BEIRUT — Ever since some enterprising scribes, a few thousand years ago in the city-state of Byblos, now in Lebanon, identified a global market for a better way of keeping records and invented the modern alphabet, Lebanon and its people have always been a peculiar mix of the local and the global. The country today seems like the stage on which ever-changing constellations of local, regional and international actors meet and play out their drama. If so, the central character in this season’s political production has changed — if only momentarily — from Syria to Hizbullah.
The significance of Hizbullah’s role in Lebanon and the region is precisely that it is not static. As such it provides a timely, real-life example of the sorts of challenges that simultaneously face the people of the Middle East and interested international powers, especially the U.S. and the European Union.
Correctly analyzing and addressing the issues that revolve around Hizbullah these days will be a valuable key to unlocking some of the other big challenges and opportunities around the Middle East, especially in relation to other mainstream Islamist movements like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The immediate issue in Lebanon is the tension within the government, where a handful of cabinet ministers representing the two Shiite movements Hizbullah and Amal have suspended their attendance at cabinet meetings. They have done so ostensibly because they thought the ruling majority, headed by the Hariri-led Future Party, was taking political initiatives in cabinet related to the recent string of bombings and assassinations in the country, without first defining a national consensus on these sensitive matters.
But this quickly gets more complicated. Many people in Lebanon and abroad see Hizbullah mainly as a political or even military extension of Iranian and Syrian interests. They suspect that Hizbullah’s move was dictated by Syria and/or Iran, both of which are locked in slow-motion confrontations with the United States over a range of issues, including nuclear industry plans, the Rafik Hariri assassination investigation and Iraq.
Hizbullah’s motives and goals have been analyzed extensively from a thousand perspectives in the past year, without a consensus on the key issues of what they want, what motivates them, who drives or influences them, and how to deal with them.
These important questions, to be fair, are also universal. They could be asked about, say, the American leadership in the White House, whose foreign policy goals in the Middle East are equally inconsistent and imprecise in their motives, drivers and goals. The United States is struggling with itself and its place in the world, due to a series of powerful transformations that it has not yet digested and absorbed. These include the triumphalism of its post-Cold War victory, the vulnerabilities of its post-globalization economic dependence on foreign money, markets and natural resources, and the trauma, fear and confusion of its post 9/11 quest for an effective foreign policy that combines brute lethal revenge with sensible policy-making.
The Hizbullah situation is intriguing, and reflective of realities throughout this region, because it is so much more complex and multi-faceted. It is too simplistic to accuse Hizbullah of being an arm of Iran, an agent that Syria can manipulate, or any of the other attributes that it has been given. Hizbullah in fact has played half a dozen important roles in its history, and these roles keep evolving, while some disappear to be replaced by others. It is one of several Islamist political groups throughout the Middle East that have played a significant role in resisting foreign occupation or domestic autocrats, but now see their future mainly as representatives of national constituencies in governance systems based on democratic elections.
Throughout its short life of a quarter of a century, Hizbullah’s credibility and power have rested on five broad pillars: delivering basic social welfare needs mainly to Shiite communities in different parts of Lebanon; resisting and ending the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon; being part of the Iranian-inspired pan-Islamic movement that also challenges American hegemonic aims; providing efficient, non-corrupt good governance at the local level; and, more recently, emerging as the main representative and protector of Shiite communal interests within Lebanon’s explicitly sectarian and confessional political system. In recent decades, it also benefited from close ties to the Syrians, who had dominated Lebanon for 29 years, until last spring.
In recent months, however, the five legs on which Hizbullah stands are changing, or disappearing in some cases. The Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, Iran’s increasing diplomatic angst vis-à-vis the West, the Israeli departure from South Lebanon in 2000, and recent international pressures via UN Security Council resolutions have forced Hizbullah to review and redefine its national role in Lebanon. This partly reflects the increased local and global talk, after Israel’s retreat from the south, about the need to end Hizbullah’s status as an armed resistance group that operates beyond the control of the Lebanese national armed forces. This is required both by UN resolutions and the intra-Lebanese Taif accord that ended the Lebanese civil war 15 years ago.
Hizbullah seems to recognize that it must continue the transition it has been making in recent years — from primarily an armed resistance to Israeli occupation and a service delivery body operating in the south, to a national political organization, sitting in parliament and the cabinet and operating on a national political stage. It is unrealistic to deal with Hizbullah as a one-dimensional group that is only an armed resistance force, a political adjunct of Iran, a friend of Syria, the main interlocutor for Shiites in Lebanese politics and power-sharing, a growing force in parliament, or an Islamist voice of global, anti-imperialist resistance.
It is all these things, and always has been. Local or global parties who want to nudge it towards more involvement in national democratic politics, and away from political and armed militancy, should resist the simplistic tendency to paint it — or any other group, including the White House crowd — in one-dimensional terms that are politically convenient, but factually and historically wrong.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 28 December 2005
Word Count: 998
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