Not a single international chain store or restaurant was in sight. No one would have invested foreign capital in the dahiyeh even if Hezbollah would have allowed it—and Hezbollah didn’t. Economic globalization reeked of a sinister plot in Hezbollah circles. Those who earned substantial amounts of money independent of the Party of God would no longer need Hezbollah’s social services; could form their own civil society organizations if they wanted; and might, at least in the long run, demand more freedom to operate without stifling controls as Lebanese could elsewhere.
I brought a small tourist camera with me. It easily fit in my pocket, and I could quickly take pictures through the windshield without drawing attention as long as the car wasn’t stopped.
“Don’t let them see your camera,” Charles said, though his warning was hardly necessary. As we rounded a corner onto a main artery through the area, a stocky militiaman took an AK-47 from the trunk of a car and slung it over his shoulder. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would be pleased to appear in my pictures.
Windows in several buildings were sandbagged. Surveillance watchtowers were erected in front of restaurants and stores.
“They’ve definitely ramped up the security since the last time I was down here,” Charles said. “They’re extremely paranoid now that the country has turned against Syria.”
Much of the construction was illegal and had been built when waves of poor Shias fled north from the Israeli border region to the outskirts of Beirut during the war. Known at that time as the “belt of misery” by Lebanese and as Hooterville4 by U.S. peacekeeping Marines, the area was still one of the poorest and most ramshackle urban places in the country even fifteen years later.
Most of Lebanon’s Shias had always been locked out of the bustling economy and were still locked out in 2005. They had been, for most of their history, simple people who worked the land while Christians and Sunnis in the coastal cities supplied Lebanon with her merchants, traders, and professionals. For Westerners, Beirut was the economic gate to the East, and vice versa. The Shias in the south and in Bekaa Valley were neither needed nor relevant, from Beirut’s point of view. Nor were the Shias, unfamiliar with the city and its ways, really welcome.
Lebanese American historian Fouad Ajami was born and raised a Shia Muslim in the south before his family moved to Beirut when he was a child. Some of his aunts and uncles of an earlier generation tried to build a life for themselves in the city and failed. “Beirut was too harsh and alien for them,” he wrote5 in Beirut: City of Regrets. “It was a Sunni Muslim world, and the generation that preceded mine was not prepared for the passage.”
His own generation managed in the late 1940s, but it wasn’t easy. “We were strangers to Beirut’s polish, to her missionary schools, to her Levantine manners,” he continued. “My generation among the Muslims . . . did not share the Christians’ romance with France. A cultural split divided the city: in Christian East Beirut, the admired, foreign culture remained that of France, the prestigious schools taught in French. In Muslim West Beirut, among Muslim Sunnis and Shia alike and among the Palestinians, the dominant foreign language of instruction was English, and the dominant foreign culture that of America.”
In 2005, the dominant foreign culture just south of Beirut was Iranian. It was a warped and distorted version of Iranian culture, however. Persia’s cosmopolitanism and sophistication, its penchant for fine wine and the arts, were utterly absent. Only Iranian politics and religion were exported to the dahiyeh—and then only Iranian politics and religion as interpreted and mandated by Iran’s current Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Roughly a third of Lebanon’s population, but only about a seventh6 of the Muslim population worldwide, is Shia. The community has long been haunted by an inferiority and persecution complex, and they haven’t been entirely imagining things. Before Saddam Hussein was overthrown, Iraq’s Sunni minority brutally suppressed the Shia majority. The Shias had been ill-treated and ill-served in Lebanon for as long as they could remember, and in Iran they were as oppressed by the Shah as everyone else, even though they made up the overwhelming majority there. And they were thoroughly repressed in many of the Arab states in the Gulf.
“At its core,” Ajami wrote7 in The Vanished Imam, “Shia history was a tale of dispossession.” The great rift in Islamic civilization between Sunnis and Shias began just a few years after the establishment of the religion itself by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. The Shias believe the Prophet chose his cousin Ali as his successor, but Ali was murdered and the Prophet’s family was shunted aside by usurpers of power. Ali’s partisans—the Shia—have been marginalized and oppressed almost everywhere ever since by the illegitimate, the despotic, and the corrupt.
The Shia tradition is one of quietism, according to which clerics should remain withdrawn from politics while awaiting the return of the Mahdi, or the hidden Twelfth Imam, with Jesus Christ at his side to bring peace and justice to the world. Shia theology says the Mahdi will return when the world has fallen into chaos and war, and in the meantime, the pious must wait and leave the governing of the world to the worldly.
Khomeini changed that. He believed deliberate action by the righteous might actually hasten the Mahdi’s return if chaos and war were ignited by men. In the meantime, according to his innovative Velayat-e Faqih ideology—rule by Islamic jurists—the people of Iran, the Muslim world generally, and eventually the human race totally, must submit to the authority of theocratic clerical leadership. Many, if not most, Iranians eventually came to see Velayat-e Faqih as a Persian variant of fascism, but the Khomeinists were fully in charge of the state by that time.
Khomeini’s revolution emboldened the ideological hard-liners among the Shias in Iran. And he emboldened some of Lebanon’s Shias by giving them voices, guns, ideas, and—for the first time ever—power.
Many Lebanese Shias found Khomeini’s message seductive, weary as they were from real and imagined abuses from Lebanese Sunnis and Christians, and from Israelis. His ideology, though, was not one of liberation—at least not as Westerners understand it. Individual rights didn’t exist in Khomeini’s world, only the rights of the community of believers against its enemies. Even many in that community suffered persecution. Inside Iran itself, clerics were more likely to be imprisoned by the Islamic Republic regime for not toeing the Khomeinist line than any other group in the country.
I saw a number of portraits in Hezbollah’s dahiyeh of the deceased cleric Musa Sadr, a far more reasonable figure in Lebanese history and politics. He was born in Iran, but he spent many of the latter years of his life in Lebanon agitating for greater economic and political rights for disadvantaged Shias. In 1974, a short year before the outbreak of war, he founded the Movement of the Disinherited, which later established the Amal militia.
Sadr himself vanished forever when he traveled to Libya in 1978 to meet with that country’s bizarre Stalinist tyrant Muammar al-Gaddafi. Libyan officials insisted Sadr disappeared in Italy, but travel records indicate that he never left Libya.
During the civil war, Amal’s militia fought pitched battles with Palestinians in the refugee camps and later with Hezbollah for control of parts of Beirut. By 2005, though, Amal had scrapped its vaguely leftist ideology and devolved into a patronage system and political machine that residents of Chicago might recognize. It had also become Hezbollah’s staunch ally despite efforts by Druze chief Walid Jumblatt and Sunni boss Saad Hariri to flip its leader and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri to their side.
The Shias were a formidable force in Lebanon now that the secular and religious halves of the community were united. Hezbollah led the coalition, of course, as it was the stronger half. Amal, though, was more than willing to accept Hezbollah’s leadership for sectarian as well as political reasons. Never before did the Shias have so much might and power in Lebanon. The Christians, Sunnis, and Druze who formerly shunned them now feared them. Hezbollah, you might say, wa
s the revenge of the Shia.
This didn’t sit well with the rest of the country. “Think of it this way,” one Lebanese person rather crudely explained it to me. “Imagine a bunch of poor Mexican immigrants all of a sudden becoming the most powerful armed force in America and ordering the White House around.”
Posters of the slain Rafik Hariri, so ubiquitous elsewhere in the country, were entirely missing from Hezbollah’s dahiyeh. Hariri was the zaim, or political patron, of the Sunnis. Hassan Nasrallah wouldn’t stand for anyone in his captured community showing allegiance to the leadership of another. Nor would he give them the opportunity to even feel any loyalty to another. Hezbollah would have none of Hariri’s postwar reconstruction projects in its territory, and the dreary urban blight of the dahiyeh was a predictable consequence.
Political crime in Lebanon was out of control, but crime of the usual sort was almost unheard of. Peter Grimsditch, managing editor of Beirut’s English-language Daily Star newspaper, told me he thought Lebanon’s system was best described as “civilized anarchy,” that he hadn’t been to any country in the world where he felt the power of the state bearing down on him less.
Hezbollah’s stronghold was different. The Party of God ruled as a miniature one-party state. Dissenting voices were smashed. Competing political movements were absolutely verboten.
I asked a Lebanese man who used to live there what would happen if he walked into the street and shouted, “I hate Hezbollah!”
“I’d get my ass kicked,” he said. “No one would do that.”
With Iranian patronage, Hezbollah provided schooling and social services for people in need. The long-term effects were catastrophic. Shia children who graduated from Hezbollah schools grew up with a mindset radically different from those given a mainstream education by the state and by private English- and French-language schools. They grew up captive to Hezbollah economics, dependent on its social services for survival, while kept deliberately on the margins of Lebanon’s moderately prosperous and increasingly global economy by their supposed savior.
Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah wanted its people to be poor—not so poor that they lived in misery and might revolt, but poor enough that they couldn’t break free of dependency. Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih ideology, demanding total life guardianship by state-approved clerics, had been successfully exported.
“This place is creepy,” I said to Charles, Hassane, and Rama, overwhelmed by the poverty and propaganda around me.
“It is,” Rama said. “But don’t get too creeped out by it. They won’t wave a gun in your face or anything like that unless you do something stupid.”
“This is the last place I intend to do something stupid,” I said.
“Stop here,” Charles said as we rounded a corner. Hassane pulled into a parking space.
“This guy,” Charles said and pointed at a man selling sandwiches from a corner stand, “sells some of the best shawarma in Lebanon.”
So we stepped out of the car and ordered some sandwiches. Most passers-by paid us little mind, but I picked up hostile and suspicious stares from a few young men and even a couple of women.
Some of the women surprised me. Most dressed conservatively like Rama, but a few refused to wear headscarves and opted instead for tight blouses, spray-on jeans, and knee-high boots. They looked like they belonged in Beirut’s Christian Achrafieh district, not in territory ruled by an Islamist militia. The Iranian government didn’t even let foreign non-Muslim women walk around Tehran dressed like that. Khomeini believed women’s hair emitted dangerous sex rays that corrupted the virtue of men, and he required that every last strand be covered in public. In this way, at least, Hezbollah was more liberal than its Iranian master.
Hezbollah’s captive Lebanese were freer than Iranians in other ways, too. They could drive or even walk out of Hezbollah’s territory and hang out in Beirut whenever they felt like it. They weren’t forced to leave the country if they wanted to drink in public or dress as they pleased, as Iranians were. Most couldn’t afford the relatively high cost of a night out in the city’s fashionable districts, and those who could were often made to feel unwelcome by some of the Christians and Sunnis, but some managed to enjoy the freedoms and charms of Beirut even so. Hezbollah may have wanted to stop them, but it couldn’t.
Some Shias felt Beirut’s proximity to the dahiyeh therefore was liberating. I found it disturbing and potentially oppressive. East and West Beirut were so unshackled from state power and control, they were practically libertarian, if not downright anarchist, as Peter Grimsditch had said, but Hezbollahland was a de facto sovereign police state. And when I returned to Beirut and realized how close I lived to Hezbollah, I could practically feel its breath on my neck.
No country can be ruled effectively by separate authorities—especially when one of those authorities is more or less democratic while the other pledges loyalty to a foreign dictatorship. Lebanon’s post-Syrian schism was the beginning of a transition stage. Partition was neither possible nor desirable in such a small country where each sect was dispersed geographically. Eventually, the state would have to absorb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah would devour the state. And Hezbollah, in 2005, had far more dedicated fighters and firepower than the legal authorities.
The Sunni, Christian, and Druze parts of the country had mostly recovered their sovereignty and had reverted to Lebanon’s democratic political norms. But Hezbollahland was still mobilized for internal and external war. Peace, democracy, and genuine national unity required not only elections but also the disarmament of the country’s final well-armed militia. That wouldn’t be possible unless the Lebanese could somehow wall themselves off from the region around them as the Israelis and Tunisians had done. And that wouldn’t be possible while Hezbollah’s base of support welcomed Iranian and Syrian power.
“They have much more power than the rest of us,” a Christian bartender said to me late at night in a popular pub. He looked exhausted by a lifetime of severe political stress. “We can feel it.”
CHAPTER TWO
hanging with hezbollah
Israel is our enemy. This is an aggressive, illegal, and illegitimate entity, which has no future in our land. Its destiny is manifested in our motto: “Death to Israel.”
—HASSAN NASRALLAH
In 1984, Hezbollah kidnapped the CIA’s Beirut station chief William Buckley and tortured him to death. His remains weren’t returned to the United States until they were delivered in a plastic bag on the side of the airport road in 1991.1
Lebanon in the 1980s was ferociously dangerous for everyone, especially for Westerners. Civilians as well as officials were hunted. Hezbollah kidnapped dozens, including American University of Beirut President David Dodge and Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson, who was held for seven years.
“The hostage seizures were fully consistent with Hezbollah’s declared goal of expunging America from Lebanon, its citizens as well as its diplomatic presence,” historian Augustus Richard Norton wrote2 in Hezbollah: A Short History. “Western hostages were held in Lebanon in despicable conditions, often alone and chained to radiators for months on end, denied even the slightest dignity.”
Hezbollah’s kidnapping spree made the country so dangerous for Westerners that the State Department prohibited the use of American passports for travel there until 1997.3 Westerners outside Lebanon were also at risk.
In 1985, Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh and two other gunmen hijacked TWA flight 847 from Athens to Rome and diverted it to Beirut’s international airport. Seven passengers with Jewishsounding names were taken off the plane and detained. Mughniyeh identified passenger Robert Stethem as a U.S. Navy diver on vacation, shot him in the head, and threw his body onto the tarmac. The remaining passengers—who were held now at gunpoint by nearly a dozen Hezbollah militiamen in a war zone—weren’t released until two weeks later, presumably after Israel agreed to release 700 Lebanese Shias from prison.
Argentine authorities later charged Mughniyeh
with wounding and killing hundreds in Buenos Aires with truck and car bombs at the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish cultural center.4 The United States fingered him for destroying a Khobar Towers housing block in Saudi Arabia with a truck bomb, killing nineteen American military servicemen and wounding 372 others from various countries.
Hezbollah was still officially listed as a terrorist organization by the United States government in 2005, but it had been easing up on Westerners for a while. After the Israeli military withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000, it was rightly perceived as much less immediately dangerous, if not for Israelis, then at least for Americans. Not for years had any Westerners been kidnapped or killed by Hezbollah in Lebanon or anywhere else. An official “no snatch” policy was firmly in place, and everyone in Hezbollah was forced to adhere to it. The party even opened a press office in the dahiyeh where reporters like me could meet its officials.
So I called Hussein Naboulsi in the media relations department to ask if I could set up an interview.
“All-oe?” he said when he picked up.
“Hello, sir,” I said. “Is this Mr. Hussein Naboulsi?”
After an uncomfortable pause, he said, suspiciously, “Yes.”
“Hello, sir,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” he said.
“I am an American journalist,” I said, “and I’d like to set up an appointment for an interview.”
“I cannot talk to you,” he said. “I do not have permission to talk to the press.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Someone gave me this number and told me you were the person I needed to talk to.”
I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. So after another uncomfortable pause, I continued.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 5
