Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (24 page)

They instead founded Amam 05—an acronym for an Arabic phrase meaning “to the front,” and ’05 was for the year that changed Lebanon.

Andraos, who is an Orthodox Christian, was busy organizing three projects when I visited her office. Amam 05 had mobilized more than sixty nongovernment organizations to form a common lobby to sustain pressure on all Lebanon’s politicians. It had also just received a World Bank grant to set up a municipal council in one of Lebanon’s poorest areas, near the Syrian border. The project was investing power and funds in the young. It included municipal elections—just for youth—to select a council, identify the region’s needs, develop projects, and then implement them. For the summer, Amam 05 had also designed a traveling exhibition with games to teach the concept of citizenship to the young; it was scheduled to hit every Lebanese city.

“March 14 petered out because there was no structure,” Andraos said. “We are trying to build institutions and generate different ideas and educate.”

The fledgling civil-society groups are no match for the warlords and entrenched clans. Yet they had begun to grab some of the new space created since Hariri’s assassination. They represented a radical departure from traditional and deferential Lebanese politics.

“I’ve undergone a total transformation,” Andraos said. “I went from someone who was disinterested in Lebanon’s politics, sort of sleepwalking and living in a bubble. I was awakened at Hariri’s death. I’ve become obsessed. And I’m not alone. There are others like me.”

In 2005,
Time
magazine named Andraos one of thirty-seven heroes—“extraordinary people who illuminate and inspire, persevere and provoke. They take on challenges the rest of the world often prefers to avoid, reminding us all of just how much a single person, even in the face of adversity, can accomplish.”
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I asked Andraos if she was disappointed at the difficulty in achieving enduring change in Lebanon.

“People forget how much has changed. More has happened in the past year than in the past thirty-five years,” she responded. “Why should we feel disappointed? It will take fifteen years if we all start working now. But fifteen years is OK. We’ve wasted the last thirty years doing nothing.”

The Shadows

I
n the process of change, poverty and political disadvantage are the wild cards. They spawn the unpredictable and the unconventional.

The outskirts of Beirut are known as the
dahiya,
Arabic for “suburb.” It is a generic term, but
dahiya
has come to mean the poor, dense, and sometimes dangerous maze of slums on the capital’s southern fringe. Its dirty alleys are crammed with concrete-block shanties and shabby apartment buildings packed together. Its chaotic streets are clogged by decrepit old cars with bad mufflers. Laundry hangs from windows; gnarled masses of wires dangle from one building across to the next, illegally tapping into electricity, phone, and television lines.

While lights burn brightly in trendy downtown Beirut, the
dahiya
is often eerily dark more than two decades after electricity became sporadic, a casualty of Lebanon’s civil war, Israel’s three interventions, and government neglect. The
dahiya
is ignored or avoided by anyone who does not live there.

The
dahiya
is separate politically too. The scruffy suburbs are the stronghold of Hezbollah, the Party of God. Since the 1980s, the Shiite movement has evolved into the most powerful actor in Lebanon. It was almost as if the country had two political stages—one for Hezbollah and then one for all the rest.

I went to the
dahiya
one evening in April 2006 to see Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah and the most controversial leader in the Middle East.

Nasrallah is a man of God, gun, and government, a cross between Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini and Latin America’s Che Guevera, a mix of charismatic Islamic populist and a wily guerilla tactician. He took over the Shiite movement in 1992. He was thirty-one at the time, a virtual kid by the standards of either senior clergy or Lebanon’s aging warlords.

But he soon built the widest following of any politician in Lebanon. Although he is only a midranking religious leader, Nasrallah became a local cult icon, a rock-star cleric. Lines from his speeches were popular ring tones on cellular phones. His face was a popular computer screen saver, too. I met youth in both Lebanon and Syria—many not religious, some not even Shiite—who gathered friends for parties to watch broadcasts of his passionate oratory. Wall posters, key rings, T-shirts, and phone cards all carried his picture. Shops sold CDs and DVDs of his speeches. Taxis played them instead of music.

Even Christians and Sunnis opposed to Hezbollah acknowledged Nasrallah’s impact and style.

“I think Hezbollah is the biggest threat to the stability of the Lebanese system. It was created by Iran, and for years Syria served up whatever it needed on a silver platter,” Michael Young, a political analyst and columnist for
The Daily Star,
told me over tea at a café in Christian East Beirut.

“But everyone thinks Nasrallah is a remarkable figure,” he added.

“He is impressive as a populist leader and quite charismatic.”

Israeli officials reluctantly concurred. “He is the shrewdest leader in the Arab world—and the most dangerous,” the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon, told me.

Running Hezbollah from the
dahiya,
Nasrallah straddled the often blurred line between religious and secular authority. He was trained, briefly, at seminaries in both Iraq and Iran. He rose to power in Lebanon’s last private army—the only Arab force that has ever made Israel retreat. In a popular photograph, he is thrusting a Kalashnikov assault rifle into the air, surrounded by cheering Hezbollah fighters.

Yet Hezbollah also won fourteen seats in parliament in 2005, one of the larger blocs.
²
And Nasrallah held one of the coveted few seats at Lebanon’s national dialogue of top Christian and Muslim leaders.

In one breath, the Hezbollah chief could sound like a prototypical militant, only to defy the stereotype in the next breath. A few weeks before I saw him, he gave a speech coinciding with the Danish newspaper publication of cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed, which triggered rioting in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East that led to more than one hundred deaths. Nasrallah condemned “those fools who did wrong to our prophet.” But he also criticized the attack on the Danish Embassy in Beirut as a serious mistake, said the perpetrators should be punished, and urged a “disciplined” response.

“Let us stop this nonsense,” he said. “As Muslims and Christians, we should continue to cooperate and unite in order to reject the offense to our prophets and our holy belongings.”

In the same speech, however, he extolled suicide bombings. “As long as there are fighters who are ready for martyrdom, this country will remain safe.”
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The
dahiya
was plastered with posters of young men who had died as human bombs under his command.

Nasrallah’s headquarters was behind a tall, well-guarded gate in an area of the
dahiya
that Hezbollah cordoned off as a security zone. As stipulated, I arrived in the car of a Hezbollah official. But a guard still thoroughly inspected the trunk, peered under the hood, and ran a long pole with a mirror under the car to check for bombs. The steel gate then slid open. Inside, I went through a metal detector, a meticulous bag search, and still had to leave my cell phone and metal pens behind. Several bearded bodyguards stood in the hall; they all wore dark shirts, dark suits, and no ties—Iranian style. They also had the same type of communication devices that the White House Secret Service uses—an earpiece attached to a wire that runs under a shirt to a mouthpiece at the wrist.

Nasrallah has one of the riskiest jobs in the Middle East. Ten days before we met in 2006, a cell of al Qaeda, which had recently begun to take root in Lebanon, had tried to assassinate him. The Sunni purists of al Qaeda loathe Shiites as heretics. Three months later, Israeli officials admitted that they had hoped to eliminate Nasrallah during their bombardment of Beirut. It would not have been the first hit. In 1992, an ambush by Israeli helicopter gunships assassinated Nasrallah’s predecessor, along with his wife and child, as they drove in a motorcade through southern Lebanon.

The United States has also long sought to hold Hezbollah’s leadership accountable for attacks on American targets during the 1980s. In 2002, a senior State Department official called its followers “the A-Team of terrorism” and pledged “their time will come.”
⁴

Inside the headquarters, I was ushered into a reception hall, a long room ringed with faux-French brocade couches. I was led to one of two chairs at the far end. A few minutes later, Nasrallah’s guards opened the door and glanced around. Then the Hezbollah chief walked in.

Nasrallah has a commanding presence. He has a full beard, a pudgy, full figure, and large glasses. He wore a stone ring on his pinky. His dark robes, like a military uniform, implied authority; they swayed rhythmically as he walked across the room. As with many devout Muslims, he does not shake hands with women to whom he is not related. Nasrallah speaks with a slight speech impediment, a lisp particularly noticeable in words with r’s. But he does not seem self-conscious about it.

Nasrallah had always wanted to lead Lebanon’s Shiites. It was the first thing he told me. He told the tale with a touch of self-deprecating humor, a note he often injects into his speeches, to great public effect.

“Ever since I was nine years old, I had plans for the day when I would start doing this,” he explained, smiling and pulling his robes around him.

“When I was ten or eleven, my grandmother had a scarf. It was black, but a long one. I used to wrap it around my head and say to them, ‘I’m a cleric. You need to pray behind me.’”

Nasrallah’s name carries religious meaning. “Nasser” means victory, “Allah” means God—thus “God’s victory.” He did not come from a religious family, however. He was born on August 31, 1960 in a Christian suburb of Beirut, the first of nine children. His father was a fruit and vegetable vendor who later opened a small grocery. The family fled back to their ancestral village in the Shiite-dominated south after the civil war erupted.

That’s when he got religion, Nasrallah explained. He was the first in his family to become a cleric.

Nasrallah’s story is a microcosm of the rise of Lebanon’s Shiites. Until their influx into the
dahiya,
Shiites were concentrated in the farming towns of the south and the verdant plains of the eastern Bekaa Valley; Maronites, Sunnis, and Druze dominated the cosmopolitan cities and scenic mountains. For most Shiites, life was still feudal until the 1960s. Most were poorly educated. Most worked in agriculture—in apple, citrus, fig, and peach orchards, corn fields, banana groves, or vineyards spread out on the rocky hills. Many families had worked the same small pieces of land for generations. Back then, the government allocated less than one percent of the state budget for public works and health care in Shiite areas.
⁵
Few Shiites engaged in politics. Activists tended toward the small Communist Party, one of the few multisectarian movements, and long led by a Christian.

Two events originally mobilized the Shiites. The first was creation of the Movement for the Disinherited in 1974 by Imam Musa al Sadr, an intense, charismatic cleric who wore a black turban denoting descent from the Prophet Mohammed. He gave poor Shiites a political identity, built a network of small schools, vocational centers, and clinics not provided by the state, and cautioned other sects about hogging power.

“The deprived are, unfortunately, the time-bomb for conflicts,” Sadr warned.
⁶

Sadr accepted Lebanon’s ecumenical essence. He cofounded Lebanon’s Social Movement with the Greek Catholic Archbishop, lectured in Christian churches, and formed an alliance with Christian spiritual leaders in southern Lebanon. But he also protected his own. On the eve of Lebanon’s civil war, he formed an armed wing called the Lebanese Resistance Battalions. Its acronym was Amal, the Arabic word for “hope.” It was the first Shiite militia.

Nasrallah was captivated by Sadr. “I always dreamed of becoming like him and doing what he did,” he told me. He put up Sadr’s picture in his father’s small grocery. Then he joined Amal. At age fifteen, about the time the civil war started, Nasrallah also enrolled in a seminary.

Sadr was of Lebanese descent, but he was born in Iran and trained in its seminaries. He was typical of the cross-fertilization of Shiites in Lebanon and Iran, dating back almost five centuries. Clerics from Lebanon had helped Persia’s monarchy convert from Sunni to Shiite Islam in the sixteenth century. The conversion was largely for political reasons. Persia wanted to differentiate itself and distance its people from the rival Ottoman Empire, ruled by a Sunni caliph, by breeding a separate identity.
⁷

The Shiite connection deepened over the centuries. As the largest minority in the Islamic world—roughly fifteen percent of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims—Shiites share a common sense of persecution. The Iran-Lebanon link endured through religion, politics, and marriage. Sadr’s niece married Mohammed Khatami, a cleric who went on to become Iran’s president in 1997.

Sadr mysteriously disappeared in 1978. He was on a trip to Libya with two aides. Their next stop was supposed to be Italy. Their luggage showed up in Rome, but they were never heard from again. Sadr’s fate—whether murdered or still imprisoned in Libya—has never been determined. It remains a source of obsessive anger among the Shiites. I once interviewed a young Amal commander who had hijacked seven planes in the early 1980s just to demand Sadr’s release.

Amal was eventually taken over by Nabih Berri, a bland and suited lawyer who had an American green card and a family in Dearborn, Michigan. Berri used traditional patronage and political favors to stay in power. Amal gradually became just another Lebanese political party, losing much of the passion central to its early appeal and to traditions of the Shiite faith.

The second event that mobilized the Shiites was Israel’s invasion in 1982 to roust the Palestine Liberation Organization.
⁸
Ironically, many Shiites initially welcomed the Israelis—with traditional rosewater and rice—in gratitude for liberating them. For more than a decade, Yasser Arafat’s guerrillas had usurped large chunks of the south to wage war against Israel. The local economy was hard hit; Shiites had also come under fire during Israel’s counterattacks. In less than three months, the invasion forced the Palestinians to leave Lebanon. And no group was happier than the Shiites to see them go.

But then the Israelis stayed—and stayed. The invasion turned into a long-term occupation. And Lebanon’s Shiites then turned on the Israelis.

Most of the Arab world paid only lip service to protesting Israel’s invasion. But Iran’s zealous new revolutionary regime eagerly stepped in. Although the mullahs were in the midst of their own grisly war with Iraq, Tehran dispatched more than 1,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon—and tapped into Shiite rage. From secret camps, Iran mobilized young men into the new Party of God and then provided them with arms, funds, training, and explosives.

Many in Amal, including Nasrallah, switched to Hezbollah.

“The attempt by Israel to control our country left a deep impact on me and others like me. I was then twenty-two years old,” Nasrallah told me.

“We used to discuss issues among ourselves,” he added. “If we are to expel the Israeli occupation from our country, how do we do this? We noticed what happened in Palestine, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in the Golan, in the Sinai. We reached a conclusion that we cannot rely on the Arab League States nor on the United Nations. The UN Security Council adopts resolutions, but Israel does not implement these resolutions.