25
may 2006
What's Hizbullah's problem with the
army?
By Michael
Young
Syria doesn't make it
easy for its friends in Lebanon. After last week's killing of a Lebanese soldier in a firefight by members of the Syria-backed Fatah al-Intifada,
Hizbullah's continued refusal
to disarm and integrate into the Lebanese Army
looks that much more objectionable. A party, allied with Syria,
refusing to acknowledge the authority of a national
institution, one of whose men
just died thanks to the actions of pro-Syrian Palestinians: That's the image Hizbullah radiates today.
On Monday, the
party's deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, showed
he was unfazed.
In a Reuters interview, he observed
that the idea of assimilating Hizbullah into the army was
"originally [United
Nations envoy Terje] Roed-Larsen's idea, in other words it
came from the Americans and some
others in the Security Council, and in fact it
aims to terminate the resistance, not to find a solution for Lebanon on
how the army and resistance can coordinate."
You will hear a great
deal about how Qassem speaks
for the hard-liners in Hizbullah, while the organization's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, is made of softer fabric. However, Nasrallah reaffirmed Qassem's
message on Tuesday: We won't disarm;
we won't be part of the army. The
deeper implications of this
inflexibility are no less disturbing: Hizbullah has the right to set up an armed
state within a state, pursue
its own separate
foreign policy (even if it is
hardly alone in doing so), and
ignore the anxieties of other communities, though this undermines
virtually every major tenet on which the sectarian compromise system is built.
But let's step back for a moment and again ask those
questions Hizbullah has generally
answered with an embarrassed shuffling of feet and empty
phrases on the remarkable effectiveness of its combatants: What does the party
have against the Lebanese Army, the sole national institution unequivocally
entitled to defend the country? Why does Hizbullah regard its own dissolution into the army
as termination of the resistance? Why is it that
such a plan, which was one of the foundations of the Taif agreement and the post-Taif settlement,
should suddenly be labeled part of an American and UN plot to harm Lebanon?
Such
questions merit being posed to the party
by one person in particular,
President Emile Lahoud, who has spent over
a decade dining out on
assertions that he reunited the army
and turned it into the
respected force it is today. Anyone
who has followed the saga of the armed forces in the postwar period knows rehabilitation also meant that
the institution's pro-Syrian
backbone had to be stiffened by passionate relations with Syria's
military. This involved
dispatching officers to be trained in Syrian military academies (where they were
even instructed on how to introduce their examination papers with paeans to the late Hafez al-Assad). The army's "nationalist" credentials remain unblemished: Syria continues to have sympathizers
in the officer corps and in military intelligence, and when Walid Jumblatt announced some months ago
that the army had allowed
Syria to send rockets into Lebanon to supply Hizbullah, the high command's
response was reportedly drafted with the head
of Hizbullah's intelligence service.
And yet Hizbullah continues to intimate, without coming out and saying so, that
the army is unreliable. This suspicion takes us back to the pre-1975 days, and to the
years 1982 to 1984, when the army was
accused by the pro-Palestinian left, later by the National Movement, and yet
later by Nabih Berri's Amal Movement and
Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party,
of being a utensil in
Maronite hands. But those days
are over, with the Maronites not much able to
control anything of consequence
in the state today. The army Lebanon
now has is what the opponents
of the pre-Taif political system always dreamt of; in fact it is precisely
what Hizbullah always dreamt of, given the blank
check the military
leadership has offered the party in the postwar
period.
Then
why the persistent doubts? Because Hizbullah is planning ahead and wants to protect
its independence indefinitely. How indefinitely?
The visiting Noam Chomsky expressed
Nasrallah's thoughts well enough when he
declared it a "reasonable position" that Hizbullah retain its weapons "until there is
a general political settlement in the region and the
threat of aggression and violence is reduced or eliminated." That could be
a long time, certainly longer than
most Lebanese groups are willing to give the party without
themselves beginning to arm. Hizbullah realizes that whoever
controls the army down the road will also benefit
from its legitimacy, making a self-regulating militia unnecessary.
That's why
Hizbullah's refusal to assimilate
into the army is, in most
respects, a refusal to assimilate
into the Lebanese state; or rather to do so only when
convenient - for example when using participation in state
bodies to derail its own disarmament, and its weight
in the state's bureaucracy to dispense patronage to the
Shiite community. That was why the
party demonstrated against the government's
social and economic reform project two weeks ago,
in collusion with an Aounist
movement afloat in
contradiction, having endorsed
an administrative purge and de-politicization
of the civil service in its
political program.
There is considerable boldness in such behavior from Hizbullah.
The party has the weapons, so
no one, not even the army it refuses to submit to, wants to pick a fight just
now. But that restraint, or fear, won't last indefinitely. It is an unfortunate reality in Lebanon that what cannot
be resolved peacefully is usually
addressed militarily, where it also
generally fails to be resolved. Whichever
option follows, Hizbullah will not be able to avoid the weapons
issue forever, particularly
when it comes
to convincing the Lebanese that their
army is really
not up to par.
The future
of Hizbullah's arms is next on the national dialogue's agenda in early June. Nasrallah's and Qassem's statements were preparation for that negotiation and need not be the
final words on the party's weaponry. But sooner rather than
later Hizbullah will have to surrender its arsenal, and it serves no one's interest to delay that moment by casting doubt on the army, just
because it might one day challenge the party's de facto sovereignty.
*Michael
Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.
Copyright (c)
2006 The Daily Star