Hezbollah’s charity wins southern Lebanese loyalty
By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times
TYRE, Lebanon — Hezbollah paid for his wife’s Caesarean section. It brought olive oil, sugar and nuts when he lost his job and even covered the cost of an operation on his broken nose.
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 doesn’t 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 pay medical bills, offer health insurance, pay school fees and make 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 here, who for years were the country’s underclass and whose sense of pride and identity are intertwined with Hezbollah.
Their presence in southern Lebanon is so widespread that any Israeli military advance seems likely to do little to excise 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 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 missiles being launched swooshed from near where the burial was to have been conducted.
The group is at once highly decentralized and extremely organized. 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, 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 Haidar was facing a hard 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, Awali said. The $1,500 needed to pay for Haidar’s Caesarean section was covered.
The brother of Fayadh, the cafe owner, is also covered by the insurance, an alternative to state insurance that the group has made available to the poor for about $10 a month.
“This is what Hezbollah does,” Fayadh said, with the Hezbollah television station, Al Manar, flashing on the 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 on the road. They were in a hurry. One was carrying what appeared to be a handheld radio, the trademark Hezbollah talking tool.
“No photo, no photo,” he said, walking from the car.
The next day, the same man, in the same clothes, was standing in a hospital parking lot 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 Fayadh’s shop. “Nobody knows them.”
Jouhair, the mechanic, says his son Wissam is a medic at the hospital in Bint Jbail, a town now largely leveled after Israeli fighter jets bombed it last week. Jouhair worked to avoid questions about his son, but it seemed clear he had been helping treat wounded fighters.
Hezbollah’s help for Fayadh came in the form of a canceled electricity bill. Some months ago, a bill amounting to thousands of dollars came for his cafe. 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 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,” 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 handheld 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 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 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 don’t know a loved one is a member.
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, Rai said.
"When he would leave for a mission, he would say, ‘I’m going to Beirut,’ " he said.
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 dress unkempt. When a reporter approached, they turned and walked in the other direction.
An indepth insight into why Hezbollah has huge widespread support by the public, not only for the military defense, but by taking on the role that the Lebanese government have so far neglected.
Heres a report on Hezbullah’s charity; they provide aid in places where other western agencies are afraid to go.