As Its Role Shifts, Hezbollah Gains in Prisoner Trade
By IAN FISHER - NYT
AQURA, Lebanon, Jan. 26 — The tense and hilly border here is where, if all goes to plan, Israeli trucks will on Friday return the bodies of 59 men killed during Israel's long occupation of southern Lebanon. The streets will be packed in celebration, predicted a grocer, Mahmoud Tahir, who lived under that occupation for 22 of his 63 years.
And Mr. Tahir has no question whom to thank: Hezbollah, heroes to virtually all of southern Lebanon even if Israel and the United States put the armed Shiite Muslim group on the "A team" of world terror.
"It was a big victory," Mr. Tahir said, referring to a significant trade of prisoners and human remains, announced last week, that Israel negotiated with Hezbollah despite the Israeli policy of not dealing with what it considers terror groups. "Israel has acknowledged Hezbollah for the second time. The first victory was when Hezbollah kicked the Israelis out in 2000."
But victories this clear come rarely these days for Hezbollah. Even its supporters say Israel's withdrawal has deprived it of its immediate mission as the daily resistance in Lebanon.
More recently, the Iraq war has increased pressure on Hezbollah's two sponsors, Syria and Iran, in ways that some experts say played itself out in the complicated reaction to an attack last week — viewed here as another recent Hezbollah success — in which its guerrillas killed an Israeli soldier who they say strayed over the border.
To some degree the Iraq war has also deprived Hezbollah of a tidy rallying cry in the Middle East. Much as it continues to profess hatred for America, Hezbollah, as a Shiite group, did not like the violent excesses of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government either. The group's leaders are quick to deny any part in the deadly resistance now under way in Iraq.
"Hezbollah's role has become less relevant," said Waddah Sharara, a professor of sociology at Lebanese University. "It's not weaker. It's just not sure how to use the power that it has at the moment."
There is no suggestion that Hezbollah, a pioneer of suicide bombings that was responsible for major attacks against Americans in the early 1980's, is an organization in decline.
It runs hospitals, charity programs and a television station and holds 12 seats in Parliament, a toehold for a likely growing role in politics. Its relations with the Lebanese government remain good, and worries — mostly among Christians — that it may provoke the ire of America are, though real, rarely articulated publicly.
Still, its plight was on display at a mosque in Beirut's southern suburbs on Sunday, when Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the cleric who has headed Hezbollah for a decade, held one of his infrequent news conferences to announce the prisoner release.
It was a moment to crow, if in Mr. Nasrallah's understated manner: in exchange for four Israelis or their bodies, Hezbollah gained more than 430 live prisoners, in addition to the 59 bodies.
[On Wednesday, Hezbollah acknowledged that three of the Israelis to be returned, all soldiers that Israel has long believed dead, were indeed dead.]
Most of them were Palestinians, a fact that burnishes Hezbollah's image in the wider Islamic world.
[A plane carrying about 30 Arab prisoners left Israel for Germany early on Thursday as part of the exchange, Reuters reported.
[The military plane took off from Lod air base outside Tel Aviv at 3:35 a.m., minutes after a German aircraft carrying an Israeli businessman and the remains of three Israeli soldiers departed Beirut.]
Yet an Arab journalist asked a question that would have been unthinkable several years ago. With Israeli troops gone and the prisoner issue nearly settled, he asked, what role is there for Hezbollah in the future?
"Nothing has changed," Mr. Nasrallah said, not losing his calm. "Hezbollah is Hezbollah. There are detainees in prisons. The land is still occupied. The daily Israeli violations are still there. The Israeli threat to Lebanon is still there, and Hezbollah's main task is still valid."
Many experts on Hezbollah, in fact, saw the incident last week at the border as a way for the group to remind Israel — and its supporters in Lebanon — that it remains a potent, relevant force, the de facto Lebanese army on the border. Proving that relevance, some suggest, may be all the more important with local elections, in which Hezbollah candidates will be competing, this spring.
As always in the Middle East, the details of what happened at the border are disputed. In this case, it came in the context of what Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations called an "upsurge" of violence at the border in the last six months, with regular violations of Lebanese airspace by Israeli planes and antiaircraft fire from Hezbollah that has crossed into Israel.
For several months Hezbollah has also been planting bombs near the border, one of which Israel reported to United Nations observers in Lebanon on Jan. 4. Last Tuesday, an Israeli bulldozer clearing the bomb entered Lebanese territory, by what Hezbollah said was more than 20 yards. Hezbollah guerrillas fired on it, killing one Israeli soldier.
Calling the attack a deliberate provocation, United States officials said the bulldozer had been forced by terrain to stray over the border to remove a bomb planted on the Israeli side of the so-called blue line that provisionally divides the two nations.
A United Nations report confirms that the bomb Israel reported on Jan. 4 was on Israeli territory. Hezbollah claims that the bomb was on Lebanese territory.
Either way, several messages were firmly delivered.
"One message is that Hezbollah's resistance is on the ground responding to any threat to Hezbollah and to Lebanon and preserve a balance of terror" with Israel, said Nizar Hamzeh, a professor of political science at the American University in Beirut. "A second message: `It is clear the resistance is alive and well. No, we have not dismantled.' "
Nawaf al-Moussaoui, the head of external relations for Hezbollah, said it was a simple matter of defending Lebanese territory. It is a right, he said, that Hezbollah has exercised since it was formed two decades ago.
"If we remained silent, 40 meters becomes half a kilometer, then one kilometer," he said, "and with the passage of time there will be a new status quo in which the Israelis can come and go where and whenever they want."
The incident was relatively small, and neither side moved to step up the conflict. Israeli warplanes struck what the military said were Hezbollah training camps, but which Israeli officials probably knew were empty.
Still, experts said the aftermath was revealing, with Hezbollah in a familiar role as a thermometer on the state of play in the Middle East. Israel did not strike Syria, as it had in October after a suicide bombing, even as it blamed Syria as one of Hezbollah's sponsors.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell immediately called on Syria to end its support for Hezbollah.
Hezbollah did not step up the conflict in part, experts speculate, because it could not count on Syria's support, but partly too in its own interests. Many in Lebanon, even Hezbollah supporters, show little appetite for the group to operate beyond the country's borders. That would seem to include marching to free Jerusalem from the Jews, an often-stated goal of Hezbollah.
The United States invasion of Iraq has also had an effect on Hezbollah, experts say. While some outside terror experts speculate on a Hezbollah role in Iraq, diplomats and other experts here say they have seen no indication of Hezbollah members traveling there.
Mr. Moussaoui insisted that his members were banned even from making pilgrimages to Shiite holy cities in Iraq, so as to leave no room for suspicion.
"We believe the Iraqi people have the ability to liberate themselves," he said.
Ibrahim Bayram, a journalist specializing in Islamic affairs, said Iraq was "definitely" having an effect on Hezbollah. "They think twice," he said. "They put more consideration on what they are doing than they had before."
But he said Hezbollah's role, despite any such pressure and however less immediate these days, did remain clear.
"It was created in direct response to Israel," he said. "So Hezbollah will exist as long as there is a conflict with Israel."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
