Militant Hezbollah Now Works Within the Lebanese System : Politics: Foe of Israel linked to car bombings becomes a force in Parliament.

Just before Christmas, a line of battered cars pulled into Christian villages near here all over the snowy Bekaa Valley and started dispensing bags of good cheer: sweets for the children, decorations for the tree. This holiday, Santa Claus came to town wearing a black beard.

The message of joy was brought by Hezbollah, the militant Islamic organization that introduced the wrath of God into the tangled world of Middle East politics and whose Shiite Muslim fighters presided over the decade of car bombings and kidnapings that culminated Lebanon’s vicious civil war.

Hezbollah’s Christmas message was an appeal for coexistence among Lebanon’s still-feuding factions, on certain terms. In an unprecedented appearance at the American University of Beirut--part of which Islamic militants blew up with 176 pounds of TNT only a little more than a year ago--Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah lectured about Christ’s message and emphasized that it does not really mean that people must always turn the other cheek.

“Christ never intended that,” the bearded cleric, Hezbollah’s senior spiritual leader, advised an audience of highly Westernized young Beirutis. “You don’t have to submit. . . . There’s a difference between having the spirit of forgiveness and practicing forgiveness without conditions. The Koran says, ‘Those who attack you, attack them with the same.’ ”

More than four decades after the commencement of the first Arab-Israeli war, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon maintains the only active battlefront against Israel outside the occupied territories, even as the Arab governments, including Lebanon, are filing to the peace table.

Yet with its mentor, Iran, increasingly seeking to distance itself from Lebanese politics, and the rest of Lebanon’s warring militias forced to give up their arms, Hezbollah itself is slowly making the transition from wartime to peacetime, emerging as one of the most potent new political forces in Lebanon.

After unexpected gains in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections last summer, Hezbollah and its allies form the single largest bloc of deputies in the National Assembly, having ousted the legendary former Speaker of Parliament when he went up against them in their stronghold of Baalbek and having captured--thanks to a Christian boycott of the elections--even the famous Christian district of Baabda.

Together, they form a noisy minority in Parliament that has demanded more Lebanese support in the conflict against Israel and wider services for the poverty-ridden Shiite suburbs of southern Beirut. They also call for an end to the current form of government--the “confessional” system, in which high offices are apportioned on the basis of religion, the presidency traditionally going to a Maronite Christian. That system’s demise, they believe, will one day lead to a Shiite Muslim president here--and an Islamic government.

Suddenly, Hezbollah has a public relations office with a telephone switchboard that plays “Home on the Range” when it puts you on hold. It sells key chains and T-shirts with the famous machine-gun logo of Hezbollah at a gift shop in Baalbek.

“Two things are at the head of our agenda: to give back to the Lebanese man his sense of belonging to the country and (to give back) his sense of responsibility,” said Ali Ammar, a former street fighter recently elected to Parliament on the Hezbollah ticket.

“To do that, the first priority today is to face the causes which have forced the country and its sons into this degree of decay,” Ammar said. “At the head of these causes is the confessional system, which has constituted the sword of exterior infiltration into our political life. . . .”

In the villages around Baalbek, the heartland of Hezbollah in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s holiday message of peace was greeted with suspicion.

“Don’t talk to me about Christmas gifts,” said Father Antony abu Rjeili of the Greek Orthodox Church in Zahlah, just south of Baalbek. “Hezbollah hates us. They want to bury us, they want to destroy us. They are very dangerous.”

“What this shows,” political scientist Nizar Hamzi said of Hezbollah’s new charm offensive, “is that they have come up with a very smart plan. Instead of calling for an Islamic revolution and working against the system, they instead decided to work with the system--to create a revolution from inside. At this point, it’s too early to judge whether the system will absorb Hezbollah or whether Hezbollah will absorb the system.”

As a military organization, Hezbollah operates on an ever-shorter leash. Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, summoning Hezbollah’s leadership to Tehran last spring, urged the group to enter the legislative elections in order to move from “an ideology folded in over itself,” limited to its own military base, to “an ideology of openness” to the Lebanese people and institutions, according to Lebanese journalist Assaf Kfoury, who has widely researched the militant organization.

At the same time, while financed by Iran, Hezbollah operates on territory dominated by Syria, long the strongest foreign power in Lebanon. Syria is widely believed to have allowed Hezbollah to maintain its arms, while all other militias in Lebanon have been disarmed, only as a means of maintaining pressure on Israel during the Middle East peace talks.

Indeed, Iran is said to have privately told Syria after the last of the Western hostages were released that it would agree to a forcible disarming of Hezbollah when “security” returns to Lebanon, according to diplomats in Beirut and Damascus.

“The Lebanese government has always expressed the wish that Hezbollah must be disarmed like all the other militias,” said one envoy. “But they for the moment don’t dictate policy. The Syrians do.”

In what may be a sign of things to come, the Lebanese army in December moved for the first time since 1984 into the southern suburbs of Beirut, Hezbollah’s stronghold, ending an era in which the suburbs had been described by local journalists as “a casbah” with gunmen freely roaming the streets.

Over the summer, Hezbollah was forced to evacuate the huge Sheik Abdullah military barracks in Baalbek, whose underground warrens were thought to have once hidden some of the Western hostages. Government security forces cut into the Bekaa region’s lucrative counterfeiting and hashish trade in December, shutting down two laboratories for processing cocaine and heroin and seizing large quantities of hashish, rocket-propelled grenades, mines, assault rifles and pistols.

Hezbollah continues to harass and occasionally kill Israeli troops in Israel’s self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon, and its guerrillas have fired rockets at Israeli settlements in northern Israel. But officials in Jerusalem consider the problem largely contained by the South Lebanon Army, a militia recruited, trained and paid by Israel. For Jerusalem, the main security concern is the Islamic Resistance Movement, known commonly as Hamas, a guerrilla organization that has targeted Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the past six months.

Political analysts say that Lebanon’s crackdown in the Bekaa Valley and southern Beirut has simply forced Hezbollah gunmen off the streets and that the government has made no inroads against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, where it operates under the umbrella of its war against Israel.

“They justify it by saying they’re fighting Israel,” said one Western envoy. “But logically, if you’ve got an entity that’s proclaiming it has the right to bear arms independently of the structure of the state, you have already by definition a state-within-a-state that can’t necessarily be contained.

“The ongoing concern on the part of a lot of Lebanese is that the south just really isn’t under state authority,” the envoy continued. “If things go the wrong way, you could end up having some kind of Islamic mini-state under the control of Hezbollah.”

At Hezbollah headquarters in Baalbek, a bearded young man scrutinizes visitors through a peephole in the door reminiscent of a 1920s Chicago speak-easy. The sign on the other side of the door is direct: “Those Who Transmit God’s Messages and Fear Him Fear No One But God.”

Elsewhere in town, there are other messages of Hezbollah’s “goodwill”-- “Israel Must Be Wiped From Existence”; a scowling portrait of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, and the ever-popular “Death to America.”

Young toughs in leather jackets stand idly in the streets in the wintry afternoon, twirling prayer beads. The shrill sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer filters through the bare tree branches.

“Hezbollah is not a political party. Hezbollah is a nation, trying to protect its territory from the aggressor,” the organization’s Baalbek spokesman, Abu Jihad Tleiss, says over a cup of tea. “What we ask ourselves is, why do the superpowers like the United States and the United Nations say these weakened people are the murderers simply because they’re fighting back? We wonder, when I’m fighting a killer, why am I called a killer? Which law governs this?”

A drive through Baalbek and surrounding villages makes it easy to see why Hezbollah captured so many Parliament seats from this region.

The organization’s Hospital of the Imam, funded by Iran, performed 2,500 surgical and other medical procedures last year, and 25,000 other patients were treated at Hezbollah clinics and first aid centers in the Bekaa Valley. The Martyrs Pharmacy in downtown Baalbek is only one of several throughout the region dispensing drugs free of charge to those who cannot afford them.

Hezbollah has installed deep wells in many of the region’s farming villages; it has built seven new schools in the Bekaa Valley and repaired many more; it operates farm cooperatives selling fertilizer and seed to farmers at cost, and it conducts agricultural training programs in the fields.

Western diplomats estimate that Iran is sending up to $10 million a month to fund Hezbollah’s wide social network in Lebanon.

“Of course the government should have done all this, but where is the government? The Hezbollah are interested in the weak people, whereas the government doesn’t care for them,” said Hassan Medlij, whose village of Shroune in the Bekaa Valley got electric power for the first time when Hezbollah installed a 500-kilovolt generator.

In the village of Nabih Sheet outside Baalbek, the twisted, burnt hulk of a car stands at the entrance to the cemetery. It is the car in which Hezbollah’s former Bekaa Valley leader, Abbas Moussawi, died during an Israeli air attack last year.

But Moussawi’s cousin, Hussein Moussawi, a senior Hezbollah official who now heads the group’s Islamic Amal wing, said the attack has rendered the organization stronger.

“At this phase, America has imposed a war on us and has put up Israel as a policeman in this region. So we have been obliged to defend our nation and the things we hold sacred as people,” Moussawi said in an interview at his well-appointed headquarters, guarded by young men with assault rifles.

Hezbollah, while working within the political spectrum in Lebanon, will maintain its primary identity as a military organization and will continue to oppose any peace talks with Israel, Moussawi said. Primarily for that reason, and also because of plans to bulldoze part of the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut for tourist development, Hezbollah has refused to endorse or join the new government of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

“We are against these negotiations, and we don’t find any interest in being in a government which negotiates with the enemy which is occupying our land,” Moussawi continued. “(It is) an enemy we should be fighting, an enemy with whom dialogue is with the rifle, not diplomacy, because the Israelis will never go out of the land they have conquered, be it Lebanon or other land, unless by force, which is the way they used to enter.”

Moussawi’s is one of the names occasionally mentioned in reports that the U.S. government has secretly returned indictments against those who held American hostages in Lebanon. According to a controversial rumor that swept Lebanon last year, American FBI agents, armed with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling authorizing them to pursue lawbreakers outside the country, were combing the Bekaa Valley for suspects.

Moussawi, coolly debonair for most of the interview, turned icy at the mention of the rumor. “The era of kidnaping is supposed to have finished, and who gave the U.S. the right to take people from their country to the U.S. to be tried?” he demanded. “We personally did not have anything to do at all with the kidnaping of Americans or the European hostages. We probably had a helping hand in releasing them. If the FBI believes any different, then its information is very ridiculous.

“If there (is) a Supreme Court which gives the U.S. Administration permission to attack innocent people,” he added, “then we have courts which take decisions that there won’t be any American safe in any spot in the world. We tell them now not to make mistakes and not to play with fire.”

In his office in downtown Beirut, a Lebanese journalist pulls out a piece of paper and a pen and explains why Hezbollah will prevail in Lebanon. A total of 64% of the Lebanese are Muslim, he says, compared with 35% Christian, and of the 64% who are Muslim, 65% are Shiites. They are the nation’s fastest-growing population group. They are overwhelmingly poor. And they have a mission.

“They have a mechanism, a machine, that no party in Lebanon can match. It comes from the Shiite experience working against regimes since Karbala,” he said, recalling the great revolt at the Muslim holy city of Karbala in southern Iraq that led to the birth of the Shiite sect of Islam.

“The Shiites have a great experience working under the ground that is unmatched in all of history. Since 1,400 years they have worked like this,” he said. “If you have no fear of death, there is nothing you cannot do. You have the capacity of driving car bombs into a Marine complex. One man can succeed against 350 Marines--if the one man has no fear.”

Times staff writer Michael Parks in Jerusalem contributed to this article.