by Al Venter
In the old days Hizbollah cadres might only have hinted at action: these days they use force to implement their demands. If warnings are not heeded, the Party of God does what it believes it needs to and if violence is involved, then so be it. During 2007, for instance, nobody could decide on a new President who, according to the constitution had to be a Christian. Hizbollah’s Deputy Secretary General, Sheikh Naim Qasim, gave the country’s politicians an ultimatum. His words were strident and belligerent, very much in line with the ‘new face’ of the Party of God.
‘After the other side resorts to manipulating the presidency and chooses a person who is not suitable for [that post] we will find ourselves forced to fill the vacuum to prevent the emergence of a constitutional vacuum’, said the Sheikh. In other words, the perception in the streets of Beirut suggested that the next President of Lebanon would be from Hizbollah. And if not the next one, then certainly the one thereafter…
He went on to say that Hizbollah had been ‘patient for a very long time about the repeated violations that the government’s group perpetrated’. He suggested that Hizbollah should step in and resolve the matter. In the view of the majority, that was war talk. Coupled as it was to a number of assassinations of prominent Lebanese politicians in recent years, these developments were – and continue to be – profoundly unsettling.
Robert Fisk captured the gist of it in a brilliant article titled ‘Dinner in Beirut, and a Lesson in Courage’ published in Britain’s Independent on 29 September 2007. He disclosed that the fear of assassination among Lebanese politicians had become so severe that 46 of the country’s MPs were hiding in the Phoenicia Hotel, ‘three to a suite…’
Apart from Hizbollah’s political infrastructure, the movement has a variety of military and paramilitary organizations on which to call. This is a kind of ‘Second Lebanese Defence Force-in-Waiting’, as one diplomat uniquely referred to it. Essentially Shi’ite, all these groups are regarded by Lebanese opposition groups as a surrogate force with a first loyalty to Iran. They maintain that the Hizbollah commander-in-chief, Nasrallah, is not averse to taking his instructions from either Tehran or Damascus and it says much that Hizbollah has always worked closely with the leaders of both countries. In fact, as has been demonstrated often enough, Hizbollah as a Shi’ite revolutionary group is an Iranian creation.
More pertinently, there are direct links between Hizbollah and Iran’s Islamic Republican Guard Corps (IRGC). This is the same paramilitary group that is responsible for all Iran’s clandestine external operations, as well as the country’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes. Significantly perhaps, it was the Guards Corps that was originally responsible for physically creating the Party of God.
Paula A. deSutter, George W. Bush’s former Assistant Secretary for Verification and Compliance, made a study of the matter while still at Washington’s National Defense University and it is worth reading. She might just as easily have been talking about Hizbollah when she wrote that ‘The Iranian government is not easy to understand. There is a gap between its rhetoric and its actions, between its sense of grievance and inflammatory behaviour and between its ideological and its national interests. Nor are its actions consistent.’ 2
Once the Israelis pulled their troops back to behind their own lines, UN forces with UNIFIL continued with their patrols, which were as successful as respective national units allowed them to be. FijiBatt soldiers were as professional as they come, but the Ghanaians soldiers and those from some other third World countries wallowed at the other end of a rather pathetic scale. This patrol, involving Scandanavians, was in a Druze-controlled region in the Shouff Mountains. (Author’s collection)
In the past, Hizbollah’s Fire Support Unit was responsible for most of the shelling of Israel and even today – though that organization goes under other nomenclatures – much of its training takes place in the Beka’a Valley. There is also what is called the Islamic Resistance, which specializes in infiltration and sabotage. The leadership of all these groups is divided into cells; one rarely has any knowledge of the other.
The actual operational planning by Hizbollah – that which is not fomented in Syria or Iran – takes place in The Dahia, deep in the southern suburbs of Beirut, still a fundamentalist stronghold even though it was almost all destroyed by Israeli Air Force attrition raids in 2006. From there the influence fans out southwards to Tyre or Nabatiya.
It is important to accept, a UN officer at Naqoura explained, that while the Hizbollah political establishment had been formally constituted, its military wing or wings had no fixed address. He went on: ‘The Israelis are always searching for them, so they’re constantly on the move… many of their leaders were assassinated before – though not so often today – but they’ve learnt some hard lessons. Consequently they take no chances.’
In more recent times, Hizbollah in all its guises, as even its enemies acknowledge, has powerfully emerged from its self-imposed obscurity and can hardly be construed as anything but an extremely wellorganized political and military grouping. It is a lot better motivated than the Lebanese government itself: it has its own public relations office that is forthcoming to any person or any government prepared to lend an ear. Nor is this limited to lip service. All attacks on Israeli and SLA positions are routinely recorded by Hizbollah’s own travelling film units, which they take into action with them. Such events are afterwards displayed on the Al Manaar and Al Jazeera television networks.
I watched some clips and I was impressed. These people knew what they were doing. Discipline, movement under fire and tactics were professionally executed. Training was thorough; much of it conducted by Iranians and, as I was to discover afterwards, included underwater demolition, Special Forces training (that incorporated airborne jump courses) as well as many of the more obscure tactics linked to evasion and escape.
There are many people in Lebanon who equate the activities of Hizbollah with those of the Palestinians in the country in the early 1980s. They are both right and wrong: while their anti-Zionist objectives might be identical, their styles of implementation are very different indeed.
In their own attempts to incite war against the ‘hated Zionists’, Palestinian leaders came to regard themselves as above the law. While similar assumptions have become evident in Lebanon more recently about Hizbollah, they’re not quite there yet.
Meanwhile, Jerusalem stirs the pot. It is no secret that Israel has always had hopes of generating friction between various Lebanese factions, especially with Hizbollah, now its prime security objective in the Middle East. More often than not, Israeli intelligence agents inside Lebanon – there are many of them – will encourage dissention, suspicion, and sometimes, through third parties, propagate confrontation, often using liberal amounts of disinformation.
It consequently came as no secret in the spring and summer of 2009, that Lebanese security officials arrested several dozen Israeli spies in the country, some of whom had been active for decades. Their numbers included high-ranking government and police officials, a Lebanese Army general or two as well as some agents who were otherwise regarded by their peers as totally committed Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. In a curious twist in June 2009, Jerusalem admitted that it had been active in Lebanon, and several other Arab states.
More recently, an Israeli spokesman said, the focus had switched to Hizbollah, though he was not prepared to say whether any of those arrested across the border were adherents to the Party of God.
For all that, the main difference between what took place in Lebanon a quarter of a century ago and what is happening today, is that Hizbollah has always had a big brother in Tehran. Nor is it a secret that the influence of Tehran’s Mullahs has become more pervasive. The Supreme Spiritual Leader in Iran – powerful and oil rich beyond compare – gives Nasrallah just about all he asks for.
The Palestinians in Lebanon in the old days, by contrast, had only themselves. There were always promises from the Egyptians, the Saudis and the rest, but lit
tle ever came of it.
Lebanon, we must remember, is the least devout of the Muslim countries in the Middle East since the integration of Christian, Druze and Islamic fighters after decades of civil war. There are many Muslims – particularly within the country’s Sunni community – who regard Hizbollah with great suspicion and who voice fears that the Party of God, if not checked, could lead the nation into another conflict. The majority have had as much as they can handle of extremists, in whatever guise.
Those who were prepared to discuss the matter with a stranger, were of the opinion that if the Party of God had its way tomorrow, it would immediately institute Shariah Law. At its most extreme, as in Saudi Arabia, that requires the cutting off of hands for theft, the prohibition of strong drink and stoning for sexual or commercial offences. They’d put every woman in a chador, as their principals have already done in Iran.
For now, the majority of Lebanese sit back uneasily and observe. They hate the Israelis who occupied much of their country for so many years and any attempt to harm the State of Israel, to cause casualties or dislocation – legal, clandestine or otherwise – gets loud applause. If that were Hizbollah’s only motive, then fine. But it is not. Just about everybody in Lebanon fears that Nasrallah has more of what they term ‘a hidden agenda’ than just ‘getting at the Jews’.
For the moment then, Beirut does nothing. They did very little about the Palestinians either, at least until they had to and by then it was nearly too late. It has never been lost on many Lebanese that, like it or not, it was the Jews who pulled those nuts out of the fire when the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon in 1982 and forced Yassir Arafat and his militants to find some other base from which to wage their wars against the Jews
What has also become apparent in the past few years is that nobody in Lebanon underestimates the power of Hizbollah. The extent of their influence and their ability to match needs was well demonstrated during and after the 2006 Israeli attack.
Earlier, in 1982 when the Jewish nation went to war in South Lebanon with aircraft and artillery, and again in 1993 for seven days during ‘Operation Accountability’, it was the Hizbollah presence in South Lebanon that picked up the pieces and helped those who had been worst affected by hostilities. The homeless were sheltered, given food and, where needed, money. Hizbollah was at the vanguard when it came to repairing much of the damage caused by Israeli artillery barrages and ordinary folk do not easily forget such gestures.
More brutality followed in 2006, when many thousands of Lebanese houses were damaged or destroyed. These were ugly displays of Schrecklichkeit that each time left hundreds of innocent people dead. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese fled northwards to safety – there were more than half-a-million refugees. Around 1,000 Lebanese and 158 Israelis were killed (most of the Israelis being IDF soldiers) including 43 people killed inside Israel by Hizbollah rocket attacks.
One of the consequences of the earlier ceasefire, which again was mediated jointly by the United States and Syria, was what was officially referred to as an ‘understanding’. Nothing was signed mind you, but it meant that Israel would no longer shell civilian targets in Lebanon. For its part, Hizbollah would stop hurling its Katyushas into Upper Galilee.
The damage done by Israel in these incursions was enormous. The United Nations immediately went to work to assess how they could help and how much it would cost. At the time, the consensus at UN headquarters in New York was that the problems faced appeared to be insoluble.
Meanwhile, Hizbollah got busy. With its own people and in-house resources, the movement repaired or rebuilt most of the damaged buildings in three weeks. Before the UN inspectors had even completed their assessments, a lot of the work was already done. Hizbollah didn’t ask the United Nations for a cent: everything they needed came from Iran. Clearly, the Arab world was impressed.
What emerged from these events, which were both bloody and widespread, was the insuperable vitality of the Party of God. It was perceived – and it is still regarded so today – that the movement’s ability is applied with a dedication and exactness that is nothing short of Cartesian. The same applies to Hizbollah’s approach to business, whether in the realms of the sacrosanct or with basic commercial or financial matters. The transition has been nothing short of astonishing.
Hizbollah is astute in all its transactions. While they might drive a hard bargain, their word is their bond once a deal is done. Small wonder then that Israel, the United States, Britain and even the Russians take Hizbollah seriously.
In the latter regard, Hizbollah is known to have close links to guerrilla separatists in Chechnya, with Hizbollah combatants known to have been killed in this war too.
On a more visible level, Hizbollah is always most active among the ordinary people. It builds schools and hospitals, pays war pensions to the wounded and the dependants of those killed in action. It cares for orphans and looks after the old, all done quietly, efficiently and without fuss in one of the most mendacious of Middle East states. Within its sphere of influence, corruption is likely to be punished with death.
In turn, Hizbollah makes certain demands. The sine qua non is one of unquestioning loyalty to the cause. Everything starts and ends with Allah and his Prophet. You are either for or against Hizbollah; there is no middle way. It also demands a level of obedience and collaboration that is absolute, almost in the historical tradition of Roman Catholic clergy towards their superiors. Most importantly, the Party of God insists on educating the young, with its own Mullahs supervising all instruction.
The most significant consequence of Hizbollah activity is that a whole generation of young people now regard Iran as the centre of their universe and Shi’ite dogma as infallible law. With its rigorous social code (no bad thing in itself in a country where most young people lost their bearings in the civil war) and extreme views, it has become a power.
What most Lebanese (and Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and, of course, Europeans and the Americans) fear most is that Iran might use these people to carry out its own programme of regional domination, even though nobody wants to be dragged into another war. And then, one needs to ask, what will happen when Iran acquires its own nuclear bomb? Even if it is a primitive ‘atomic’ device, Iran’s cadres speak about it often enough.3
There is also a genuine fear that since much of Hizbollah propaganda is directed at that part of the population with the least to lose and the most to gain, that the Mullahs might ultimately end up with a good share of political power in their quadrant of the Levant. We’re also aware that such things tend to lead to conflict, which, going back a bit was one of the original causes of war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s.
Many people suggest that it could happen again, but this time, under a totally different guise and, once more, in Lebanon.4
CHAPTER TWENTY - FOUR
Tete Convoy in Mozambique
‘For twelve wearisome years, the Portuguese and the mesticos, those of mixed European descent and the six million Africans have been learning to live with their grim little war. On every street in every town and village there are soldiers, white and black, swaggering and conspicuous in their jungle camouflage uniforms. The original 3,000 has become 60,000.’
Al Venter’s Africa at War, 19731
WHILE PORTUGAL FOUGHT ITS MILITARY campaigns in Africa, the town of Tete – a strategic African settlement dominated by a huge suspension bridge across the Zambezi River – came to represent one of the last of the embattled outposts of an imperial tradition that had lasted half a millennium. When I visited the place in the early 1970s, what was going on in this vast land on the east coast of Africa was a chapter of recent history about to close.
I’d gone through Tete with Michael Knipe – the London Times’ man in southern Africa at the time – and we were to discover an archetypal Portuguese-style settlement similar to those that could be found in many parts of the southern half of the continent. These were critical times in what European pundits would term ‘Afr
ica’s Liberation Wars’.
But for the great Zambezi, Tete could have been mistaken for Luso in Angola or Cacheu in Portuguese Guinea, where the first of Prince Henry’s navigators made landfall on African soil looking for fresh water during their bid to discover a sea route to the spice islands of the East.
By the time we arrived, it was clear that the ongoing conflict in the adjoining region had been tough, especially for the hardscrabble black population for whom, apart from the military, opportunities to earn those few extra escudos were sparse. Almost all of the town’s Portuguese civilians had left a year or two before, in part because normal commercial activity had ended. More likely though, they had been intimidated by the war as more often than not, hostilities would start at the edge of town, almost as soon as the sun disappeared over the jungles to the west.
With all the soldiers and military vehicles about, there was no mistaking that armed rebellion was on Tete’s doorstep. As hostilities gradually became more intense, mines began to take a bigger toll. There wasn’t a day that we didn’t spot vehicles towed in from the bush or hauled back to town on low-loaders after they’d been blown up or ambushed. Many more trucks were destroyed by landmines than in enemy ambushes, their cargoes either removed or, when oversized – like mining equipment or industrial plant – abandoned, hopefully to be recovered another day. The rebels would see to it that they rarely were.
Such was the nature of insurgency in this remote corner of tropical Africa that fringed the Indian Ocean, a very different kind of war compared to what was going on just then in South-East Asia.