Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Challenge for Hezbollah is how to make the leap into politics

Excerpt

“The Israeli-Hezbollah fighting was at some levels a manifestation of US-Iran tensions,” Mr Khouri said. “Until these improve, Lebanon will have problems. But this is what Lebanon has always lived with in its modern existence.

The opinion editor at Beirut’s Daily Star, Michael Young, said what Lebanon needed now was what it had always needed – reform of the sectarian political system. “The big question is now whether we can move to a package deal – a new president, electoral reform, new elections and finally a government of national unity.”

by Ed O’Loughlin in Beirut :: Sydney Morning Herald :: October 7, 2006

THE Israel-Hezbollah war killed about 1000 innocent Lebanese civilians, wrecked housing and infrastructure and set the economy back at least 10 years.

It must, then, have had a profound effect on domestic politics. The trouble is, no one is sure yet what this is.

Almost two months after a United Nations-mandated ceasefire brought a halt to the shooting, leaders of the main factions – Shiite Muslim, Christian, Sunni Muslim and Druze – continue to eyeball each other across an ever-deepening sectarian chasm.

“I think the situation is really one in which the impact of the war hasn’t been fully translated into political dynamics yet,” Rami Khouri, a leading Beirut commentator, said. “Obviously, something has changed or must change, in terms of the balancing act between the various Lebanese factions and the foreign forces that act in Lebanon – the Syrians, Iranians, Americans, Israelis and Europeans – but it’s not clear what.”

Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim militia sponsored by Iran and supplied by Syria, emerged from the war as it went into it, as the strongest single domestic force in divided Lebanon, but its strength relative to all the other factions remains untested.

Hezbollah’s defiance of the might and wrath of Israel has proven again what everyone in Lebanon knew, that the Shiites have the toughest, most disciplined fighters and, thanks to their foreign sponsors, the best weapons.

But it is uncertain how Hezbollah can translate its prowess into a greater share of political power. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, may now be the darling of the Islamic world, but most of the Islamic world doesn’t live or vote in Lebanon. Any attempt to use its military muscle for domestic ends would cause another civil war, something for which Hezbollah has shown little appetite.

At the political level, Hezbollah’s recent military adventures have only united opposition to it among the other groups, which together make up at least 60 per cent of the population.

Most non-Shiite Lebanese were angered at the destruction brought on their country by Hezbollah’s July 12 border raid against Israel, a neighbour which most Lebanese have little or no interest in confronting. They were also terrified at the prospect of Hezbollah, with its Iranian-backed Islamic fundamentalist ideology, increasing its influence at the expense of their own sects.

Relations between Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanon were already cool even before the war broke out. The present government of the moderate Sunni Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, is based on what came to be known as the “March 14th movement”, an alliance of Christian, Sunni and Druze forces brought together by last year’s murder of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a crime widely attributed to Syria.

Repeated efforts to restore “national dialogue” have foundered on the inability of all sides to agree on a way of modifying Lebanon’s strange sectarian-based constitution, which allocates parliamentary seats to different religious groups on a quota basis and states that the president, prime minister and speaker of parliament must be, respectively, a Christian, Sunni and Shiite.

Hezbollah has begun pressing for a place in a new government of national unity – a move which the ruling alliance rejects. Hezbollah’s enemies accuse it of wanting to impose Iranian-style Islamic rule on multicultural, tolerant Lebanon, and of seeking to restore Syrian hegemony.

In turn, Hezbollah and its supporters accuse the Siniora-Hariri faction of working to impose an Israeli and US agenda on Lebanon.

“The Israeli-Hezbollah fighting was at some levels a manifestation of US-Iran tensions,” Mr Khouri said. “Until these improve, Lebanon will have problems. But this is what Lebanon has always lived with in its modern existence.

The opinion editor at Beirut’s Daily Star, Michael Young, said what Lebanon needed now was what it had always needed – reform of the sectarian political system. “The big question is now whether we can move to a package deal – a new president, electoral reform, new elections and finally a government of national unity.”

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This entry was posted on 7 October, 2006 by in Asia, Empire, War and Terror, Futures, Geopolitics, International Relations, Lebanon, Middle East, ParEcon, Syria.

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