Meeting Hizbullah

What better way to respond to news that George W Bush has been elected President of the USA for the next four years than to go and visit contacts in Hizbullah, and in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, here in Beirut?
Hizbullah… Which has been listed by the US State Department as a “foreign terrorist organization”… Which has also been targeted in a US-inspired Security Council resolution that requires Lebanon to disband all “militias”..
…But which also happens to have been elected to no fewer than 12 seats in Lebanon’s 128-member parliament… and to have won control through popular elections of more than 140 municipalities throughout the country.
Hizbullah is quite a poster-boy for democratic control of local and national institutions! Just the folks to talk to about George W Bush’s extensive plans for democratizing the Middle East, don’t you think?
And then, there’s Shatila camp… Location of one of Ariel Sharon’s more notable earlier attempts to “solve” the Palestinian people through terror and extermination. I’ll write more about that, in a later post.
But meanwhile, back to Hizbullah… Back in the mid-1990s, the Lebanese people were chafing under a corruption-riddled system in which municipal leaderships had not been elected since 1963. Hizbullah was at the forefront of a movement to ensure accountable, democratic control of the municipalities, and managed to win government acquiescence in the idea of popular elections for municipal councils…
That first round of new local-level elections took place in 1998, and Hizbullah did fairly well in them. They did even better in the second round of municipal elections earlier this year, which indicates that their people performed pretty well during their maiden terms on the councils. (The local elections here Lebanon reflect the “popular will” of the electorate much more directly than the national-level elections. These latter consist of numerous small, multi-member contests conducted according to arcane rules specifying the religious affiliation of each of the candidates.)
So, being all in favor of finding out more about Hizbullah’s experiment in popular democracy, I set out this afternoon for their headquarters in the –Hizbullah-controlled– southern flanks of the city…. Also known here, more simply, as the “Dohhiya” (the suburb)…

I reckon that what people call “Beirut” is actually four or five cities all rolled into one. Where Bill and I are living right now is Ras Beirut, a cosmopolitan, relaxed, and slightly chaotic area in which Muslims and Christians and Druze all rub shoulders very easily. The campus of the American University, where we are staying, has a few women students wearing some form of Muslim veiling. But those veiled women will walk along easily with female colleagues wearing strapless or off-the-shoulder decolletes… and the off-the-shoulder crowd definitely seem to be the majority here. Many of them are Muslim, but most are probably Christian. It’s just not an issue.
In addition, there’s the chic Christian area of Ashrafieh, in east Beirut, where lovely little Armani stores butt up against nightclubs and of course the ever-popular Starbucks. Then, there are huge areas of religiously mixed poor regions, many of them straddling the jagged scar of the civil-war-era “Green Line” that cuts right through the city…
And then, there’s the Dohhiya, a collection of three “suburban” muncipalities that butt seamlessly onto each other and Beirut proper, and which from the 1970s on provided a home away from home for hundreds of thousands of Shi-ite refugees fleeing from war and disruption in their home-villages in the south of the country.
If I say “suburb”, an American reader might get quite the wrong idea of lovely tree-shaded, planned dormitory communities. The Dohhiya here is more like “suburb” in the French sense of bainlieue… but actually, somewhere between that and the Third World’s omnipresent shanty-towns… Here, the Dohhiya is sort of like a very overcrowded, three-dimensional, concrete-constructed slum. Or at least, that’s how the area used to be, until Hizbullah started running the three municipal councils.
Now, it is just one precarious notch up from being a total slum… They have brave little tree-planting projects that have put spindly saplings along many of the hopelessly crowded streets. The streets are–miraculously–kept fairly clean. There are plans afoot to manage the terrible scourge of the region’s traffic. The eight- and nine-story apartment houses look terribly overcrowded… But the streets all have brave new signs on them: “Ayatollah Khomeini Boulevard”, “Imam Musa Sadr Avenue”, etc etc.
(Did I tell you Hizbullah is overwhelmingly a Shi-ite party? I thought you might just have guessed by now. They do, however, have two of their 12 MPs who are Sunni Muslim, and one who’s even a Christian.)
Well, I went to finish up a series of three interviews I’ve been doing with Hizbullah officials, looking back at the party’s notable record of having (1)liberated all of South Lebanon (except for, possibly, one contested area called the Shebaa Farms) from Israeli occupation and (2) reinvented itself as the most modern and effective political party on the Lebanese political scene. Evidently, there are huge numbers of potential lessons here for anti-occupation resistance organizations in both the occupied Palestinian territories and Iraq, so I welcomed the opportunity to go and talk to some Hizbullahis about how they look back on their own history, and also how they view those other anti-occupation struggles.
I know that for many Americans, the name “Hizbullah” may conjure up mainly images of wild-eyed terrorists, kidnapers, and suicide bombers. Bill’s good friend Malcolm Kerr, then the president of AUB, was murdered here in his office on campus in 1984 by people widely thought to have been Hizbullahis. Dealing with such memories is not easy, and nor should it be.
In this regard, I note the following: In 1982, Ariel Sharon’s army had launched a completely gratuitous and very violent assault against Lebeanon and occupied one-third of the country. (Malcolm had to stand at the gate of AUB to prevent the Israeli tanks rolling right on into the campus.) But Sharon’s invasion and subsequent occupation got a clear green light from the Reagan administration…
The Palestinians suffered the worst at the time (see “Shatila”); but the Shi-ites in South Lebanon also suffered very badly indeed–in 1982 and then right through to May 2000 (see “Khiam”). Those were desperate years for many in the Shia community… Also, Hizbullah was far from being an organized force in 1982-85. It didn’t come into existence at all until after the Israeli invasion, and wasn’t able to consolidate any kind of internal discipline till 1985.
Killing Malcolm Kerr, an evidently noncombatant community leader, was clearly a major rights abuse, not “justified” by any of the above. Nor were the kidnapings of numerous western hostages in Lebanon in those years justifiable in any way. But hundreds of Lebanese Shiites were being killed, kidnaped, and otherwise abused by the occupation forces in those years; and those abuses too were equally unjustifiable…
Thank God that era is– for now! more or less!– behind us here in Lebanon (though quite analogous craziness is ruling the day within Iraq.) Here in Lebanon, I think there’s only one Lebanese hostage still being held by Israel–Samir Qantar– and the remains of one one last Israeli air force flier downed while he was bombing Lebanon– Ron Arad– still to be returned to his family.
Anyway, I had a good discussion yesterday with Hizbullah’s head of Media Affairs, Muhammad Afif. He and the other Hizbullahis I have encountered here all seem to belong to a new, very serious and disciplined generation of Lebanese political activists. Their discourse is nearly all couched in terms of the values of good citizenship like “accountability”, “civic equality”, “the need to combat corruption”, rather than specifically religious values, though they sometimes adduce religious sayings to back up what they are saying.
It seems like they are still busy building their political organization and skills. They have so far resisted all invitations to enter any Lebanese government, but their bloc in parliament works to protect their interests fairly well. I have a sense that they’re biding their time a little, politically, trying to build their community back up after all the terrible hammerings it took during the years of Lebanese civil war and Israeli occupation. One of their big projects, that’s been in place for several years now, is called the Jihad al-Bunna’ — that is, the “construction jihad”. It helps to organize, finance, and implement all kinds of infrastructure projects around the country. Good for them.
The party officials I talked to say they have longstanding relations with many strands within the Iraqi Shiite community… Indeed, that these relations go back to long before the aborted (by hand of George HW Bush) Iraqi Shi-ite uprising of 1991. The party’s weekly paper, Al Intiqad, has correspondents in Baghdad (as well as in Gaza and Jenin.)
I asked Afif whether he feared that the recent US-sponsored Security Council resolution (# 1559) that calls for the disbandment of Hizbullah’s militia as well as Syria’s withdrawal from intervention in Lebanese affairs, would hurt Hizbullah badly. (This– unbelievably enough– comes from a US administration that is intervening in a most massive and most destructive ways in the affairs of Iraq these days!)
Afif said, in effect, that resolution 1559 might hurt some, but not too badly, since they have been through much worse things before…
Anyway, I’m going to use that interview, and two others that I conducted with his colleagues, in a piece I’m starting to pull together for Boston Review on the situation here. Lebanon is always one key “cockpit” in which the bigger powers fight out their contests in this region. It’ll be interesting to see what happens here.
Meantime, I think it’s really important that we in the west don’t fall too easily into the trap of stigmatizing Hizbullah completely, solely on account of Bush’s totally un-nuanced policies in the war against terrorism. Hizbullah are doing some good and interesting things here, and many of the things they work for are quite legitimate. If we say it’s okay to have parties in Europe that are explicitly “Christian” and democratic (as in Germany), or in Israel that are explicitly “Jewish” and only barely democratic, then maybe we should say there is room in a country like Lebanon for a party that is explicitly Muslim but also committed to democratic practice in national affairs.
Incidentally, that’s probably also one of the least-bad outcomes we could hope for in Iraq.