Syria Goes, and Then...?
BAALBEK--The entrance to Baalbek used to be guarded by a statue of the late Syrian president Hafez Assad. His arms outstretched from a pedestal in the middle of the road, he seemed to be welcoming all to this town deep in the Bekaa Valley.
But now the statue is gone--and the pedestal is plastered with Hezbollah's yellow flags and posters of leader Hassan Nasrallah. "At 2 a.m. last Sunday, the Syrian troops closed the street, looked in all the windows to make sure no one was taking pictures, and removed the statue," says Yaakob Agam, 21, whose family owns a supermarket across the street. "And just when they finished, Hezbollah came and put up the flags. They want everyone to know they're still here and still in charge."
Disarming. But will Hezbollah still be in charge after its protector is gone? Mass popular demonstrations last month in Beirut upset the old political order. This week, the pullout of Syrian troops and intelligence officers is supposed to be complete. In addition, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 calls for all militias in Lebanon--meaning Hezbollah, with its military wing of several thousand armed men--to be disbanded. However, says one western diplomat, "nobody sees a way of forcibly disarming Hezbollah. . . . If you got the Lebanese Army to disarm Hezbollah, that would lead to civil war."
The United States considers Hezbollah a terrorist group, responsible among other things for the deadly bombings in Beirut of the U.S. Marine barracks and the American Embassy in 1983-84. But it is also an important Shiite political party, with 13 seats in Parliament and a large social welfare network. Its popularity stems both from these services and from what is seen as its success in forcing Israel out of southern Lebanon in 2000. "The question is, Whither goes Hezbollah?" says Paul Salem, director of the Fares Foundation, a development group. "It could choose to go along with the new situation and disarm. But if it decides to cling to Syria and say, 'I'm not with this new deal,' that could cause a deep split in Lebanon, which Syria might then be able to utilize."
It is here in the Bekaa Valley, which runs along the Syrian border, where Iranian Revolutionary Guards, with Syria's blessing, stationed themselves in the mid-1980s to convert disaffected Shiites to the jihad. Syria and Iran have used funding and arming of Hezbollah to claim a front line against Israel. Today, military flatbed trucks ply the road to Damascus, packed with Syrian soldiers and equipment heading home.
Now, Hezbollah is at risk of losing not only political and military cover from Syria but also Iran's funding, estimated at $120 million to $150 million a year. "They were living under a rock, but the rock is no longer there," says Jamil Mroue, the publisher of Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper. "Now, they have to learn to redefine the word resistance, to move beyond arms to politics. If they don't do that, they will still be the tool of Syria and Iran."
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