Firefight sparked by parking dispute highlights militias’ role in Lebanon’s tensions

Armed militias: a quandary for Lebanon, US

BEIRUT — It started with a dispute over a parking space and erupted into a four-hour street war between Hezbollah and a rival militia, with masked snipers running through alleyways and rocket-propelled grenades exploding in the middle of a Beirut neighborhood.

Last week’s bloodshed, which killed three people, was nothing close to the worst this city has seen. But it has refocused attention on the bane of Lebanon’s existence: the dozens of private armies that grew out of the country’s 15-year civil war and still flourish 20 years after the conflict ended.

“People still in this country have RPGs in their homes,” Nadim Houry, the Beirut director at Human Rights Watch, told The Associated Press after the Aug. 24 clashes. “And they’re still in good shape, as you can see.”

The fighting led the Western-backed prime minister, Saad Hariri, to call yet again for the militias to disarm. But the biggest militia of all, Iranian-backed Hezbollah, is part of his government, wielding virtual veto power, and long-running talks on disarmament have gone nowhere.

The power balance worries the U.S. and its close ally Israel, Hezbollah’s sworn enemy. This month, U.S. lawmakers in Congress put a hold on $100 million of the $720 million in military aid that U.S. administrations have provided to Lebanon’s ill-equipped army since 2006.

It’s not clear how long the suspension might last. U.S. administration officials say the aid should continue, and will prepare responses to the lawmakers’ concerns that the weapons may be falling into the wrong hands.

Israel says it spotted an ominous change on Aug. 3 when the Lebanese army, recipient of the U.S. weapons, traded fire with Israeli forces who were pruning a tree on their border with Lebanon. An Israeli officer, two Lebanese soldiers and a Lebanese journalist died.

Hezbollah was not involved in that fighting, but Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said his country always had concerns the army’s weapons could end up in Hezbollah’s hands.

Now, he said, Lebanon’s weapons are being used directly against Israel.

The move in Congress has provoked defiant responses in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its chief backer, Iran, both said they were willing to make up the arms shortfall, and Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr vowed Lebanon would reject any military assistance if the condition was that the weapons not be used against Israel.

He opened a bank account for Lebanese to donate money to buy arms from alternative sources.

Since Israel and Hezbollah fought a devastating 34-day war in 2006, Western governments have worked to strengthen the central government, now led by Saad Hariri. The danger of another Israel-Hezbollah war is ever-present, and would be especially disruptive now, when Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are about to get a fresh start initiated by the Obama administration.

Hariri’s call to disarm the militias has broad public backing, motivated by fears that local clashes could erupt into another civil war. But when it comes to Hezbollah, opinion is ambivalent. Hezbollah confronting Israel is applauded, but after the militia was seen by some as igniting the 2006 war and Israel bombed Lebanese infrastructure, it came under criticism.

Now that it’s part of the government and focused on building its political credentials, Hezbollah must tread carefully; it knows its standing would suffer if it were blamed for another outbreak of violence.

The criticism that followed the war with Israel was repeated two years later when 80 people died in clashes as Hezbollah resisted government attempts to dismantle its private phone network, and after the latest violence, both Shiite Hezbollah and its smaller Sunni rival, al-Ahbash, were at pains to portray the matter as stemming from a “personal dispute,” not a sectarian one.

But the fact that gunmen last week had the weapons to sustain a four-hour gunbattle is testament to the power of these armed groups.

Lebanon is not entirely dependent on U.S. military assistance, and has turned to Russia and Arab governments for assistance in the past. But Iran’s profile is growing steadily.

“Iran and Lebanon are members of one body,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in Tehran on Sunday. “These two nations have joint assignments and responsibilities against arrogant powers.”

Hariri has stressed that his calls for a “weapons-free” Beirut do not extend to Hezbollah, and he would have a hard time including it in a ban.

For one thing, Hezbollah draws legitimacy from being the only militia that was allowed to keep its weapons under the agreement that ended the 1975-1990 civil war. For another, it is respected by Lebanese as the force most willing to stand up to Israel.

“We are with the resistance against Israel, and there is an ongoing dialogue about these arms,” Hariri said recently.

But, he added in a later speech, Lebanon cannot stand by in the face of firefights like last week’s, saying: “We will not allow anyone to burn our homes, kill our children and destroy our belongings only because someone didn’t find a suitable parking for his car.”

AP Writers Aisha Mohammed in Jerusalem and Matthew Lee in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.