Just as the south prepared to celebrate the anniversary of its liberation from the Israeli occupation, Hizbullah consolidated its leadership of Lebanon's Shias, write Serene Assir and Mohalhel Fakih Rival movements Hizbullah and Amal vied for supremacy in South Lebanon's elections. The country's third round of municipal elections saw a very high turnout -- around 65 per cent of Nabatiyeh and the South governorates' registered voters cast their ballots, with turnout in the city of Tyre described as the "highest ever" by government officials. For the first time, the Syrian leadership did not exert pressure on the two factions to form a single coalition. The fierce competition between them was given full rein. With Amal's popularity waning steadily in much of the country, especially after its rival's resistance fighters gained credit for the liberation of the south from the occupying Israeli regime in 2000, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's non-intervention provided Hizbullah with a de facto victory. Given Hizbullah's victory in the municipal elections earlier this month in the country's two other predominantly Shia areas -- the eastern Bekaa and Beirut's dahiye (outskirts) -- Shia participation in national politics is set to be ever more channelled through Hizbullah. Significantly, in Prime Minister Rafiq Al- Hariri's hometown Sidon, Hizbullah also managed to outweigh the Sunni politician's clout, despite the fact that he and his sister Bahia Al- Hariri -- a member of parliament for the municipality -- are known for their welfare projects in the area. Still, there will be some power sharing to be done in the highly complex patchwork of Lebanon's sectarian politics. Amal said it won in 90 out of 247 municipalities with the other seats going mainly to Hizbullah. Tyre, for example, was celebrating Amal's victory even before the official results were announced, with the gates of the ancient city decorated with a photograph of the movement's leader and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, underlined with a caption identifying him as al-assad -- meaning "the lion", in a clear reference to the Syrian leadership, former and current. Meanwhile, neither party has emerged unscathed from this round of elections. On the one hand, there have been serious and potentially damaging accusations of outright corruption. The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) said both Hizbullah and Amal had pressured voters to cast their ballots in the open instead of behind private screens, in breach of the law. On the other hand, many former South Lebanese Army (SLA) members, particularly in the predominantly Christian town of Marjayoun, were prevented from voting altogether by having their names removed from the voting lists. The SLA worked in collaboration with the Israeli occupation regime and many of its former members have thus been tried since the withdrawal on 25 May 2000. However, South Lebanon is still in a state of war. The municipal elections, by the very nature of the so-called democratic system that has been in place since the colonially instated National Covenant came into effect in 1943, provide more of an accurate picture of how the various factions try and work around an essentially unrepresentative system rather than of how citizens try and seek true political representation. Municipal elections have historically tended to provide an appropriate platform for local strongmen and their families to secure their seats of power. Alignments and coalitions are usually created merely in a spirit of opportunism. This is reflected in the constant shifts in alliances that take place. One of Amal's main allies in this round was the Communist Party, once linked to Hizbullah during the Lebanese civil war. In fact, the real show of popularity for Hizbullah came before the south went to the polls. Critics attribute Hizbullah's overwhelming success to its capitalisation on the anniversary of the liberation of the south and to party leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah's call for the staging of a 500,000-strong rally in south Beirut last Friday. It was the largest demonstration in Lebanese history. On the other hand, the fact that Lebanese and Palestinian men and women from all sects, including thousands who walked a 100-kilometre distance to the capital to demonstrate their solidarity with those suffering in Iraq, is highly indicative of Hizbullah's mass appeal. Many of those who attended the rally wore white shrouds -- white being the colour of mourning -- symbolising their readiness to die in defence of the Shia shrines in Najaf and Karbala in occupied Iraq. Nasrallah said the rally constituted a "symbolic message to the Americans. They have to understand that your [the demonstrators] attendance is not a show, but it signals the renewal of your engagement in the struggle for the just cause until victory. By attacking holy sites, they are attacking all Muslims and Shias worldwide." He added that the desecration of holy sites leaves only one option -- that of making "great sacrifices and the call of martyrdom". Hizbullah's militant stance has gained it many enemies within Lebanon, some of whom have accused the party's leadership of provoking increased pressure from the United States, which has classified the militant organisation as "terrorist" in its State Department blacklist and has been piling up pressure on neighbouring Syria. Only last week, the Syria Accountability Act came into force after a long delay, and given Hizbullah's strong ties with the Baathist regime, any overt show of support for the Iraqi resistance by the Shia movement could be capitalised on by the US. In addition, Maronite Fares Saed MP of the Qornet Shehwan Christian Party accused Nasrallah of ignoring Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani's call to Shias worldwide not to rally public support for the young Muqtada Al-Sadr's resistance movement. The Hariri-owned Al- Mustaqbal newspaper had also published a series of letters from Shia clerics advising their sect's members to distance their politics from those of Al-Sadr in Iraq. Essentially, what Nasrallah's position indicates -- along with that of those who attended the historic rally -- is that the conventional hierarchy in the ranks of the Lebanese Shia has given way to a far more powerful rallying cry: that of liberation, that which has been at the core of Hizbullah's discourse since its inception in 1982. It is this that granted the Shias political weight, by virtue of the resistance in the south against the Israeli occupation, and it is this that renders street politics in Lebanon far more representative of the national mood than an electoral process that by its very construction can never be fair. This is because, though municipal elections are essentially open to all, parliamentary elections can only result in the presidency being taken by a Maronite Christian and the premiership by a Sunni Muslim, while the Shias must have their highest representative in the speaker of parliament. Berri currently holds this last post at present: in these elections, his was the greatest defeat. Meanwhile, Hizbullah has taken both the street and the democratic process by storm, though for now the victory is more symbolic than actual. With Shias throughout the region growing increasingly agitated with colonial injustice, nevertheless, what seems to be building up is a situation that the French-designed Lebanese system may not be able to contain for much longer.
