Hezbollah Militants, Israeli Troops Obstructions to Lebanese Recovery

By Peter Saiers

On the road to Baalbek, the visitor is greeted by the spectacular 2,000-year-old ruins of three mammoth stone temples. Built by the Romans to honor their god Jupiter, the site was a magnet for tourists and for 20 years home to an international summer festival. But after the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, Baalbek was yanked from tourist brochures, and today few foreign tourists visit the monuments.

Nor, since the 1980s, have Lebanese from the populous coastal plain been eager to visit the town, situated 80 miles from Beirut in the northern half of Lebanon's Bekaa valley. The cool, verdant former highland resort area has been known as a stronghold and training center of the Iranian-financed, mainly Shi'i Hezbollah militia.

So I wasn't surprised when my friends in Beirut balked when I told them I was going to Baalbek for a few days. During my 10 months in Lebanon I had been nearly everywhere but Baalbek, mainly because no one would go with me. "Have fun in Iran," a Sunni friend snickered, referring to the Lebanese government's lack of real control over the area.

A few days later, as his old Mercedes taxi wound down the Lebanon range into the fertile Bekaa valley, separated from Damascus to the east by the anti-Lebanon range, the garrulous Baalbeki driver laughed when I told him what people in Beirut thought of an American going willingly to his hometown. "There are no more problems here, the war is over," he said. He explained that he once had worked as a truck driver for Hezbollah. "The money was better then," he said. He quickly followed this wistful lapse with a more common Lebanese sentiment, "we're tired of the fighting."

Founded in 1982 at the anarchistic zenith of the Lebanon war, Hezbollah was blamed for numerous terror attacks in Lebanon, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks, bombings of the American and French embassies, and the kidnappings of more than 30 Westerners. At present the group is cited as the principal reason for the continuing State Department ban on travel by U.S. citizens to Lebanon.

Faced with a stronger Lebanese central government, and the possibility of Syrian and Lebanese peace agreements with Israel, Hezbollah no longer operates with complete impunity. Its influence over daily life also is on the decline.

Baalbek, the Hezbollah-declared "capital of Islamic resistance," reflects the change. Its busy marketplace compares to those of other Lebanese cities, where business—not religion—is the main concern. Few women wear the long black chador that is mandatory in Iran. Alcohol, though not prominent, can again be bought in town.

"The Hezb is still powerful, but not like before," says Rabih, a baker. "They did a lot of good here," he adds, referring to the Iranian-built hospital, water and electric projects.

As I strolled through the markets, I was befriended by three men in their early 20s and invited home to dinner. I asked if there was much pressure on young men in Baalbek to join the Hezbollah.

"No," said Ayman, who during the week travels to a hotel management apprenticeship in the nearby town of Chtura. "But there isn't much interaction between Hezb and us." They said about half of the men in the city of 150,000 were Hezbollah members, but few were fighters. "They don't get as much money as before," he said.

That night, at the crowded neighborhood pool hall, I was surprised to find young men openly drinking Lebanese-brewed Almaza beer. "The Hezb know we drink here," Ayman's friend told me. "As long as we don't drink in public, they can't do much."

That Hezbollah still retains considerable influence in the city was attested by black and yellow flags with the party's emblem of a hand brandishing an automatic rifle fluttering in the breeze at a park around the Ras el-Ain natural spring. As I was sitting there in the sun, a man in his 30s wearing mirrored sunglasses approached and introduced himself as "security" for the Ayatollah Khomeini Hospital across the street. After I produced my credentials and dropped some names, he bought me a 7-Up. "Look what was built here thousands of years ago," he said, pointing in the direction of the towering Roman-era monuments. "What Hezbollah is building is much more important."

Hezbollah rocket assaults on Israel's occupied zone in Lebanon and on northern Israel itself, and the massive retaliation they provoke, usually occur at critical times in Middle East peace negotiations. Given Syria's current hegemony over Lebanon, and because it is the conduit of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran, such activities are seen in Lebanon as Syrian muscle-flexing rather than solely an expression of Iranian opposition to peace talks.

An Ambiguous Relationship

The Lebanese army reflects this ambiguity in its treatment of Hezbollah, the only party militia it has not disarmed. Earlier this year, a token force of Lebanese soldiers deployed in Baalbek, a key move in the government effort to extend its control over the entire country. Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, eager to project the image of a stabilized Lebanon to the world, and to rebuild Lebanon's economic vitality, also sent army units to the south following last summer's roadside attack in the Israeli-occupied zone that killed seven Israeli servicemen, prompting large-scale Israeli retaliation. At that time, the deployment reportedly infuriated Syria, which felt it was not properly consulted.

The current move into Baalbek, according to a Lebanese minister, has Syrian sanction and is the beginning of Beirut's reassertion of control of the area from Hezbollah. The formal reason for Lebanon's reluctance to disown Hezbollah and move into southern areas controlled by the militia has been the claim that Hezbollah is fighting to liberate southern Lebanon from the occupying Israeli army and its puppet local militia.

Privately, however, Lebanese officials say that once a regional peace agreement is signed and the Israeli army withdraws from Lebanese territory, Hezbollah will have to give up its weapons and operate only as a Shi'i welfare organization. It then will be welcome to concentrate on its considerable health and education projects in the south, the northern Bekaa, and in the capital's impoverished southern suburbs, all areas with significant concentrations of Shi'i Muslims, who constitute Lebanon's largest sectarian population.

For their part, Hezbollah officials dismiss the relative certainty of a Middle East peace treaty. "The future is yet to be determined," snapped a Hezbollah official with whom I spoke regularly in Beirut. He refused even to discuss the prospect of his organization's disarming.

While it still espouses anti-Western, anti-establishment rhetoric, Hezbollah cannot operate as the rogue organization it was in the 1980s. Under Syrian pressure, Hezbollah officials met in December with a delegation of U.S. senators to discuss missing and imprisoned Israelis and Lebanese. Hezbollah, wary of Muslim public reaction, has not confirmed that Damascus meeting.

Although strongly critical of the Lebanese government, Hezbollah has eight deputies in parliament. When parliament in April banned all private television and radio stations from broadcasting news until a new regulatory law could be drafted and approved, Hezbollah's Manara television complied. "They feel the pressure to [work within the system] as the survival of their organization is at stake," explained a real estate broker with long ties to Hezbollah.

Still, Hezbollah's elaborate power structure, especially in the northern Bekaa, remains embarrassingly outside Beirut's control. In February Hezbollah tried a 16-year old Baalbek boy who was accused of taking part in the murder of a woman and her two children. He was convicted and executed by Hezbollah with no reference to Lebanese law, and no retaliation by the Lebanese government. After Hezbollah staged an illegal military parade where fighters brandished weapons in the streets of Baalbek, the Lebanese government responded only by cracking down on some of the city's butchers whose meat was not stored in accordance with health regulations.

Hezbollah officials say violence against innocent victims is strongly denounced by the organization's religious leaders, but that its military leaders have few options to express their frustration at Western, especially American, handling of the Lebanese civil war and support for Israel. One Hezbollah leader compared their actions with those of Palestinian groups during the 1970s. "Look at [PLO Chairman Yasser] Arafat," he said. "The West once called him a terrorist. Now he is visiting every Western leader."

Prominent Lebanese Shi'i, though openly proud of the vastly increased political influence of their formerly ignored community, note differences in local and Iranian religious customs and say quietly they would prefer an indigenous organization as a political alternative to the Iranian-influenced Hezbollah. But those who have directly benefited from Hezbollah's social works are grateful.

"Thank God for Iran and Hezbollah," said Jafer, whose son studies medicine on a Hezbollah grant and who owns a busy furniture store in Dahieh, Beirut's crowded southern suburb. "They are the only ones who are helping the Shi'i."

Hezbollah's future is contingent as much upon regional developments in the Arab-Israeli peace process as upon unilateral events in Lebanon and Syria. Therefore it probably won't be too long before visitors again throng Baalbek to see its awesome Roman monuments. Nevertheless, optimistic Lebanese officials may have jumped the gun this year when they declared 1994 as Lebanon's Year of Tourism. That will only become reality when Baalbek has resumed its place in the world's tourist brochures.