One Country’s Terrorists Are Another’s Liberators

Manal Karaki has bright eyes, a slightly crooked smile and the quick wit of a 20-year-old college student who wants a career in television.

America says she supports terrorism.

Haida is a 25-year-old college graduate who volunteers on weekends selling discounted school supplies to low-income families.

America says he promotes terrorism.

Nayef Krayem leans back in his leather chair, papers spread across a black-lacquered desk, as he runs one of the Arab world’s most-watched satellite television stations.

America says he works for terrorists.

All three are members of Hezbollah, or Party of God, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim group that the United States has branded a terrorist organization, accusing it of operating cells around the world and having ties to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

But to Lebanese, Hezbollah is a liberation movement, a well-oiled militia that forced Israel to withdraw after a nearly 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon.

Karaki, whose family home in the southern Lebanese village of Ain Bouswar was damaged by Israeli rocket fire, said that in her view, Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization but actually fights terrorism. “I consider myself Hezbollah,” she said.

Perhaps more than any other organization, Hezbollah illustrates the murky waters of America’s global campaign against terrorism. The United States needs a coalition that includes Arab states if it is to avoid having its effort perceived as anti-Islamic. But when the battle shifts from Afghanistan to the Middle East, the U.S. will find its plans undermined by diverging views of what constitutes terrorism. Syria and Iran, for example, two states crucial to any effort, both support Hezbollah with money and arms.

“This is one complicated issue,” Jordanian Prime Minister Ali abu Ragheb said in an interview. “Nobody can answer you clear-cut. When the United States fought Vietnam, they bombed civilians. Are they terrorists?”

The U.S. view of Hezbollah has been shaped by the organization’s history of high-profile bombings and kidnappings.

At its core, Hezbollah is also virulently anti-Israeli, refusing to accept the idea that the Jewish state is a permanent fixture in the region. In practical terms, that allows it to serve as a proxy for Iran and Syria. It also has led Hezbollah to define the United States as an enemy because of its support of Israel.

Locally, Hezbollah has become part of the establishment. It controls at least 10 seats in parliament; it runs a hospital and schools; it is a television broadcaster; it offers small business loans, hands out scholarships and sells school supplies.

Even Christian leaders who are at odds with Hezbollah’s ultimate aim of transforming Lebanon into an Islamic state grudgingly offer admiration for its accomplishments.

“Hezbollah is a resistance group that fought to liberate its land,” said Marwan Fares, a member of parliament who is a Greek Orthodox Christian. “Do we consider the French who fought to liberate their land terrorists, or Abraham Lincoln?”

But Hezbollah has also become a regional player, and to deal with it is to have to address the thorniest problem in the Middle East: the failed Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Over the course of the current Palestinian uprising, Hezbollah has coached and supplied the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The Party of God has evolved so fundamentally that even some Western diplomats in Beirut acknowledge that the U.S. view is simplistic.

“Hezbollah can be more or less trusted,” said one Beirut-based Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition he not be identified. “It’s not a gang of runaway bearded radicals. It’s a group of professionals.”

The United States continues to take a different view. In interviews since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has said that Hezbollah is a terrorist group that “destabilizes” the Middle East.

The State Department, in a recently published report on terrorism, wrote that although Hezbollah had not attacked U.S. targets in Lebanon since 1991, it still was a threat to U.S. interests here and around the world.

Among 27 Lebanese the United States regards as terrorists are Hezbollah Secretary-General Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, its spiritual advisor Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, former Secretary-General Sheik Sobhi Tufeili and former security chief Imad Mughniyah.

U.S. officials say that Hezbollah also may have played some role in the attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen last year and in the Khobar Towers military barracks bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996--unproven allegations that Hezbollah denies.

Its anti-American rhetoric has been toned down since last month’s terror attacks.

The new Hezbollah was on display at a recent rally in a Beirut suburb marking the one-year anniversary of the Palestinian uprising, an event attended by more than 10,000 people. Under heavy security, a men’s choir and band took their place on a stage. The band played a jaunty, chest-swelling tune as the choir belted out “Death to Israel, Death to Israel.”

A boom swiveled a camera through the crowd, projecting spectators’ images up on a screen, like fans at a baseball game. Hundreds of yellow Hezbollah flags waved.

Nasrallah, wearing a black turban denoting that he is a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, stepped up to a lectern behind bulletproof glass and delivered his traditional themes--including a call for the destruction of Israel.

He condemned the terror attacks on the U.S., while sharply criticizing American support for Israel. In a sign of the group’s interest in preserving the status quo, he declared that the attacks should not be allowed to spark a war between Christians and Muslims. But his sentiment was cloaked in anti-Zionist rhetoric.

“Each person who destroys a church as a retaliation for burning a mosque is executing the desire of the Zionists,” he declared.

Lebanon started to fracture along religious and ethnic lines in the late 1970s, triggering a ruinous civil war that dragged on for more than a decade. In 1982 Israeli forces invaded Lebanon, going all the way to Beirut. The forces withdrew from the capital but stayed in the south, setting up what Israel called a buffer zone.

When Marines set up camp as part of a multinational peacekeeping force, Hezbollah did not even exist. Some members of the Amal movement, a Shiite Muslim political party with a militia, broke off into a more militant faction that would eventually become Hezbollah. They were funded by Iran and trained by its Revolutionary Guards.

The United States picked up and left Lebanon after a suicide bomber drove a truck into the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing more than 200 service personnel.

That reinforced the notion that this new group was on to a successful strategy, and that the United States could be made to flee. In 1985 Hezbollah announced its formation, and over time developed an international reputation with a series of high-profile kidnappings.

The group also allegedly attacked the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and is a suspect in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires.

When the Lebanese civil war ended in 1990, many militias were forced to disarm, but not Hezbollah. With the support of Syria and Iran, Hezbollah continued its hit-and-run attacks on Israel, which still occupied a swath of southern Lebanon. Last year, when Israel withdrew, Hezbollah was credited across Lebanon with having liberated the land.

Many Lebanese believe that Hezbollah’s growth was a direct result of U.S. policy at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Eager to bring Syria into the Desert Storm coalition against Iraq, the United States, they said, expressly or implicitly agreed not to interfere with Syria’s subjugation of Lebanon.

“For the past decade, the United States has looked the other way while Hezbollah has developed from a small resistance group to a pan-Arab example of resistance,” said Simon Karam, Lebanon’s ambassador to the United States in the early 1990s. “Now, if the United States comes and asks Lebanon to go after Hezbollah, it is the equivalent of reigniting the civil war.”

In some ways, Hezbollah’s highest point is also its most difficult. With Israel gone from southern Lebanon, according to one Western diplomat, Hezbollah becomes “a liberation movement without something to liberate.”

Officials here said that some members wanted to transform Hezbollah into a civil force, while others wanted the resistance to continue. A decision was made in Iran and Syria that the fighting would continue.

In addition to contesting with Israel an unpopulated 10-square-mile patch of land called Shabaa Farms, Hezbollah got the go-ahead from Iran to throw itself behind the Palestinian drive for an independent state--an extraordinary union bringing a Shiite Muslim group together for the first time with a Sunni Muslim group.

Although its members insist that it does not get involved in activities beyond its boundaries and has no relations with Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, for example, Hezbollah does try to export its brand of resistance.

“Hezbollah seeks to make other Arab nations aware of how to resist forms of occupation,” said Abdullah Qasur, a Hezbollah representative in parliament.

Inside Lebanon, Hezbollah continues to control the southern border region.

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud has refused to deploy the Lebanese army in the south, saying it would in effect protect Israel from Hezbollah.

Roads in southern Lebanon are lined with hundreds, maybe thousands, of billboards of young men considered martyrs who died in operations against Israel. Some blew themselves up. Some died in combat.

In this village, many of the houses still bear the scars of Israeli shrapnel, bullets and rockets. Though the village was not occupied, it was repeatedly attacked because it was a stronghold of Hezbollah fighters.

At the top of the village, high on a cliff, waves the yellow Hezbollah flag, emblazoned with a green emblem of a fist holding an AK47. High above that, in the hills, villages said Hezbollah’s militia still holds positions.

Down the road in the next town, Jbaa, five Hezbollah flags wave outside a storefront. Posters of a blood-covered hand holding a rock are pasted on the window.

Inside, Haida, who said he was afraid to give his last name because he works with Hezbollah, was selling school supplies. As he talked about Hezbollah, a crowd of men and children pressed around.

“All of these villagers support Hezbollah!” an elderly man shouted in the crowd.

Seventy miles away in Beirut, Hezbollah’s most high-tech and, some say, most effective tool is guarded by a man with an automatic weapon. Past a black metal gate, through a mirror-tiled lobby, up the secured elevator is the studio of Al Manar, or Hezbollah television.

The station allows Hezbollah to broadcast its brand of news to viewers throughout the region eager to have their sentiments confirmed, though there is still room for American comedies.

In the wake of the attacks on the United States it reported the widespread rumor that more than 4,000 Jews did not show up for work that day in the World Trade Center.

Krayem, the Al Manar executive, said the television engages in “psychological warfare” but has nothing to do with terrorism.

“If we are terrorists, then the French resistance were terrorists, then Americans are terrorists because they liberated Kuwait,” he said.