I couldn’t quite find a hook to explain it. But this morning, while on my way to a store in the southern suburbs, I ran (not literally) into these guys directing traffic. For those not familiar with Lebanon; these are NOT Lebanese traffic cops. Lebanese traffic police goes in grey, be it either solid grey or cameo-grey.
The gentlemen in the picture however, are the infamous “Indibat”, which is the name for the ‘discipline’ department of Hezbollah. They take care of crowd-control at large demonstrations, make sure your name is on the list of you want to attend a Hezbollah media event, and nowadays it seems they even direct the traffic in the suburbs. This is your Hezbollah police.
Hezbollah functions in some ways indeed as a parallel government. They basically run (parts of) the southern suburbs. Right up to the small details. Their argument is that they do this in absence of a government. For the longest time, just after the end of the civil war, the government tended to focus more on the affluent regions of Beirut and the country. The southern suburbs got ignored, and Hezbollah – conveniently – stepped in. And they stepped in to the extent that Lebanese authorities are – in some cases – not even welcome in those neighborhoods anymore.
You can walk into any neighborhood in Beirut and make pictures. As long as you’re not aiming at an army post, or the house of an MP, nobody will object. Well, somebody may, but you can very politely ignore that.
In the southern suburbs, you cannot ignore anyone. Unidentified men will come up to you, request your papers, demand you erase the pictures, or (in the old days) ask you to hand in your film. I’ve handed a number of films to those guys. You then get escorted to some office where they triple check your credentials, en then ask you to go away. If you are not cooperative, well, they make it clear that being uncooperative is not a wise decision.
I was once asked not to come there on my motor bike anymore. “When in Rome, be as he Romans. Take a car,” the then Hezbollah press officer said. A woman on a bike must have been a bit of an embarrassment for him. That was in the old days, when their press officer didn’t speak English yet. They’ve gotten savvy since, and their press officers are well-spoken and likeable fellas.
Lebanese policemen receive little respect in general. Nobody pays much attention to traffic police, partly because Lebanese find rules and regulations an insult to their liberty. And partly because some policemen are notoriously incompetent when it comes to directing traffic. They’re either on the phone, chat with a colleague while traffic comes to a grinding halt (since they actually ‘create’ traffic’, the name traffic police is appropriate), or direct traffic against each other.
Policemen instill little respect. I once ran over a policeman’s scooter, laughed at him, and drove off with no consequences whatsoever.
Hezbollah is no laughing matter. They run the suburbs with an iron fist. It has some advantages. People respect them, of maybe it is fear, and things do run well. Two days after the Israeli bombardments stopped, their construction company (Jihad al Bina, since then put on the list of terrorist organizations) was already hauling off debris, and had a roadmap ready showing which buildings were gone, who was getting what money, and where reconstructions would starts. Go ask the Lebanese government to do that. We transferred our registration papers from Tripoli to Beirut some nine years ago. They are still missing, and we are now registered nor here, nor there. I couldn’t care less, but we are no longer allowed to vote, among other things.
But it is odd that within a state, there is another organization that nobody can mess with, not even the government itself. Reminds me a little of the mafia, albeit these guys are legal. Now that I have my hook, I’ve got to write the article.
2 comments:
a state within a non-state ...
i like that state within a non-state statement so true and sad
L
Post a Comment