Lebanon: Hezbollah, the Special Tribunal, and the Power of the Multitude (Khatib)
Saturday, October 30, 2010 at 11:20 | Scott Lucas in EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 
Lina Khatib writes in Foreign Policy about the latest developments with United Nations' Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which continues its investigation of the 2005 killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and consideres the wider implications for Lebanese and regional politics:
On Wednesday, two male STL investigators --- an Australian and a Frenchman --- visited the office of gynecologist Iman Sharara in Southern Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, after making an appointment with the purpose of examining the records of at least 14 people who had visited her clinic since 2003. The investigators, accompanied by a female translator, were subsequently mobbed by 150 women who surrounded them, violently attacked them, and snatched a briefcase that one of them was carrying which contained a laptop and official STL documents.
The Western media have largely not picked up on the latest episode in Hezbollah's campaign against the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, driven by the Tribunal's rumored potential indictments of Hezbollah members. But the episode marks the introduction of a new, "bottom-up" variable in Hezbollah's political strategy that is aimed at discrediting the STL and those who cooperate with its investigations. This variable has been used to escalate the campaign with potentially serious consequences for the Lebanese government's relationship with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah's handling of this incident is notable for using women as a "soft" weapon to impede the investigation. Hezbollah, through its al-Manar TV station, framed the clinic episode as a legitimate and "firm" reaction by the women to a "moral scandal." In a speech by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah the following day, he presented the event as a development tarnishing "our honor and dignity and requiring a different stance" from Hezbollah. He went on to question, "who would accept someone looking at the gynecological files of a mother or a sister or a daughter?" By invoking the issue of women's honor, Nasrallah is appealing to a traditional set of values that makes the event dogmatically unacceptable. The STL's investigators provided the perfect pretext for this framework, not only by physically entering a Hezbollah stronghold where they are certainly unwelcome, but also by sending men to a gynecological clinic.
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