A Defiant Hezbollah Rises From the Rubble

Edited by anaxarchos on Tue Aug-15-06 10:25 AM

"We're Still Here!", The Red Cross evacuates an injured fighter on Monday in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-f...

A Defiant Hezbollah Rises From the Rubble
By Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer
August 15, 2006

BEIRUT — Hezbollah's urban nerve center is a shattered shell. Its most loyal followers trudged homeward to a heartland laid to waste. And yet the Shiite organization lighted up the night sky with fireworks Monday and declared itself triumphant over Israel.

Israel meant to break Hezbollah with its monthlong offensive, but instead the militant organization has been strengthened politically in Lebanon, analysts say. The movement has a fresh boost of popularity, at least for now, and a renewed sense that it is entitled to keep its armed militia outside the control of the Lebanese army, they say.

It is unclear what remains of Hezbollah's arsenal. But the group made it plain Monday that the sacrifice of its weapons was off the table for the time being. Nasrallah scoffed at the idea that the "resistance" should lay down its guns in order to build a strong Lebanon. It should be the other way around, he argued.

"First you have to build a strong, capable, just and secure country for all Lebanese, so that you can tell the people, 'We can protect your dignity and honor, and there is no need for the weapons of the resistance,' " he said.

Ibrahim Moussawi, foreign news director at Hezbollah's Al Manar television station, was even more blunt.

"Hezbollah will not give up its weapons. This is a red line. The Israelis couldn't do it, so nobody can," Moussawi said.

"There is no army that can disarm Hezbollah. These 14 of March idiots can't do it," Moussawi said, referring to the bloc of Lebanese politicians who led the charge that ended Syrian dominance here last year and who then turned their attention to Hezbollah's weapons.

Asked what effect Hezbollah's hardened determination to keep its guns could have on Lebanon's ever-shaky national unity, Moussawi responded angrily. "Hezbollah is not going to be asked about national unity while they're giving their blood to defend the country," Moussawi said. "Hezbollah has to ask them about national unity. They are not in the place to ask about it. How do you ask if you don't defend your country?"

In his speech Monday, Nasrallah spoke out harshly against Lebanese who dared to criticize Hezbollah.

"We heard them speak from their air-conditioned offices … while people were watching their houses being demolished," he said. "This is really unethical, and a big mistake."

Meanwhile, Lebanese officials were scrambling to figure out how to fulfill their obligations to the United Nations Security Council resolution that paved the way for the truce.

Hezbollah's objections to disarmament reportedly has split the Cabinet and complicated the next moves.

Those concerns were nothing to Nidal Shaib, a 35-year-old taxi driver and longtime loyalist to the Communist Party who joined his brothers to sweep up the wreckage of a badly damaged building in Beirut's southern suburbs.

Until this war, he said, he respected Nasrallah but didn't support him. Now he celebrates him as the man who made Israelis suffer, Shaib said.

"Now I totally accept him. He's a great leader," he said. "Even greater than Che Guevara."

Background:

During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) many of the political parties in Lebanon formed armed militias. In 1982, when the Israelis invaded, many of those militias including almost all of the left-wing ones, were re-oriented to oppose the Israeli occupation of Lebanon (which went on to last 18 years). That loose front, universally called "the Resistance", is very broadly based and includes the Lebanese Communist Party, numerous Socialist parties, several Arab-socialist oriented parties, Amal, and many other groupings including Sunni, Druze, and Christian organizations. There is no question that Hizbullah is the strongest and most important of these and the phrase “the Resistance and Hizbullah” is sometimes used to underline this prominence. Nevertheless, over a dozen Lebanese political parties listed numerous “martyrs” (the term is used by both secular and religious parties) killed in the recent fighting with Israel.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14351426/from/RS.2/
Hezbollah fighters emerge from rubble
‘We’re still here,’ one of them says
By Anthony Shadid
The Washington Post

There was no gunfire in the air, no chants, no jubilant displays of celebration. There were, rather, the satisfied expressions of survival. Men embraced, kissing each other's cheeks, some emerging into sunlight for the first time in weeks. Cellphones, in almost everyone's hand, rang with queries of others' whereabouts, the fate of houses and the reality of a cease-fire that still seemed fragile. They smiled. "Thank God for your safety" was the refrain.

And Hussein Kalash, burly, hard and confident, offered three words that defined the war for Khiam's defenders, the Hezbollah fighters."We're still here," he said.

The war ended Monday -- at least for now -- in Khiam, a hilltop town perched within eyesight of the Israeli border. But the fighters began weaving the narratives even before a bulldozer threw up dust as it cleared rubble from the town's tattered streets, where hardly a building was untouched. They were myths of resistance -- of tanks repulsed across the fertile plain that frames the town; of surviving on chocolate and water for two weeks along the town's front line; of faith serving as their greatest weapon.

In an undecided war, perception becomes paramount, and the gaggles of fighters Monday, some with drawn faces, others with a look of contentment, walked like victors through a town that was gouged, cratered and pockmarked but, they said, still theirs.

"They couldn't enter," said Abu Abboud, wearing a jersey that read "Narkotic" and khaki military-style pants.

He sat on a short staircase, rubble skirting the building, its facade torn by shelling. Its red and yellow steel gates were tossed in the street like crumpled pieces of paper. A cat tentatively crawled through the wreckage, as Israeli aircraft sounded overhead. He greeted another fighter, in military-style pants and black hiking boots, black prayers beads hung around his neck.

"Either we live with dignity and strength or death is better," he said.