13
April 2006
Shiites need clarity,
but no loyalty oath
What did Walid Jumblatt mean when he
told Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, at one of the more recent national dialogue
sessions, that Syrian President Bashar Assad was behaving
like Hassan Sabbah, the leader of the medieval Ismaili sect of the Assassins?
As
revealing as the comparison itself was the
fact that Jumblatt directed his remark at
Nasrallah. The Druze leader
thus reminded him that Hizbullah,
by declaring its fidelity to the Syrian regime, was complicit in a campaign for the physical elimination of Syria's enemies in Lebanon. But a bookish interpretation would better explain
why Nasrallah was so stung
by Jumblatt's barb. Whether
it is Sabbah
the Ismaili or Assad the Alawite, both men hail
from sects that are offshoots of mainstream Twelver Shiism. That Nasrallah,
who as curator of God's party is presumably
a defender of orthodox Shiism,
should be assisting a heterodox upstart in his dirty work, is
not a message the Hizbullah
leader likes to hear, whatever the murky
allegations this week that assassins may be on the
prowl for him.
These are complicated times
for Lebanon's Shiites, who find
themselves caught between a rising Iran and a largely Sunni
Arab world increasingly
vocal in its fear of a so-called "Shiite arc." When
Jordan's King Abdullah II used the
term in The Washington Post
in December 2004, he created a stir that was quickly
swept under the rug in a region
that fears any talk of sectarianism. However, when Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak
last weekend accused Iraqi Shiites of being more loyal
to Iran than to Iraq, Sunni
angst about rising Iranian power suddenly became more acceptable, even though the president's
remark was factually erroneous.
Lebanese Shiites face difficult choices
in the coming months and years.
The most important is whether they
will continue to insist on being represented, in their majority, by a political-military-religious organization
that is deeply
uncomfortable with Shiite
dissent. Hizbullah is an anomaly in Lebanese politics, an institutionalized organism in a country where personalities dominate politics. There is a reason for this: Hizbullah was a creation of the security and
intelligence apparatus of Iran, a country historically gifted for building
institutions. And it is to a large extent Iranian money that allows Hizbullah to finance a vast web of patronage among Shiites, a reminder that no matter how ideological a party tries to be, support most often ends up being
a pocketbook issue.
Rich cacophony, not devout
unanimity, is the natural order
in Lebanese Shiite political
participation. Though for decades
the community's interlocutors with the state were traditional leaders like Ahmad or
Kamel al-Asaad in the south and
Sabri Hamadi in the Bekaa, it was
because of this that
Shiites displeased with being offered such
narrow horizons entered,
for example, ideological
parties, particularly the Communist Party and the Baath. Maneuvering between conservatives
and those rebelling against the status quo was a clergy that
could lean either way, the
essential embodiment of this
being Moussa Sadr, who combined traditional
religious learning with a radical social program. Today, one can add to that mix
a rising Shiite business and
professional class, whose members, again, can gravitate either
toward Hizbullah or toward its rivals.
That this community awash with paradox
should find itself effectively under the sway
of a single party is not only regrettable, it is almost as suffocating
a state of affairs as when the traditional patrons ruled. One wonders how, without Iranian funding and arms,
Hizbullah would be able to so easily
dominate its co-religionists.
A
question being asked today is whether
Hizbullah has psychologically
moved beyond the era of Syrian
hegemony in Lebanon; and if it has done
so, has the influence of
one state sponsor, Iran, gained ascendancy
over that of another, Syria? The optimists argue the party has indeed
left the Syrians behind, even if there is
no intention of cutting off ties
with Damascus. This is supposed to mean that Hizbullah,
like a majority of Lebanese, would contest any Syrian
effort to regain a security foothold
in the country. But even assuming this is
true, what the optimists can't elucidate is how Hizbullah will address the high
stakes in its Iranian connection.
The party's inability,
or refusal, to clarify the parameters of the alliance with Tehran has a bearing on the Shiite community as a whole. For example, would Hizbullah bomb Israel if the United States were to destroy Iran's nuclear
infrastructure? And if so,
how would the fierce Israeli backlash affect inter-communal
relations, with most Lebanese almost certain to protest that Iran's wars are not theirs? Nasrallah and his
acolytes dislike being labeled Iranian stooges, and it
would indeed be very hard for Hizbullah to involve Lebanon in any Iranian-American conflict. But if
that's the case, why not say so
openly? Hizbullah's determined
vagueness only shows how necessary an inter-Shiite debate over the
community's relationship with Iran (but also Syria) has become, in the context of the Shiites' interaction with the other Lebanese
communities.
And what of the Arab world? Hizbullah has spent years burnishing
a winning Arab model for fighting Israel. The party is
popular throughout the Middle East because it succeeded where
Arab armies failed. Yet despite
this, a sneering phrase like Mubarak's can cast doubt on the
whole enterprise: if Iraq's
Shiites are suspect, so too
are Lebanon's. For the doubters,
the Shiites' ties to Iran
must mean their loyalty to the "Arab cause" is questionable, regardless of what they did
to the Israelis. It's not
up to Lebanese Shiites to prove
their bona fides in Cairo or Riyadh, but they will only be
able to fight back when, from within their
ranks, they shed light on the ambiguities in Hizbullah's regional allegiances.
Hizbullah's
virtual monopoly over
Shiite power makes it unlikely the party
will soon re-assess its strategy
and affiliations. Nasrallah
is smart, but he's little experienced in the scrappy give and
take of Lebanese communal bargaining. As he plays regional politics with Iran and Syria, as he
defies the United States and the United Nations, as he intercedes on behalf of Palestinian officials, his Achilles heel is
at home, in the form of a growing feeling of sectarian mistrust directed against Hizbullah that all Shiites are now having to bear.
The span of this mistrust is
unfair and unwarranted, but the Shiites' deliverance requires first putting their house in order.
Michael
Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.
Copyright (c) 2006 The Daily Star