EL ROSTRO DE LA GUERRA...........Hezbollah

Tomado de The New York Times, hoy, 6-08-06

AHMED Awali, guardia de seguridad, quedo sin dinero luego del nacimiento
de una hija. Lo dijo a un vecino, y pronto empezo a recibir paquetes de
comestibles. Como muchos pobres en el sur de El Libano, Ahmed Awali, 41,
guardia de seguridad en un edificio de departamentos, ha recibido ayuda
de Hezbollah a traves de los anos. Dice Ahmed que el no es miembro del
grupo y ni siquiera conoce los nombres de aquellos que le han ayudado.


Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Ahmed Awali, a security guard, ran out of money after a daughter was born. He
told one of his neighbors, and soon bags of groceries arrived. Like many poor
Shiites across southern Lebanon, Ahmed Awali, 41, a security guard at an
apartment building in this southern city, has received charity from Hezbollah
for years. He says he is not a member. He does not even know the names of those
who helped him.
Hezbollah fighters move like shadows across the mountains of southern Lebanon;
its workers in towns and villages, equally as ghostly, have settled deeply into
people’s lives.
They cover medical bills, offer health insurance, pay school fees and make seed
money available for small businesses. They are invisible but omnipresent,
providing essential services that the Lebanese government through years of war
was incapable of offering.
Their work engenders a deep loyalty among Shiites, who for years were the
country’s underclass and whose sense of pride and identity are closely
intertwined with Hezbollah.
Their presence in southern Lebanon is so widespread that any Israeli military
advance will do little to extricate the group, which is as much a part of
society as its Shiite faith.
“The trees in the south say, ‘We are Hezbollah.’ The stones say, ‘We are
Hezbollah,’ ” said Issam Jouhair, a car mechanic. “If the people cannot talk,
the stones will say it.”
Hezbollah is nowhere but everywhere. In this city, the gateway to the fighting
and the location of several of southern Lebanon’s largest functioning hospitals,
clues about its fighters surface daily.
A doctor at one of the hospitals, Jebel Amal, said it currently had about 450
patients. Hospital officials, however, seemed eager to show off a few wounded
women and children, but would not allow access to any other patients.
On Wednesday, a mass funeral was canceled. Authorities cited the security
situation. Minutes later, the sound of rockets being launched swooshed from an
area near where the burial was to have been held.
“Just because I’m sitting here in this café doesn’t mean I’m not a resistance
fighter,” said Haidar Fayadh, a cafe owner, who was smoking a water pipe as his
patrons sipped tiny plastic cups of coffee near pictures of Sheik Hassan
Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.
“Everyone has a weapon in his house,” he said. “There are doctors, teachers and
farmers. Hezbollah is people. People are Hezbollah.”
The group is at once highly decentralized and extremely organized. Mr. Awali,
whose job as a guard pays $170 a month, far lower wages than average, ran out of
money for food shortly after his second daughter was born. He mentioned this to
one of his neighbors, and days later, people with bags of groceries showed up at
his tiny one-room apartment.
“They just put it down in the middle of the room and left,” said Yusra Haidar,
Mr. Awali’s wife, sitting on a stoop outside their building, her young
daughters, now 6 and 9, eating grapes at her feet.
But it was the health insurance, when Ms. Haidar was facing a difficult
pregnancy, that saved the family. They applied for and received the insurance by
submitting photographs and filling out paperwork. Someone from Hezbollah — he
did not identify himself — came to inspect their apartment, and ask about their
finances, checking their application.
They were issued a medical card that they can use in any hospital in Lebanon,
Mr. Awali said. The $1,500 needed to pay for Ms. Haidar’s Caesarean section was
now taken care of. Mr. Fayadh’s brother also is covered by the insurance, an
alternative to state insurance that the group has made available to poor people
for only about $10 a month.
“This is what Hezbollah does,” Mr. Fayadh said, with the Hezbollah station, Al
Manar, flashing on the television screen behind him.
Most connections with the group are indirect. Its fighters are a part of the
population, and identifying them can be close to impossible. On a mountain road
not far from the Israeli border on Tuesday, a beat-up, rust-colored Toyota was
parked with its doors open. Several men in ordinary clothes were standing on the
road. They were in a hurry. One was carrying what appeared to be a hand-held
radio, the trademark Hezbollah talking tool.
“No photo, no photo,” he said, walking away from the car.
The next day, the same man, in the same clothes, was standing in a hospital
parking as hospital authorities were preparing to bury 88 bodies in a mass
grave.
“They are ghosts,” said Husam, a thin unemployed man in a black T-shirt who was
waiting for coffee at Mr. Fayadh’s shop. “Nobody knows them.”
Mr. Jouhair, the mechanic, says his son, Wissam, is a medic at the hospital in
Bint Jbail, a town that is now largely leveled after Israeli fighter jets bombed
it last week. Mr. Jouhair worked to avoid questions about his son, but it seemed
clear he had been helping heal wounded fighters.
Hezbollah’s help for Mr. Fayadh came in the form of a canceled electricity bill.
Some months ago, a bill amounting to thousands of dollars came for his café. He
could not pay it.
“Hezbollah intervened for me to get the price down,” he said, fiddling with his
empty plastic cup. “They said, ‘This is insulting for the people.’ ”
The bill came from Beirut. The electric company had sent out bills for a large
sum before, something that was particularly frustrating for Mr. Fayadh, who had
to transfer his four children from private to public school two years ago,
because he could no longer afford the $1,000 annual fee for each child. He
blamed the government of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which he said was
corrupt and arrogant, ignoring the needs of southerners.
That sentiment is expressed by many here, who see themselves as separate from
the Lebanese in the north and center of the country who support a government
coalition that is often referred to as March 14, for the day in 2005 when
thousands rallied to support them.
“I don’t trust them,” Mr. Jouhair said, as a Hezbollah station played on a radio
under a small tree near his tire changing shop. “They do not represent me.”
Hezbollah members also act as silent police, keeping tabs on neighborhoods.
Members in cars cruise about, stopping and asking questions at any sign of
commotion. Late Friday afternoon, in a suburb of Tyre, men gathered to speak to
a visitor and, within minutes, a bearded man in a button-down blue shirt and
belted slacks walked up to the group.
“What’s going on here?” the man said, squinting in the sun. “What is she asking
about?”
Residents identified the man as the Hezbollah security officer in the
neighborhood. He carried a hand-held radio and fielded three cellphone calls in
the course of a few minutes. He refused to identify himself. When asked about
Hezbollah in the area, he replied, “Hezbollah is us, from the smallest child to
the oldest man.”
The deep attachment to Hezbollah here has its roots in recent Lebanese history.
In the Israeli invasion in 1982, Shiites across the south welcomed the Israelis,
because they had come to fight the Palestinians, who had made their lives
difficult for years. But as the occupation dragged on, Israelis came to be hated
by the Shiites here, a feeling that is now passed on to small children growing
up in the Lebanese south.
“What is that sound?” said Hani Rai, a neighbor of Mr. Jouhair, directing the
attention of his small daughter Sara to the whine of a drone in the sky. “Voices
of Israeli planes.”
Sara, who is only 3, can already recite a chant glorifying Mr. Nasrallah.
Now, Hezbollah’s military branch is separate from its social works, but in its
early days it began together, organizing water delivery for people in Dahiya,
the Shiite area in south Beirut, the scene of some of some of the most complete
destruction in this war.
Several residents who knew Hezbollah members said they were trained and groomed
for up to five years before becoming full-fledged members. The military wing is
so secretive that sometimes friends and family members do not know a loved one
is a part of it.
Mr. Rai said he was stunned to learn that a close friend of his, Muhammad, was a
Hezbollah fighter. He learned of his membership only after his killing some
years ago. His body was returned to his family in an Israeli military prisoner
exchange, Mr. Rai said.
“When he would leave for a mission, he would say, ‘I’m going to Beirut,’ ” he
said.
Mr. Rai has also been helped by Hezbollah: It paid for a relative’s heart
operation.
In Tyre, even in this time of war, the group is still as elusive as ever. On
Saturday afternoon, after Hezbollah fought Israeli commandos for several hours
here just before dawn, men with serious faces, several of them bearded, walked
purposefully through the halls of Hakoumi Hospital. Several stood by a large
stack of coffins. One studied a list. Another looked distraught, his hair
disheveled, his clothes unkempt. When a reporter approached, they turned and
walked in the other direction.
“You are sitting here. Do you see anybody from Hezbollah?” said the hospital
director, Dr. Salman Zainedine. “I’ve been here for a long time. I haven’t seen
one Hezbollah body in this place.”

posted by victor @ Sunday, August 06, 2006