Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
“The best metaphor for a Westerner to try to understand this truth,” Nasrallah told a British journalist, “is to think of a person being in a sauna bath for a long time.
“This person is very thirsty and tired and hot, and he is suffering from the effects of the high temperature. Then he is told that if he opens the door, he can go into a quiet, comfortable room, drink a nice cocktail, and hear beautiful classical music,” Nasrallah continued. “Then he will open the door and go through without hesitation, knowing that what he leaves behind is not a high price to pay—and that what awaits him is of much greater value.”
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The early militants were also the first to seize civilian hostages—more than 100 foreigners over a seven-year period—as leverage for political or military concessions. Among the hostages were Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson and American University of Beirut Dean Tom Sutherland. Some were held in the
dahiya,
Baalbek, or southern Lebanon for as long as seven years. Not all survived. CIA station chief William Buckley and Colonel William Higgins, a Marine who was assigned to the UN Truce Supervisory Organization in southern Lebanon, died in captivity; both were brutally tortured.
The tactic had enormous impact. In the mid-1980s, Hezbollah’s hostages enabled patron Iran to do a secret swap with the United States. Engrossed in its own eight-year war with Iraq, Tehran needed weaponry. So Washington secretly provided missiles in exchange for Tehran’s intervention to free three American captives. The scandal later rocked the Reagan Administration. Top White House officials were forced to resign; some faced trials. It proved to be Reagan’s worst blunder.
And the swap did not end the problem. Shortly after the three Americans were released, three more Americans were kidnapped off Beirut’s rough streets.
A common theme in the hostage dramas was Shiite prisoners.
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Hezbollah’s close-knit adherents hatched daring schemes to free their brethren.
The most notorious member of Hezbollah in the early days was a thug named Imad Mughniyah. A surprisingly slight man at five foot seven and about 150 pounds, he had a short beard that arched around the angular jawline of his face. Mughniyah was widely tied to the deadliest acts of terrorism against American targets until September 11, 2001. He was often linked to the Marine bombing; he was also implicated in many of the early kidnappings. President George H. W. Bush dubbed him America’s Enemy No. 1. He remains on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists—with a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to his capture.
Mughniyah was connected to hostage seizures in part because of a Shiite prisoner. Mustafa Badreddin was Mughniyah’s cousin and brother-in-law. He was arrested and tried for a stunning 1983 series of six bombings in Kuwait that simultaneously targeted the United States Embassy, the French Embassy, Kuwait’s main oil refinery and airport, and the Raytheon Corporation compound. It was the deadliest violence ever in the little oil-rich Gulf country. Badreddin—who was linked to a Shiite group called Dawa, or the Call—was convicted, along with sixteen others, and sentenced to death. They became known as the Kuwait Seventeen.
Between 1984 and 1991, the hostage takers repeatedly demanded freedom for the Kuwait Seventeen as their condition for releasing the American and other Western hostages seized in Beirut.
Prisoners were also the motive behind the extraordinary saga of TWA 847, which was hijacked by Hezbollah supporters in 1985. The plane was forced to shuttle for days between Lebanon and Algeria. During one stop in Beirut, the hijackers murdered American Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem; his body was dumped onto the airport tarmac. The drama unfolded over sixteen days. In what became known as the “no-deal deal,” the TWA passengers and crew were eventually driven to Syria and freed. Israel soon freed 766 prisoners, mainly Shiites—but denied that the release had anything to do with the hijackers’ demands. The FBI eventually charged Mughniyah, in a sealed indictment, with the TWA hijacking.
In the early years, the new militants were an amalgam of clandestine and often overlapping little groups. Leaders were unknown. Titles varied. They phoned in claims under the names of the Revolutionary Justice Organization, the Followers of the Prophet Mohammed, the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, Islamic Jihad, and the Organization of Right Against Wrong.
Hezbollah’s leadership later denied the most violent bombings and hostage seizures of the 1980s. Those acts, they insisted, were conducted by cells outside the party structure.
But the early activists were basically the embryo of what became Hezbollah. They all had the same Iranian tutelage, training and funding, as well as Syrian support. Years later, during a trip to Tehran, an Iranian cabinet minister boasted to me that Iran had trained the bomber who attacked the Israeli headquarters in Lebanon in 1983—and gave me his name.
Hezbollah—which should technically be written Hizb ’Allah, or Party of God—took its name from the last verse of the fifty-eighth chapter in the Koran: “Verily the party of God shall be victorious.” The verse, in dark green, runs atop a logo on the movement’s bright yellow flag. The logo consists of the party’s name written in thick, artistic calligraphy. An arm thrusting a Kalashnikov assault rifle into the air extends from the first Arabic letter in Allah. To the side is a globe.
The implications are obvious—worldwide Islamic revolution.
During the movement’s early years in the 1980s, I wangled the first Hezbollah press pass from one of its cells; it may still be the only one ever issued. As I spent more and more time in the
dahiya,
I wanted some kind of credential to avoid being detained, harassed, or taken hostage, especially as an American. Most other militias issued press passes to use at their checkpoints. Since Lebanon had many armed groups—almost forty at the height of the civil war, including foreign troops—journalists carried a wallet full of passes.
The trick was pulling out the right pass at constantly shifting checkpoints. Several journalists who guessed wrong were detained or beaten; at least two were killed.
In those days, Hezbollah had no headquarters, much less public officials. But one day when I was in the
dahiya,
heading to the office of a Shiite cleric, I saw an unfinished building nearby with a black, spray-painted stencil of the new Hezbollah logo; it had begun to appear on walls all over Beirut. I ducked inside. Several gunmen with beards and Kalashnikov rifles were in a ground-floor room that was plastered with Hezbollah posters.
I explained who I was, described an earlier book I was writing, and then said that I wanted a press pass. One of the gunmen, who did not introduce himself, told me that the group did not issue press passes. When I persisted, he shrugged, walked over to one of the posters, ripped off a corner with the logo, and handed it to me.
“Can’t you date it, or write your name on it, or something to make it look a bit more official?” I asked.
“Just show it,” he replied, “and you won’t have any problems.”
I assumed he was trying to get rid of me. But when I was stopped at a Hezbollah checkpoint a few days later, I pulled out the little piece of Hezbollah’s poster. The gunmen waved me through. I used it for years.
The Party of God finally emerged from the underground—and as a single unit—in 1985 in an open letter addressed “to all the oppressed in Lebanon and the world.” It was read at a Beirut mosque and published in a Lebanese newspaper. Its tone was militant, its goals absolute. It called for an Islamic society in Lebanon and blasted Lebanon’s Christian Maronites.
We don’t want to impose Islam upon anybody, as much as we don’t want others to impose upon us their convictions and their political systems. We don’t want Islam to reign in Lebanon by force as is the case with the Maronites today…. [But] we call upon you to embrace Islam so that you can be happy in this world and the next…. Only an Islamic regime can stop any further imperialist infiltration into our country….
In more aggressive language, it also demanded the destruction of Israel.
The Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated.
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The Party of God defiantly pledged that it would never compromise with the Jewish state. “We recognize no treaty with it, no cease-fire, and no peace agreements,” Hezbollah announced.
The open letter also warned, “No one can imagine our military potential.”
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Hezbollah’s first phase ended with Lebanon’s civil war in 1990 and the brief 1991 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait after Iraq’s invasion. Both events altered dynamics throughout the Middle East.
The Iraqi invasion also, inadvertently, eliminated the prisoner issue. In one of those accidents of history, the Iraqis had opened Kuwait’s prisons—and unwittingly released Mughniyah’s cousin and other members of the Kuwait Seventeen, thus ending a key reason for the hostage abductions.
The early era symbolically came to a close, after Iran’s intervention, when Hezbollah then freed its last foreign hostage, Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, in 1991. Anderson was a friend; we had offices in the same building. A former Marine, he was nabbed after he came back from a tennis game in Beirut in 1985. He had been bundled into the trunk of a getaway car and held for the next seven years, much of it chained to a radiator or a bed.
Hezbollah’s tactics shifted after that—at least in practice, if not in policy.
Anderson returned to Lebanon five years later to purge the ghosts of his captivity. Among his stops was the Hezbollah headquarters to see Nasrallah, who had since assumed leadership of the movement. Anderson asked Nasrallah, who is often called sayyid as a man of religious learning, what he thought of kidnapping foreigners.
“I’m not saying whether their methods were good or not, right or wrong,” Nasrallah told him. “These actions were short-term, with short-term objectives, and I hope that they will not happen again.”
“Can you say, sayyid, flatly, that this was wrong or a mistake?” Anderson pressed him.
“I can’t make such an absolute judgment,” Nasrallah replied.
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Transitions from militancy into mainstream politics depend on a confluence of factors.
Hezbollah began to evolve as it moved into a second phase in 1992. It coincided with Nasrallah’s sudden rise to the leadership, after Israel assassinated the movement’s secretary-general. The specific turning point was the most controversial decision Hezbollah had yet taken—to enter politics. It was Nasrallah’s first major act. And it was a major reversal.
During its first decade, Hezbollah had rejected any role in Lebanon’s convoluted confessional system. The Shiite movement had considered itself above other parties, militias, clans, and the Lebanese government generally. The Party of God believed it was a bigger actor. It played on a regional stage, engaging with an outside enemy rather than in domestic squabbles.
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It had largely avoided the civil war, except for turf battles with Amal, the other Shiite militia. In politics, Hezbollah was the odd man out.
But after a heated internal debate, and at Iran’s urging, the movement opted to run candidates for parliament in the first elections after Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war ended. Under pictures of its martyrs, its campaign posters appealed,
THEY RESIST WITH THEIR BLOOD. RESIST WITH YOUR VOTE.
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At a rally for thousands assembled in a
dahiya
stadium on election eve, Nasrallah sounded like a conventional politician talking about Hezbollah representing Shiite interests in parliament.
“We will seek to serve you in our new positions to end this area’s deprivation and oppression,” he said, exhorting a large crowd and pumping his arm in the air. “Tomorrow, God willing, our candidates will stand in the Chamber of Deputies to remind those who have forgotten that there is a deprived area in Lebanon called the southern suburb…. We refuse to let anyone deal with it as if it were foreign to Lebanon.”
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The Party of God won twelve seats in the 128-seat parliament. Overnight, it became one the biggest of Lebanon’s seventeen political blocs. Former clandestine leaders in an extremist movement were suddenly elected officials. Hezbollah soon became engrossed in politics as an opposition party. It criticized government for corruption, ineptitude, and allocating inadequate funds for Shiites. It pushed for no-confidence votes. It was politically engaged.
“We’ve taken the decisions that suit each stage,” Hezbollah external relations chief Nawaf al Musawi, an intense and portly man with a dark beard, told me during one of several interviews with Hezbollah officials in offices scattered around the
dahiya.
“I always remember a saying by the Greek philosopher Herodotus,” he continued. “‘You do not swim in the same river twice.’
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He meant, if you swim the river, the second time it will not be the same because the water will not be the same as it was the first time.
“Politics,” Musawi pronounced, as his left hand flipped through a set of white worry beads, “is the same.”
The shift was not universally popular. “When we took the decision to engage in the parliamentary process, not everyone wanted to participate,” he conceded. “There was one who opposed it, and he left.”