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Hezbollah grows in stature in Lebanon

It is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. But that's not how the group is seen closer to its home.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published May 15, 2005

	Q&A with Sheik Muhammad Kawtharani An amble about Beirut a gamble
	[Times photos: Susan Taylor Martin]
	Abu Ali, who says he spent four years as a prisoner at the Al-Khiam detention camp and now is a guide, shows the metal box in which he says he and other inmates were confined for long periods.
	The gate at the Al-Khiam detention camp now welcomes tourists.
	A souvenir from Al-Khiam: a key chain with Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

KFAR KILA, Lebanon - The Al-Khiam Detention Camp is not your everyday tourist attraction.

Foreigners can't visit without permission of the Lebanese army. The gift shop sells key rings and flags with the logo of Hezbollah, the Islamic militia that Israel and the United States deem a terrorist organization.

To the thousands of Lebanese who flock here, though, Israelis are the terrorists and Hezbollah the heroic resistance force. With grim fascination, visitors peer into tiny, windowless cells where Israel is said to have tortured prisoners before its soldiers withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000, after almost two decades of occupation.

Hezbollah "defended our country - we couldn't come here if Hezbollah hadn't defended us," says Safa Saleh, a 22-year-old nursing student who arrived with a large tour group on a recent Saturday.

"Israel talks about peace, but look at this place."

The popularity of the Al-Khiam camp, now run by the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism, is just one sign that Hezbollah is accepted, even admired in this country, no matter how repugnant others may find the so-called "Party of God."

An emergent political force, Hezbollah has 14 seats in the Lebanese Parliament. In a notoriously corrupt society, its leaders enjoy a reputation for incorruptibility. It operates a popular TV network, and runs schools, hospitals and clinics for the needy.

"People like Hezbollah," says Michel Edde, president of the Lebanese Maronite League, an influential Christian organization.

"People rely on them because, unfortunately, the Lebanese state is poor."

Behind the humanitarian image, though, lies a bloody history of bombings, kidnapping and hijackings. Hezbollah has been widely blamed for the 1983 suicide attacks that killed 241 U.S. peacekeepers in Beirut and ushered in the modern era of terrorism. Its struggle against Israel - which Hezbollah says has no right to exist - has claimed scores of Israeli lives.

A State Department official once called Hezbollah part of the "A-team" of terrorism. Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham of Florida said it posed a bigger threat than Saddam Hussein.

Today, Hezbollah is at a crossroads. Now that both Israel and Syria have withdrawn their troops, will Hezbollah lay down its weapons and help build a peaceful, independent Lebanon free of foreign interference?

"We say, "You cannot rely on your arms now - you have to integrate with civil society,' " says Edde, who has good relations with Hezbollah and often speaks with its leaders. "How can we sit at the table with you if you still have arms and we only have a pen?"

"What time was your appointment?" Hussein Naboulsi asks a reporter.

"2:30."

"What time is it now?" Naboulsi demands, pointing at his watch.

"2:40."

A Hezbollah spokesman, Naboulsi is unmoved by the excuse that his office is hard to find, hidden in a nondescript apartment building in the crowded Shiite slums of south Beirut.

Inside, however, a large sign announces that this is Hezbollah's "Media Relations" department. There are computers with Internet access, sleek black furniture, smart-looking business cards. And a portrait of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Hezbollah was founded in 1982, three years after Shiites in Iran overthrew a secular, pro-Western government and set up an Islamic state headed by Khomeini. Iran's stern new leader galvanized Shiites in Lebanon and other countries where they had long been an oppressed minority.

"The Iranian revolution came as an earthquake," Edde says. "Khomeini appeared as a genuine Muslim, and started to export this throughout the Arab world."

Hezbollah committed itself to creating a Shiite state in Lebanon, where Christians and Sunni Muslims held most of the power. It was also determined to drive out Israel, which invaded in 1982 to get at Palestinian terrorists.

For both Iran and Syria, Hezbollah proved a useful proxy in their own campaigns against the "Zionist entity."

From the lush hills along the Israeli-Lebanese border, Hezbollah fired rockets at the red-tiled roofs of Metula, a picturesque town in northern Israel. In 1988, a suicide bomber turned dozens of Israeli soldiers into "masses of fire and limbs," as proudly noted at a shrine that includes a Hezbollah collection box.

In return, Israeli jets attacked as far north as Beirut. The carnage hit its peak in 1996, when a bomb intended for a Hezbollah base instead landed in a U.N. refugee camp, killing 107 civilians.

By 2000, Israeli leaders were under intense pressure at home to end the occupation that had cost 900 soldiers their lives. That May, Israeli troops pulled out of southern Lebanon in what most Arabs regarded as a triumph for Hezbollah.

This spring, it was the Syrians who left under duress, blamed for a huge bomb blast that killed a former Lebanese prime minister.

Now the heat is on Hezbollah. It has refused to disarm, saying Israel still occupies a 25-square-mile chunk of south Lebanon called Chebaa Farms. The United Nations and Israel consider the area part of Syria. Lebanon says the land belongs to it.

After five years of relative quiet, tensions are flaring.

Last month, Hezbollah unnerved Israel by flying an unmanned spy plane well into Israeli territory. Israeli jets, meanwhile, are accused of violating Lebanese airspace with window-rattling sonic booms.

Last week, a Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon heavily damaged a bakery in northern Israel. On Friday, Israel bombed and shelled Hezbollah outposts, prompting at least nine retaliatory strikes against an Israeli military site.

As Edde puts it: "Israel and Hezbollah are in a balance of terror."

Pistol on hip, a Hezbollah staffer directs the reporter and an interpreter through traffic-clogged streets to another drab apartment building. The elevator opens onto an entire floor of Hezbollah operations.

A second man ushers the visitors into a room with ornate furnishings, a Persian rug and the ubiquitous portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. The interpreter is wearing a skirt that exposes her knees when she sits down; the man shoves a coffee table in front of her legs so as not to offend conservative Shiite sensibilities.

This is the room where Hezbollah's current leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, meets with his nine-member decisionmaking council. Speaking for him today is one of the nine, Sheik Muhammad Kawtharani, in white turban and black robe.

"Welcome," he begins. "You can consider yourself at home among family and brothers."

Born in south Lebanon in 1961, the sheik has a master's degree in philosophy from Baghdad University. Like all Hezbollah leaders, he says, he also has been "trained and worked in jihad and military resistance."

Tea is served. The interview begins.

What would it take to convince Hezbollah that Israel is no longer a threat?

How does the international community guarantee your security?

"They are the ones who should find a way. It's not my job to do this."

If it WAS your job, what would you do?

The sheik answers most questions directly but skirts one of the most serious charges against Hezbollah - that its training camps in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley have taught militants from all over the world to make bombs and plot assassinations. In the leadup to the Iraq war, Graham of Florida said closing the camps should be a higher priority for the United States than ousting Hussein.

All Sheik Muhammad acknowledges is that Hezbollah trained and supported Palestinians.

"But that is before," he adds. "Now the Palestinian organizations are inside Palestine, they are not here. There is no need - the Palestinian organizations are mature by themselves."

Do you support suicide attacks?

"During 1993 and 1996, when Israeli planes were destroying Lebanese vital institutions and killing innocent Lebanese, yes, we set rockets on Israeli establishments. Just as Israel sometimes kills innocents, it is possible at times our rockets did kill innocents."

Toward the end of the interview, Sheik Muhammad pulls out a pack of Gauloises. He used to smoke Marlboros, he says with a chuckle, but switched to the French brand to protest the United States "interfering in all the world."

Still, he says, Americans have no reason to fear Hezbollah, despite the deadly attacks of the '80s, when U.S. Marines were seen as occupiers, and more recent reports that Hezbollah "cells" have spread to North and South America.

"We do differentiate between the American people and the American administration. Our problem is with the political administration in the United States because it is always taking the part of Israel. But we know that a lot or even most American people, if free from the Zionist media, would be more fair. That's why Hezbollah is not going to target an American except in self-defense."

As talk turns to domestic issues, the sheik predicts Hezbollah will become more actively involved in Lebanese politics. And he is at his most emphatic when asked if Hezbollah still wants to make Lebanon a Shiite Islamic state.

""LA! LA! LA!" he almost shouts, Arabic for "NO! NO! NO!"

"We refuse this point of view completely. On the contrary, we look at the diverseness and richness of Lebanon - this is what makes it of unique value in the Middle East. It cannot be governed by one color."

As if to illustrate his point, the interpreter has a request. Could she be photographed with the sheik?

Certainly, he says. So there they pose in front of Khomeini's portrait - a Muslim man in a turban and a Christian woman with frosted blond hair.

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at

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[Last modified May 15, 2005, 01:42:44]