RELIGION BULLETIN-LEBANON: Islamist Radicals Find Local Politics A Winning Game

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Firass al-Amine

BEIRUT, May 31 1998 (IPS) - Hezbollah, the Islamic political movement best known today for its guerilla war against the Israeli occupiers of South Lebanon, appears to have pulled off a stunning electoral victory in the poor quarters of southern Beirut.

Based on preliminary figures, the political wing of Hezbollah (Party of God) has taken the lead in two key southern districts of the capital — seeing off an alliance between prime minister Rafik Hariri and influential parliament speaker Nabih Berri.

More than 9,000 candidates vied for some 3,000 municipal council seats across the Mount Lebanon, Jounieh and South Beirut regions on Sunday. The rest of Beirut and other parts of the country vote in later weekend polls this and next month.

Lebanon last held municipal elections in 1963. Later polls were halted by political crisis and a 15 year civil war.

Six hundred jobs as ‘mokhtars’ — elected officials who keep records of births, marriages and deaths — were also up for selection Sunday. It is also the first time since 1992 that the Lebanese Christian community has not boycotted the vote.

The Hezbollah victory in the poverty-stricken southern city districts of Gorbayri and Bourg el-Barajneh, if confirmed, could be the final nail in the coffin for Elyssar, the public corporation set up to oversee a half billion dollar redevelopment plan fo r the area.

It also restores the domestic prospects of the Hezbollah, riding high as a military force on the back of its victories over Israeli occupation forces to the south, but, up to now, much less sure footed in its dealings with the clan networks that traditio nally run conventional Lebanese politics.

Last week Hariri tore up a carefully pre-arranged election pact between his people and Hezbollah, and signed up with Berri, apparently in a bid to freeze out Hezbollah once and for all.

They seem to have failed in this aim in south Beirut, but in other areas the voters seem to have backed the government’s coalition lists of candidates, drafted to guarantee a Christian representation on most of the councils.

Unlike the national elections here, municipal elections do not use quotas to distribute seats evenly among the country’s 19 religious communities.

Former prime minister Michel Aoun, in exile in France, decided to fight Hariri’s candidates in Beirut, but Toufik Hindi, spokesman of the disbanded Lebanese Forces of Samir Geagea, said his group had joined Hariri’s coalition lists to “ensure a Christia n rpesentation”. Druze leader Walid Jumblatt also backed coalition lists in the Druze-dominated Shouf and Aley districts, which vote later. “The war is over, Christians and Druze should now cooperate,” Jumblatt told reporters.

Nevertheless, opposition to Hariri, a fabulously rich construction magnate, is particularly vocal in Beirut. Former Sunni prime minister Salim Hoss is one among many who object to the way that he has given a free hand to giant reconstruction companies th at he either owns, runs or has substantial stakes in.

Hoss has called on the newly elected councils to regain control of the planning process. Not surpassingly, Hariri is reported to be investing lot of his time and money to ensure that the candidates loyal to his local and national policies get elected.

As it turned out, Hezbollah’s strong community links in the southern suburbs, based around its networks of health clinics and schools, stood it in good stead against Hariri on Sunday.

But some of its success in the southern suburbs appears to be down to the links it retained with families left out of the last minute Hariri-Berri deal — many of whom wil have no truck with fundamentalist Shi’a Islam.

Indeed, the lipsticked girl volunteers in tight ripped jeans seen working at the Islamic ‘fundamentalist’ Hezbollah campign HQ on Sunday offered one measure of the variety of view that might be expected from a Hezbollah-run south Beirut district council .

How the new council will handle the Elyssar project, sister scheme to the giant Solidere conglomerate presently rebuilding the Beirut city centre, is not known.

Elyssar announced its plans to open up the land for development in 1996. But political wrangling and difficulties in financing delayed the start and last March it cancelled the tender for the work without indicating when a new tender would be offered.

The project has been dogged by financial and political problems, chief among them the question of the thousands of poor Shi’ite Muslims, mostly refugees who came in from southern Lebanon during the civil war.

Both Hezbollah and Berri, the Shi’a’s leading representative, had taken up the issue of rights to relocation and compensation, but Berri’s alliance with Hariri and their last minute rejection of cooperation with Hezbollah seems to have driven the local S hi’a vote into the Islamists’ hands.

The news from Beirut Sunday night was that the man certain to lead the 21 seat local authority in Gorbayri, if the Islamists really have won the day, would be Hezbollah political bureau chief Mohammad al-Khansa.

Hariri and his foreign investors are acutey aware of the strategic significance of the Gorbayri district. It covers existng high profile developments like the Summerland and Coral Beach hotel complexes and above all, the airport and the road between it and the city centre.

The road used to be avenued with giant pictures of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomenei — a reminder of Hezbollah’s Iranian links and its association with the kidnap gangs that would pluck western hostages off the road as they travelled to and fro m the airport in the 1980s.

Only after much coaxing did the government have the posters removed; observers here wryly note that a new district council can now put them back up.