The Worst “Solution”
Labor Minister and Hezbollah member Mohammad Fneish, in an interview with London’s Financial Times, offered a disturbing explanation for the party’s armed take-over of half of Beirut and their assault on the Mountain.
Hezbollah politician and Labor Minister, Mohammad Fneish, in an interview with the Financial Times, published on Friday, endorsed his party’s deadly assault on West Beirut and other parts of the country in May of this year.
“Suppose May had not happened,” Fneish said to the paper. “Would we have a president by now? Would we have had a solution? This was the solution.” What Fneish failed to mention was that Hezbollah had engineered the 18-month political crisis that came to a head last spring, which his party allegedly “solved” by staging what amounted to an attempted coup.
Until that point Hezbollah consistently practiced a strategy of taking hard-line positions and then refusing to budge until its will was imposed. Instead of engaging in dialogue in the parliament in 2006, Hezbollah’s ministers stormed out of the cabinet, paralyzing the government because they wanted veto power. Instead of negotiations to bring the ministers back so all of the country’s confessions could be represented in the cabinet, Hezbollah occupied downtown Beirut, installing a sprawling tent city that crippled the local economy. When the government questioned Hezbollah’s illegal telecommunications network in early May of 2007, the party launched the offensive that killed 69 people in a week of blood and chaos.
Fneish asserted that the May events were a response to the government’s “threats” against the Resistance– not a political power grab – reinforcing the outrageousness of the party’s tactics and highlighting its refusal to acknowledge the destruction it caused. Hezbollah’s response to opposition is a policy of takeover and murder. Is this the party’s vision for Lebanon?
Lebanon has a long history, of which it should be proud, based on the principles of democracy, whereby differences of opinion should be discussed and debated within the framework of national institutions and ultimately decided by the people at the ballot box – not “resolved” by forcing opponents into submission at the barrel of a gun. Fneish, however, voiced his party’s rejection of civil discourse and democratic principles during the interview. “You can’t apply notions of Western political science in Lebanon,” he said discussing the concept of statehood.
Yet he also claimed that if “a society approves,” he has no problem with an armed militia standing side-by-side with a national army. But isn’t societal approval as a basis for legitimacy rather close to the “Western political science notion” of democracy? So what exactly is Fneish’s – and by extension, Hezbollah’s – position on this? Democratic principles when it suits them and the rejection of those principles when it doesn’t?
While it would be nice, we certainly don’t expect an answer. That’s not Hezbollah’s style. The party does not offer straightforward answers, civil solutions or constructive criticisms. It offers conflict.