Hezbollah Loyalties Cause Sectarian Rift in Lebanon
By ANNE BARNARD
Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
A boy held a flag during the funeral of the Hezbollah fighter Ahmed Awad on Tuesday.
As Hezbollah fights alongside President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the
mostly Shiite border village of Hermel finds itself at odds with local
Sunnis.
Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
A boy held a flag during the funeral of the Hezbollah fighter Ahmed Awad on Tuesday.
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: June 21, 2013
HERMEL, Lebanon — The procession was small as Hezbollah funerals go,
just a few hundred people winding past wind-tossed olive trees through
this remote Bekaa Valley village. Still, the mourners honored the
fighter killed in Syria with the usual solemn choreography: the coffin
draped with a flag, the uniformed Boy Scouts bearing his portrait, the
women carrying babies and wreaths of roses.
Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Lebanese men carried a coffin during a funeral of Ahmed Awad, a Hezbollah fighter killed in Syria.
But to the traditional prayers and chants – praising the leaders of Iran
and Hezbollah, denouncing Israel and America – the mourners added a new
barb, for the gunmen battling the Syrian government who, they said, had
killed him: “Death to the Free Army.”
The funeral on Wednesday at once encapsulated Hezbollah’s cohesion and
the new uncertainties and anxieties its followers face as it fights a
new kind of war, more intimate and ambiguous than the group’s founding
conflict with Israel.
Hezbollah’s increasingly open military intervention in Syria, against
fellow Arab Muslims, is framed by its followers here in the northern
Bekaa Valley less as a galvanizing mission than a regrettable necessity.
“We are fighting with them, but we dislike this fighting,” one resident,
a man who accompanied journalists to the funeral and asked to be
identified as a Hezbollah supporter, said at the party’s headquarters
after the ceremony.
The fighting has severely altered life here. It has left the Shiite
Muslims of Hermel afraid to visit nearby Sunni villages in Lebanon and
Syria, cutting them off from jobs, friends and business dealings.
Soldiers now check cars entering the village, fearing bombs. a new
wariness has crept up between some Syrian workers and their employers
here.
“Unfortunately, we don’t know who our enemy is today,” one villager, Abu
Hassan, said as the family of the fighter, a young father with a wispy
beard named Ahmed Awad, crowded, some weeping, around the grave.
“It’s as if you take the fight against Israel and you bring it instead
into your own house,” the other Hezbollah supporter said. “But
honestly,” he added, referring to Syrian rebels and the foreign radicals
fighting with them, “it was them who brought it into the house.”
Nearly everyone interviewed during three recent days in Hermel said that
Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim militant group and political party that
holds sway in this mostly Shiite village, had no choice but to fight
alongside its Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad, against an
uprising increasingly influenced by Sunni extremists. Some Sunni rebel
groups have denounced Shiites as apostates, killed them and destroyed
their shrines.
Yet the very view from the grave site in Hermel was a reminder of why
Hezbollah’s followers here express more pain over the Syrian fight.
Below the hillside cemetery stretched the mountains and apricot orchards
along the border with Syria, lands where the Shiites of Hermel have
long shared deep ties -- of commerce, of kinship-- with Lebanese and
Syrian Sunnis. The ties remained even as some Sunnis joined or supported
the uprising, and local Hezbollah leaders and supporters worked with
Sunni sheiks to keep the area calm.
But as Hezbollah poured fighters across the border last month to help
the Syrian army retake the nearby town of Qusayr -- its white buildings,
where Hermel residents used to shop, visible in the distance from the
cemetery – rebels increasingly clashed directly with Hezbollah and
attacked its civilian areas in Lebanon. Hermel has lost four residents
to rocket attacks from Syrian rebels, and about seven Hezbollah
fighters, the mayor, Mustafa Taha, said.
Residents fear worse. An obstetrician from Hermel recently got a call
from her boss at a clinic in Arsal telling her it was unsafe for her to
come to work anymore.
Her husband, a Russian-educated member of the secular Syrian Social
Nationalist Party, said he was concerned about the growing religious
fervor on both sides -- “Marx was right. Religion is terrible for
society.” But for now, he said he accepts Hezbollah as the price of
protection saying the party is less fanatical than the extremists on the
other side.
The economic problems that began when rebels seized border villages and
gunmen started kidnapping travelers have worsened: lucrative fuel
smuggling has dropped off. The fish farms along the gushing Orontes
River have lost most of their business, which was with Syria. The
restaurants there stand empty, their umbrellas advertising Lebanese beer
unopened. Apricots and apples go unharvested.
Watching the funeral, Abu Hassan, who gave only a nickname to protect his security, said it might have been “a mistake” to fight Syrians, but added, “If we didn’t, they will come to us.”
“I dislike the whole situation,” he said. “The Syrians don’t trust us.
They consider us lambs permissible for slaughtering.”
Mistrust had invaded the village, he said, even among some Shiites as
some have supported the battle more enthusiastically than others, and
especially between them and the Syrian laborers who have long worked
here.
“We’re watching them,” he said.
Here, Hezbollah finds itself caught between competing pressures. Some
tribal Shiites, who back Hezbollah politically but resent the way it has
supplanted their traditional power, voice discomfort with the fighting
that has disrupted livelihoods and community ties and want it to end as
soon as possible.
On the other hand, some followers chafe when the party urges restraint
and reconciliation and forbids them to attack rebels and their
supporters in the Lebanese Sunni village of Arsal across the valley.
Over the past week, the son of a Sunni leader from Arsal was killed near
Hermel, and four Shiites were killed near Arsal, including two from the
powerful Jaafari tribe.
Abdullah Jaafari, a tribe member, said in an interview that the family
was refraining from traditional revenge killings at Hezbollah’s request –
for now.
“We won’t stay silent over our sons’ blood,” he said.
Even though Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, forbade celebratory
gunfire in a recent speech, as the funeral procession passed on
Wednesday, relatives of the dead fighter honored him with barrages of
gunfire. Asked why, the Hezbollah supporter said it was impossible to
contain people’s emotions – and, eventually their demands.
“I told Sayyed Hassan myself, there is a point at which we can’t control
the people,” he said. “If we could, then people from Arsal wouldn’t
have been killed, nor the Jaafari people.”
After the funeral, he awaited a meeting with a sheik from Arsal, part of
a flurry of talks that aims to keep tensions low. Hezbollah, according
to multiple Hermel residents and Sunnis visiting from Syria who do not
support the uprising, has worked behind the scenes to keep Sunnis safe
in Shiite majority villages on both sides of the border, once even
paying compensation to Shiites who wanted to take revenge on
anti-government Sunnis they said destroyed their homes.
But the Hezbollah supporter said he believed the rebels had not reciprocated. “That’s what hurts,” he said.
North of Hermel, the Syrian border was quiet, the black-clad Hezbollah
fighters who had been active there during the Qusayr battle nowhere to
be seen; Hezbollah supporters said they had moved on to other battles in
Syria.
Hussein Jamal, a Shiite man living at the border, whose yard had been
struck by a shell and whose brother was kidnapped and never returned,
said he felt safer now, but was unsure if relations with neighboring
Sunnis would ever be the same.
“We were told no one was allowed to be hurt,” he said. “But without the
leadership I don’t think they would be staying here.”
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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