voice in a political system where religious identification remains all-important. (Under Lebanon's rigid divisions, the highest political post a Shiite Muslim can aspire to is speaker of Parliament.)
At the very least, the scale of the march on Tuesday is almost certain to stall the American-led attempt to disarm Hezbollah, which Washington has labeled a terrorist organization.
Hani Hammoud, one of Mr. Hariri's closest advisers, summed up Sheik Nasrallah's gamble by organizing the extraordinary march this way: "Before he did it, when the Americans and the French and the U.N. said disarm Hezbollah, you had at least 50 percent of all Lebanese who said no, this is not a militia, this is not a terrorist movement, this is not Zarqawi, this is not bin Laden, this is a national resistance movement, the only one that ever liberated any Arab land."
The next phase could be markedly different.
"But if he turns himself into a local political player and keeps repeating 'We want Syria,' pretty soon you will find that not just 50 percent of the Lebanese, but even 50 percent of the Shiites will start asking, 'Why does that militia still hold its weapons?' This is the risk," Mr. Hammoud concluded.
In some ways the struggle over post-Hariri Lebanon resurrected the long fight over how the Lebanese see themselves. Mr. Hariri was a Sunni Muslim who believed in Arab causes, but he also spoke to the many Lebanese, particularly Christians, who consider themselves misplaced Europeans.
He was a self-made billionaire real estate tycoon. He wore good suits, smoked expensive cigars, spoke three languages fluently and lunched with friends like France's president, Jacques Chirac.
He was rebuilding downtown Beirut to become the financial and tourism Mecca it had been before the civil war. He ran up some $35 billion in debt - but Lebanese habitually live beyond their means.
Many Lebanese took note on Tuesday that Sheik Nasrallah, in his black turban, spoke from a balcony right above the trendy Buddha Bar and just a few buildings away from Bank Street, lined with the country's premier financial institutions, which together hold an estimated $65 billion to $85 billion.
It is not turf frequented by the bulk of the working-class Shiite Muslims from the capital's unkempt southern suburbs who form Hezbollah's backbone. Indeed, it was the group's emergence during the civil war that gave that underclass its first substantial voice. The march underscored that the downtrodden were not going to cede turf to the more secular, more Westernized coalition of Christians, Sunni Muslims and Druze who have been marching weekly since Mr. Hariri died. The strength of the Shiite showing was shocking to many Lebanese.
"There is a whole generation who had a sort of curtain in front of their eyes, who did not realize that this country was not only theirs," said Ghassan Tueni, the retired publisher of An Nahar newspaper and the dean of Lebanese political analysts.
In reaction, the opposition is trying to pull off its own gargantuan rally on Monday. The math of the Lebanese population means no sect is big enough to dominate. Sheik Nasrallah himself says he has never tried to direct his appeal only toward Shiite Muslims. Although the dour pictures of Iran's revolutionary patriarchs stare down on Hezbollah neighborhoods, there is no forced veiling for women or other Islamic rigidity.
"We don't think in a sectarian manner," he said in a previous interview with The New York Times in November 2002. "It is true that I am a Shiite Muslim, but when I think about Palestine or Iraq or any other country, I don't think within the limits of the Shiites affiliated with my own sect."
Part of Sheik Nasrallah's appeal is rooted in his own story. He was born in Beirut, the son of a grocer, and attended public schools until leaving at age 15 for Najaf, Iraq, where he studied in a Shiite seminary. He fled in 1978 when Saddam Hussein's government rounded up Lebanese clergy, and for the next decade his studies were interrupted repeatedly by the vagaries of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.
In 1989, he did a short stint in Qum, an Iranian city holy to Shiites.
When Israel assassinated Sheik Abbas Musawi, his spiritual mentor and Hezbollah's leader in 1992, he took over the organization at age 32.
Among the scores of Hezbollah foot soldiers who died fighting the Israeli Army was his son Hadi, the oldest of his five children, killed in September 1997.
A leader whose children suffer for his cause is virtually unknown in the Arab world. That combined with his modest lifestyle lends Sheik Nasrallah and other Hezbollah politicians a reputation for not being corrupt, rare among Lebanese leaders. Hezbollah has 13 Parliament members and could double the number once the Syrians are no longer around to force them into an election alliance with a rival movement, Amal.
Still, the Hezbollah march left a distinct unease that an alien fundamentalist state had suddenly sprouted in Lebanon. "Christians are really afraid that he could take control whenever he wants," said Georges Kenaan, a 20-year-old business major eating an avocado salad for lunch at a chic Beirut restaurant on Friday. "I don't have a problem with Hezbollah, but not for him to have his own arms; he's kind of scary."
Even Shiite critics argue that Hezbollah must reconcile its long-held stand as a body of persecuted outsiders with its yearning for more stature before it tries to lead the nation.
The issues, says Waddah Sharara, a Lebanese University sociology professor, start with small, symbolic matters like the fact that most people in Hezbollah neighborhoods refuse to pay their electric bills - but never get cut off.
On a larger scale, Lebanon's potential will be hobbled as long as Hezbollah remains a possible source of instability, he argues. .
"Hariri paid for all the windows broken by Syria and Iran via Hezbollah, but even he realized it could not continue," said Mr. Sharara, adding that Sheik Nasrallah espoused "a political program for a community, not a state."
"Ultimately it squeezes Lebanon both economically and politically," he said
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: March 13, 2005
BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 12 - When Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah organization, addressed the hundreds of thousands of party faithful who gathered in the largest rally in Lebanon's modern history on Tuesday, his usual theme of liberating Jerusalem went unmentioned.
Instead, Sheik Nasrallah, a 44-year-old bearded cleric, focused, uncharacteristically, on the future of Lebanon.
The speech was also remarkable for its venue - downtown Beirut - and the absence of the trademark Hezbollah backdrop, its green and yellow banner with a fist brandishing a Kalashnikov rifle. Manar Television, the organization's satellite channel, ended its somewhat triumphant reporting with a tight shot of Sheik Nasrallah, standing on the balcony of a sparkling white sandstone building and in front of a Lebanese flag.
"Today Sayyid Nasrallah has become a national leader," the announcer intoned.
With the Feb. 14 assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, Lebanon lost a rare man who succeeded in appealing to some extent across the patchwork of often murderous sects who compete for the spoils in this tiny and mountainous country. The question is whether anyone can fill his shoes as a kind of national arbitrator. The huge march on Tuesday served as Sheik Nasrallah's opening bid for the job.
"This is the first time that Nasrallah played the role of statesman; we have never seen him as a Lebanese leader," said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University and author of a book on Hezbollah's politics and religion. "Hezbollah might emerge as the new power broker in Lebanon outside Syria."
Sheik Nasrallah's bid is a major gamble. To some extent, he has stayed above the endlessly bickering fray of Lebanese politics. He gained national stature by directing Hezbollah's considerable firepower and thousands of armed men against the Israeli Army, winning admiration across the Arab world for ending the 22-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000.
Once he plunges fully into the political fray, however, he becomes less of a pan-Arab, pan-Islamic figurehead and may be considered just one more Lebanese ward boss, albeit representing the largest Shiite bloc. It is also questionable how his support for Syria - his speech on Tuesday was laced with glowing references to Syria's Assad dynasty and ended with the line "Long live Syria!" - will play in a country where many are sick of what they see as its exploitive neighbor.
But becoming "more Lebanese" could well prove necessary. With the anticipated departure of Hezbollah's Syrian protectors, it will be harder for the group to pursue its emphasis on maintaining Lebanon as a battlefield for the Palestinian cause. It is only by flexing the muscles of the Shiite community that Sheik Nasrallah can ensure that Hezbollah retains a voice in a political system where religious identification remains all-important. (Under Lebanon's rigid divisions, the highest political post a Shiite Muslim can aspire to is speaker of Parliament.)
At the very least, the scale of the march on Tuesday is almost certain to stall the American-led attempt to disarm Hezbollah, which Washington has labeled a terrorist organization.
Hani Hammoud, one of Mr. Hariri's closest advisers, summed up Sheik Nasrallah's gamble by organizing the extraordinary march this way: "Before he did it, when the Americans and the French and the U.N. said disarm Hezbollah, you had at least 50 percent of all Lebanese who said no, this is not a militia, this is not a terrorist movement, this is not Zarqawi, this is not bin Laden, this is a national resistance movement, the only one that ever liberated any Arab land."
The next phase could be markedly different.
"But if he turns himself into a local political player and keeps repeating 'We want Syria,' pretty soon you will find that not just 50 percent of the Lebanese, but even 50 percent of the Shiites will start asking, 'Why does that militia still hold its weapons?' This is the risk," Mr. Hammoud concluded.
In some ways the struggle over post-Hariri Lebanon resurrected the long fight over how the Lebanese see themselves. Mr. Hariri was a Sunni Muslim who believed in Arab causes, but he also spoke to the many Lebanese, particularly Christians, who consider themselves misplaced Europeans.
He was a self-made billionaire real estate tycoon. He wore good suits, smoked expensive cigars, spoke three languages fluently and lunched with friends like France's president, Jacques Chirac.
He was rebuilding downtown Beirut to become the financial and tourism Mecca it had been before the civil war. He ran up some $35 billion in debt - but Lebanese habitually live beyond their means.
Many Lebanese took note on Tuesday that Sheik Nasrallah, in his black turban, spoke from a balcony right above the trendy Buddha Bar and just a few buildings away from Bank Street, lined with the country's premier financial institutions, which together hold an estimated $65 billion to $85 billion.
It is not turf frequented by the bulk of the working-class Shiite Muslims from the capital's unkempt southern suburbs who form Hezbollah's backbone. Indeed, it was the group's emergence during the civil war that gave that underclass its first substantial voice. The march underscored that the downtrodden were not going to cede turf to the more secular, more Westernized coalition of Christians, Sunni Muslims and Druze who have been marching weekly since Mr. Hariri died. The strength of the Shiite showing was shocking to many Lebanese.
"There is a whole generation who had a sort of curtain in front of their eyes, who did not realize that this country was not only theirs," said Ghassan Tueni, the retired publisher of An Nahar newspaper and the dean of Lebanese political analysts.
In reaction, the opposition is trying to pull off its own gargantuan rally on Monday. The math of the Lebanese population means no sect is big enough to dominate. Sheik Nasrallah himself says he has never tried to direct his appeal only toward Shiite Muslims. Although the dour pictures of Iran's revolutionary patriarchs stare down on Hezbollah neighborhoods, there is no forced veiling for women or other Islamic rigidity.
"We don't think in a sectarian manner," he said in a previous interview with The New York Times in November 2002. "It is true that I am a Shiite Muslim, but when I think about Palestine or Iraq or any other country, I don't think within the limits of the Shiites affiliated with my own sect."
Part of Sheik Nasrallah's appeal is rooted in his own story. He was born in Beirut, the son of a grocer, and attended public schools until leaving at age 15 for Najaf, Iraq, where he studied in a Shiite seminary. He fled in 1978 when Saddam Hussein's government rounded up Lebanese clergy, and for the next decade his studies were interrupted repeatedly by the vagaries of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.
In 1989, he did a short stint in Qum, an Iranian city holy to Shiites.
When Israel assassinated Sheik Abbas Musawi, his spiritual mentor and Hezbollah's leader in 1992, he took over the organization at age 32.
Among the scores of Hezbollah foot soldiers who died fighting the Israeli Army was his son Hadi, the oldest of his five children, killed in September 1997.
A leader whose children suffer for his cause is virtually unknown in the Arab world. That combined with his modest lifestyle lends Sheik Nasrallah and other Hezbollah politicians a reputation for not being corrupt, rare among Lebanese leaders. Hezbollah has 13 Parliament members and could double the number once the Syrians are no longer around to force them into an election alliance with a rival movement, Amal.
Still, the Hezbollah march left a distinct unease that an alien fundamentalist state had suddenly sprouted in Lebanon. "Christians are really afraid that he could take control whenever he wants," said Georges Kenaan, a 20-year-old business major eating an avocado salad for lunch at a chic Beirut restaurant on Friday. "I don't have a problem with Hezbollah, but not for him to have his own arms; he's kind of scary."
Even Shiite critics argue that Hezbollah must reconcile its long-held stand as a body of persecuted outsiders with its yearning for more stature before it tries to lead the nation.
The issues, says Waddah Sharara, a Lebanese University sociology professor, start with small, symbolic matters like the fact that most people in Hezbollah neighborhoods refuse to pay their electric bills - but never get cut off.
On a larger scale, Lebanon's potential will be hobbled as long as Hezbollah remains a possible source of instability, he argues. .
"Hariri paid for all the windows broken by Syria and Iran via Hezbollah, but even he realized it could not continue," said Mr. Sharara, adding that Sheik Nasrallah espoused "a political program for a community, not a state."
"Ultimately it squeezes Lebanon both economically and politically," he said