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Beirut crowd shows support for Syrian role

BY MOHAMAD BAZZI | MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT

March 9, 2005

BEIRUT - They came in rickety buses, in overloaded cars and on foot, along roads surging with faith and fervor.

Wave after wave arrived Tuesday in Riad Solh Square, once a front line in Lebanon's 15-year civil war but now an emblem of Beirut's glistening downtown.

By midday, the crowd had swelled so large that people began gathering on highway overpasses and tunnels surrounding the square.

By the time the boisterous rally got under way, about 500,000 people -- an eighth of the country's entire population -- had assembled in one of the largest political gatherings in Lebanese history.

Most came out because of an appeal from one man: Hassan Nasrallah, a Shia Muslim cleric and leader of Hezbollah, Lebanon's main Shia party.

The rally was intended to show Lebanese support for Syria and to condemn U.S. pressure on Damascus to withdraw 14,000 troops from Lebanon.

More importantly, the large turnout signaled the Shias' intention to become the pivotal force in a country with an undecided future.

"I ask our partners in Lebanon or those looking at us from abroad: Are all these hundreds of thousands of people puppets?" Nasrallah thundered at the rally, responding to criticism that his group is acting at Syria's behest.

"Is this entire crowd agents for the Syrians?"

The Shias are a plurality in Lebanon, making up 40 percent of the population of 4 million.

But since the Feb. 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri plunged Lebanon into a crisis, they had largely stayed on the sidelines -- until Tuesday, when they burst on the political scene in a sea of humanity.

"We want America to know that we're not a weak people like the Iraqis," said Mustafa Fatouni, 25, who traveled for two hours from the southern city of Qana. "The Americans will never be able to impose their will on us."

At Nasrallah's urging, the crowd did not wave Hezbollah's yellow banner, which shows a fist clenching an AK-47 assault rifle. Instead, only one flag was visible at the rally: the red-and-white Lebanese flag with its green cedar tree. It is the same symbol of national unity being used by the anti-Syria opposition, which has held daily rallies in downtown Beirut since Hariri's killing.

The massive response to Hezbollah's rally highlighted that there is no Lebanese consensus on a Syrian withdrawal, as the Bush administration has tried to argue. Without support from Shias, the anti-Syria opposition will be hard pressed to claim that it represents the majority of Lebanese. And the huge turnout Tuesday dwarfed all the opposition's rallies, the largest of which have drawn about 70,000 people.

"They are a speck in the sea," Ismael Assiyali, 72, said of the opposition rallies, smiling.

Assiyali came from the southern town of Dibin, which was occupied by Israel until 2000.

That's when an 18-year guerrilla war with Hezbollah finally pushed Israel to withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon.

Assiyali's 23-year-old son, Ahmad, was a Hezbollah member who fought in the "Islamic Resistance" against Israel.

Assiyali said his son was killed along with two other Hezbollah fighters during an attack on an Israeli patrol in 1995.

"I came to this rally to honor the blood of martyrs like my son," said Assiyali, a stooping man with leathery hands. "And because Hassan Nasrallah asked us to."