Half a Million Gather for Pro-Syrian Rally to Defy Vision of US
by Robert Fisk in Beirut

Wednesday, March 9, 2005 by the
Independent (UK)

It was a warning. They came in their tens of thousands, Lebanese Shia
Muslim families with babies in arms and children in front, walking past
my Beirut home. They reminded me of the tens of thousands of Iraqi
Shia Muslims who walked with their families to the polls in Iraq,
despite the gunfire and the suicide bombers.

And now they came from southern Lebanon and the Bekaa to say they
rejected America’s plans in Lebanon, and wanted – so they claimed –
to know who killed Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister murdered
on 14 February, and to reject UN Security Council Resolution 1559
which demands a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament
of the Hizbollah guerrilla movement, and to express their “thanks”
to Syria. This was a tall order in Lebanon.

But only 100 yards from the Lebanese opposition protests, the
half-million – for that was an approachable figure, given Hizbollah’s
extraordinary organisational abilities – stood for an hour with
Lebanese flags, and posed a challenge to President George Bush’s
project in the Middle East. “America is the source of terrorism”,
one poster proclaimed. “All our disasters come from America”.

Many of those tens of thousands were Hizbollah families who had
fought the Israelis during their occupation of southern Lebanon,
been arrested by the Israelis, imprisoned by the Israelis and feared
that American support for Lebanon meant not “democracy” but an imposed
Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty.

There were Syrians in the crowds – indeed, I saw buses with Syrian
registration plates that had brought families from Damascus – but
almost all the half million were Lebanese Shias and they wanted to
reject 1559 because it called for Hizbollah to be disarmed. They
were perfectly happy to see the Syrians leave (who now remembers
the Syrian massacre of Hizbollah members in Beirut in 1987?) but,
bearing in mind Syria’s transit of weapons from Iran to Lebanon,
Hizbollah wanted to be regarded as a resistance movement, not a
“militia” to be disarmed. What the Shia were saying was that they
were a power, just as they said when they voted in Iraq. In Lebanon,
Shia Muslims are the largest religious community.

Syria is run by a clique of Alawis – who are Shia – and Iraq is now
dominated by Shia Muslims who voted themselves into power, and Iran
is a Shia nation So when President Bush said “the Lebanese people
have the right to determine their future free from domination of a
foreign power”, the power the Shias were thinking of was not Syria
but the United States and Israel.

And 100 yards away, the demonstrators who have bravely protested
against the murder of Rafik Hariri have become factionalised,
courtesy of the Syrians. At night, the opposition protesters are
largely Christian. Yesterday’s Hizbollah rally, while it contained
the usual pro-Syrian Christians, was essentially Shia. And their
message was not one of thanks to President Bush.

“The fleets came in the past and were defeated; and they will be
defeated again,” Hizbollah’s leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, said in
reference to the Americans. Ironically, President Bush was to refer
within hours to the killing of 241 US Marines in Beirut in October
1982, as if their deaths were the responsibility of al-Qa’ida. To the
Israelis, Nasrallah said: “Let go of your dreams for Lebanon. To the
enemy entrenched on our border, occupying our country and imprisoning
our people, ‘There is no place for you here and there is no life for
you among us: Death to Israel’.”

Nasrallah’s take on the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war was predictable.
The crowds were meeting on the front lines that had separated the
Lebanese during the civil war; indeed, on the very location of
the Christian-Muslim trenches of that conflict. “We meet today to
remind the world and our partners in the country,” Nasrallah said,
“that this arena that joins us, or the other one in Martyrs’ Square,
was destroyed by Israel and civil war and was united by Syria and
the blood of its soldiers and officers.”

This was an inventive piece of history. Israel certainly killed many
thousands of Lebanese – more than the Syrians, although their soldiers
took the lives of many hundreds – but the half million roared their
approval.

So what did all this prove? That there was another voice in Lebanon.
That if the Lebanese “opposition” – pro-Hariri and increasingly
Christian – claim to speak for Lebanon and enjoy the support of
President Bush, there is a pro-Syrian, nationalist voice which does not
go along with their anti-Syrian demands but which has identified what
it believes is the true reason for Washington’s support for Lebanon:
Israel’s plans for the Middle East.

The Beirut demonstration yesterday was handled in the usual Hizbollah
way: maximum security, lots of young men in black shirts with two-way
radios, and frightening discipline. No one was allowed to carry a gun
or a Hizbollah flag. There was no violence. When one man brandished a
Syrian flag, it was immediately taken from him. Law and order, not
“terrorism”, was what Hizbollah wished. Syria had spoken. President
Bashar Assad’s sarcastic remark about the Hariri protesters needing a
“zoom lens” to show their numbers had been answered by a demonstration
of Shia power which needed no “zoom”.

And in the mountains above Beirut, still frozen under their winter
snows, few Syrians moved. There were Syrian military trucks on the
international high way to Damascus but no withdrawal, no retreat, no
redeployment. The Taif agreement of 1989 stipulated that the Syrians
should withdraw to the Mdeirej heights above Beirut, which they have
now agreed to do, 14 years later than they should have done.

The official document released by the Lebanese-Syrian military
delegation in Damascus suggests this is a new redeployment and that
in April the Syrian forces, along with their military intelligence
personnel, will withdraw to the Lebanese-Syrian border.

But the question remains: will they retreat to the Syrian side of
the frontier, or sit in the Lebanese-Armenian town of Aanjar, on the
Lebanese side, where Brigadier General Rustum Gazale, the head of
Syrian military intelligence, still maintains his white-painted villa?

Either way, Lebanon can no longer be taken for granted. The “cedar”
revolution now has a larger dimension, one that does not necessarily
favour America’s plans. If the Shia of Iraq can be painted as
defenders of democracy, the Shias of Lebanon cannot be portrayed
as the defenders of “terrorism”. So what does Washington make of
yesterday’s extraordinary events in Beirut?

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress