[Lebanon] Shia of Lebanon emerge from poverty to face charges of overstepping their powers

from The Financial Times

By Roula Khalaf

The newly built stone mansions in the village of Kfar Jos symbolise the changing fortunes of Lebanon's Shia community, the country's largest minority sect.

Nestling at the edge of the town of Nabatiye, known as the Shia capital of southern Lebanon, Kfar Jos's landscape has been transformed by a wave of immigrants who brought home part of the wealth earned in Africa and America.

At Nabatiye town hall, officials say almost every family in this part of the Lebanon has a member working abroad, their remittances helping to lift the living standards of one of the country's most deprived regions. They proudly list the social and economic achievements, including the establishment of 16 bank branches, five hospitals and more than 15 schools.

Signs of the Shia community's political empowerment are visible too, with posters of revered political chiefs plastered all over town and in surrounding villages.

Among them is the late Musa Sadr, the charismatic leader who was the first, in the 1970s, to assert the Shia's political rights and fight discrimination by the then dominant Sunni Muslims and Christian Maronites.

Even more prominent are the pictures of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, chief of Hizbollah, the largest and most powerful Shia party, considered a terrorist organisation in the US but widely seen in the Arab world as a legitimate resistance group.

The Islamist movement's long war of attrition with Israel, which ended with an Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000, underlined the Shia's nationalism and cemented their role in the Lebanese state.

"The Shia were the poorest, they weren't well educated, and many of them were unskilled workers in Beirut," says Ali Fayad, director of the Beirut-based Consultative Center for Studies and Documentation, a research institute affiliated with Hizbollah. "Change for the southern Shia community came with migration, with political organisation, and with the Shia revival everywhere after the 1979 Iranian revolution."

But the forceful assertion of political rights has recently become a source of controversy. Shia parties face accusations of overstepping their powers and using the backing of Syria and Iran to impose their will on other communities.

In a country of less than 4m people, more than a dozen different sects and a history of civil war (in the 1970s and 1980s) no one knows the precise size of every religious community. The Shia, however, are now thought to be at least as numerous - probably more so - as the Sunni Muslims, with the once dominant Christians, most of them Maronites, now considered far fewer than Muslims.

Under the 1989 Taef accords that ended Lebanon's civil war, power was more evenly divided among the three main sects, with the Shia represented in the powerful position of speaker of parliament. But the civil harmony, always fragile, was shattered just over a year ago, when the country's Sunni leader and former prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in Beirut.

Most Christians and Sunni Lebanese rose in revolt against Syria, which then controlled Lebanese politics and was blamed for the killing, forcing the departure of Syrian troops in April 2005.

Shia parties - Hizbollah and the more secular Amal movement - were caught in the middle. Hizbollah in particular has come under pressure from both Damascus and Tehran (its even stronger backer) to stand against the pro-western and anti-Syrian forces in the country. And it has resisted demands from the United Nations - and from some Lebanese parties - to dismantle its military wing.

But continued Shia backing for Damascus has prompted anti-Syrian politicians to question Shia parties' loyalty to Lebanon and to accuse Hizbollah of using its military power to gain political leverage.

"The Shia feel threatened but there is no real threat. They're the only ones who are armed," says a Christian politician. "They feel like a besieged minority but the others see them as a dominant minority and a threatening minority." Hizbollah officials say the party's weapons would never be used against other Lebanese and insist they are as attached to civil peace as any other political party.

Other Shia religious and political leaders, meanwhile, have been stressing that the community's allegiance is only to Lebanon.

"The Shia . . . do not want to replace Lebanon for any other country and they will not accept that they be ruled by Iran or Syria. They co-ordinate with Syria and Iran on issues that they believe in, exactly in the same way that others co-ordinate with America or France," says Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's top Shia cleric. "Why is the intervention of the US, through the American ambassador, and that of the French, considered 'independence' but the help of other countries considered 'occupation'?"

But the polarisation of Lebanese politics has alarmed regional governments, already troubled by the Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq. Saudi Arabia is said to have warned Sunni leaders to avoid confrontation with the Shia at all cost.

All sides were reminded of the risk of sectarian violence last month when security forces foiled a plot to assassinate the Hizbollah chief. The would-be killers were said to be a group of Sunni extremists.