Hezbollah chief wins admirers
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Nasrallah's success unites Arab world
By Liz Sly
Tribune Foreign Correspondent
August 3, 2006, 11:33 PM CDT
chicagotribune.com
BEIRUT -- When the face of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah appeared on the television hanging over the bar, the customers at Lina's, an upscale Beirut cafe serving coffee and cocktails, fell silent.
For nearly 30 minutes, the middle-class patrons, none of them ever likely to vote for an Islamic fundamentalist party, sat spellbound on a recent evening as the black-turbaned Hezbollah leader delivered one of his periodic addresses that remind the world he is still alive. Others got up and stood around the television, to better hear the man at the center of the war engulfing their country.
And when it was over, scattered applause rippled around the room as the customers went back to their drinks. "We are not Shiite, but we love him," said Mona Saman, a 28-year-old accountant, who is Sunni. "He's defending Lebanon."
It isn't just in Lebanon that Nasrallah, a man considered a terrorist by Israel and the U.S., is winning admirers far beyond his Shiite Lebanese constituency. Across the largely Sunni Arab world, the Islamist leader whose fighters have defied the Israeli army for the past three weeks is being lionized.
In Damascus,Nasrallah T-shirts and buttons are all the rage. In Egypt, demonstrators have held up his picture alongside that of the last generation's Arab hero, Gamal AbdelNasser. A new hit on Arabic satellite music channels by Egyptian folk singer Shaaban Abdul Rahim is dedicated to Nasrallah.
"Oh Hassan! Oh Nasrallah!" goes the refrain. "We are behind you and will not leave you."
This was not the intention of Israel's government when it set out to eliminate the movement led by a man described by Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmertas a murderer. But three weeks into the war, which began when Hezbollah fighters entered Israel and took two Israeli soldiers captive, there is still no sign that Hezbollah and Nasrallah are on the verge of being defeated.
Gained respect of Sunnis
On Thursday, in another of the recorded addresses made from his hiding place, he upped the stakes again by threatening to strike Tel Aviv.
"If you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity," he said. "We will bomb Tel Aviv. Anytime you decide to stop your campaign against our cities, villages, civilians and infrastructure, we will not fire rockets on any Israeli settlement or city."
That Nasrallah, a Shiite, is being feted by the mostly Sunni Arab world makes his ascendancy all the more significant at a time when the violent Sunni-Shiite division in Iraq and the United States' controversial effort to reshape the Middle East have polarized the region.
"He's the man of the moment. He's the one bridging the Sunni-Shiite divide through the Arab cause," said Nizar Hamzeh, a Lebanese political scientist at the American University of Kuwaitand an expert on Hezbollah. "Nasrallah, after fighting the most high-tech army in the Middle East, is still standing, and that has made him a hero."
The U.S.-allied Saudi and Egyptian governments, the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the region's most influential Sunni clerics and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda are among those who have offered praise for Hezbollah in its fight against Israel, an unusual convergence of views. So has Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose Shiite theocracy sponsors Hezbollah.
The Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadrhas called on his followers to rally in Baghdad on Friday in support of Nasrallah and Hezbollah.
Movement gains strength
Nasrallah's credentials as a military tactician and a politician are well established in his home country. His reputation grew after Israel's army withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, following attacks by Hezbollah's fighters.
Under his leadership, the shadowy movement held responsible for the suicide bombings and kidnappings that drove the U.S. military from Lebanon in the 1980s has become a mainstream Lebanese political party, with seats in parliament and two ministers in the government.
Nasrallah, too, has backed away from his hardest line. Gone are the days when he required women who interviewed him to cloak themselves in black abeyas, the head-to-toe garments. No longer do Hezbollah militiamen bomb the bars of Beirut or threaten storeowners who sell alcohol.
"He has had to adapt to the political reality of the religious and sectarian diversity of Lebanon," said Amal Saad Ghorayeb of Beirut's Lebanese American University. "Hezbollah is an Islamist movement, but if you look at Nasrallah's [more recent] speeches, there's very little Islamism in there. It's all about political goals and military strategy."
He has proved to be a skilled political operator, steering his way through the sectarian minefield of Lebanese politics without making any real enemies--and winning some curious friends. Among them is the Christian leader, Gen. Michel Aoun, with whom Nasrallah forged a formal alliance in February. The partnership surprised many because Aoun vehemently opposed the presence of Syria in Lebanon, while Damascus is one of Hezbollah's main sponsors, along with Iran.
Although Nasrallah is portrayed by the U.S. and Israel as a tool of Iran, which supplies his movement weapons and money, and as an ally of Syria, he has positioned himself within Lebanon as a nationalist.
Studied under Iraqi Shiites
Ideologically, his roots are closer to those of Iraq's Shiites than Iran's. In 1978, he went to Iraq to study at the seminary in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, under the tutelage of the influential Mohammed Baqir Sadr, who founded the Dawa Party now governing Iraq.
In 1980, as Saddam Hussein launched his crackdown against the Dawa Party, Nasrallah fled to Baalbek in Lebanon to continue his studies.
When Iranian Revolutionary Guards arrived there in the wake of Israel's 1982 invasion to create a new, Shiite force that would counter U.S. influence in Lebanon and oppose Israel's occupation, the young Nasrallah was among those recruited to the new cause. He fought as a commander in southern Lebanon and served as Hezbollah's official spokesman before ascending to the leadership in 1992.
He is also renowned as a man of his word–an important quality in a region where Arab leaders are mostly renowned for their failure to deliver on their promises. The July 12 abduction of two Israeli soldiers, which triggered the crisis, was code named Operation Truthful Promise because Nasrallah had promised for more than a year to kidnap Israeli soldiers to exchange for Lebanese prisoners.
"When he promises Israel there will be surprises, there are surprises," said Saad-Ghorayeb. "People believe him, and if he promises to hit Tel Aviv, they believe he will hit Tel Aviv."
Whether Nasrallah's prosperity would outlive a defeat of Hezbollah's militia by Israel's superior ground forces is in question. But almost any outcome other than a crushing defeat would benefit Nasrallah, she said. "As Nasrallah has said, victory means not losing."
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