Global Policy Forum

By Michael Young

Last week, Lebanon's Hezbollah showed it had zero tolerance for satire. A political comedy show depicted its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, setting outlandish conditions for the party's disarmament, as demanded by the United Nations. In response, Hezbollah sympathizers took to Beirut's streets, burning tires and, most ominously, marching on Sunni and Christian neighborhoods, where fighting broke out. The situation was brought under control, but it highlighted how potentially explosive is the matter of Hezbollah's weapons.

Hezbollah is caught between conflicting loyalties - to Lebanon and the consensus between its religious communities, to Iran and to Syria. Its inability to resolve this by surrendering its arms and becoming solely a Lebanese political organization may provoke more sectarian friction in the months to come.

Hezbollah, backed by a majority of Lebanon's Shiites, refuses to disarm in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1559. It argues that this demand has been imposed by the United States and Israel, and says its weapons are necessary to defend against Israeli aggression. Most non-Shiites don't share this view: Israel is not trusted, but national defense is seen as the prerogative of the army, not of a militia, or "resistance" as Hezbollah describes itself. In a sectarian society like Lebanon's, there is growing anxiety that Hezbollah's arms are there to expand the power of Shiites against non-Shiites.

Hezbollah denies this, but benefits from having carved out a virtually autonomous territory for itself in the border area of southern Lebanon and in Beirut's southern suburbs. It has stifled independent Shiite voices through advantageous election laws, patronage and intimidation.

The notion that Hezbollah is a quasi-democratic party that has integrated into the Lebanese body politic is too simplistic: It has done so, but mostly to protect its independence and sway. Hezbollah effectively operates in a parallel environment to the state, which is not unusual in a sectarian society, but alarming when accompanied by a paramilitary and intelligence structure over which the state has no control.

When other militias were disarmed at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, Hezbollah retained its weapons because Syria, which dominated Lebanon until last year, saw rewards in using Hezbollah against Israel, which occupied a large border strip until May 2000. These were golden years for the party: It built up regional esteem as a vanguard of the anti-Israel struggle, and it didn't need to make the tiresome sectarian compromises necessary to defend its stakes in the system.

During that time the Syrians and Shiites strengthened their relationship. Many Shiites had little enthusiasm for the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon last year. Hezbollah lost a valuable partner and Shiites recalled that it was under Syria that they emerged from decades of marginalization. Hezbollah has employed Shiite fears of a return to secondary status to fight disarmament.

No one could deny that the Shiites were once, shamefully, Lebanon's deprived stepchildren. However, it is the implications of Hezbollah's weapons and their function in the party's foreign entanglements that are now a source of ill-feeling among Lebanese political groups, not disagreement over acknowledging past Shiite mistreatment.

Since Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, the Iranian side of Hezbollah is said to have gained ascendancy over the Syrian one. That's why a crucial question is whether Hezbollah's loyalty to Iran - oiled by Iranian financial and military assistance and close ties between Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic's security apparatus - would push it to take action if America bombed Iran's nuclear facilities.

Iranian officials have indicated that Israel would become a target after an American attack. This implied that it might be hit by thousands of Hezbollah rockets deployable in south Lebanon. But Hezbollah's leaders know that there would be harmful domestic repercussions if such attacks provoked Israeli retribution in Lebanon. At the same time, however, Hezbollah must also show its relevance to Tehran and justify decades of Iranian backing. So while party officials have denied they would strike Israel, they have carefully phrased this to suggest they might resort to force if Israel were deemed a threat.

This ambiguity, and the party's enduring alliance with Syria, the likely offender in the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, can hardly ameliorate Lebanese civil peace.

This week a new UN report on the killing will be released, and on Thursday Lebanese politicians, including Nasrallah, met to discuss Hezbollah's weapons. The party has said it will not disarm, but proposes a "national defense strategy" that aims to reshape Lebanese society to better combat Israel.

The Lebanese are in no mood to turn their country into a redoubt of militancy. Without its weapons Hezbollah would lose its reason for existing, its revolutionary vitality, but with them it could take Lebanon into a new civil war - not between Christians and Muslims but, more terribly, between Shiites and Sunnis.

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