Trad Hamadah: 'Hezbollah's weapons not sacrosanct' (Figaro)
Much of what Hamadah says here is just standard propaganda boilerplate. Incidentally, that includes a preview of Hezbollah's current position on an immediate unconditional cease-fire. Now that the UN is about to pass a resolution mandating an immediate cease-fire (prior to resolving the substantive issues), as many people around the world have been demanding for weeks, Hezbollah and its friends refuse to accept one. This position had already been made clear last week, though its significance seemed to elude a lot of commentators at the time. What Hamadah said in this August 3 interview was: "We demand an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops." What this means is: We will not accept an immediate cease-fire without other conditions attached. Now the list of conditions, qualifications, and reservations has merely been increased.
But in the last paragraph of the interview there is a more intriguing suggestion, which is picked up in Figaro's headline.
[Malbrunot] Supporting the Al-Sanyurah plan means accepting the Lebanese Government's recovery of sovereignty throughout the territory. So does Hezbollah agree to be disarmed?The first point to make is that one shouldn't get too excited about this. Hamadah has made similar statements on other recent occasions, but it's not clear that they mean much. For example, some people would like to be encouraged by his carefully worded formulation that "Once the Lebanese prisoners in Israel have been released and Israel has withdrawn from the Al-Shab'a farms, the liberating role of Hezbollah's resistance will be over." With a certain amount of wishful thinking, this could be interpreted to mean that, after the Israelis have withdrawn from the Shebaa Farms strip (which is actually part of Syria, not Lebanon), then Hezbollah would consider its armed conflict with Israel to be over. But Hamadah didn't actually say that, and other figures in Hezbollah who are much more important than Hamadah, including Hezbollah chief Nasrallah himself, have explicitly and repeatedly said otherwise. For example, speaking of Israel as a "temporary country" in a July 29 radio broadcast, Nasrallah offered this long-term perspective:
[Hamadah] The first point is correct. As for Hezbollah's disarmament, it depends on what national defence strategy is chosen after the war, once all the political groupings resume the national dialogue. If we then succeed in defining a defence system based on the Lebanese Army, without Hezbollah's weapons, we will have no problem with that. We have no fondness for weapons. The question of our armament is not in a sacrosanct one. Our weapons are not and end in themselves. They serve to resist Israel. Once the Lebanese prisoners in Israel have been released and Israel has withdrawn from the Al-Shab'a farms, the liberating role of Hezbollah's resistance will be over. It will then be necessary to determine what is the best deterrence against Israeli violations of our airspace. This deterrence capability will be defined by Lebanon's defence strategy.
“(Vice Premier Shimon) Peres said ‘this is a life or death war for Israel,’ and he is right because he knows that if the resistance will come out triumphant this time the Zionist entity will not have a future. When the (Israeli) nation will begin to lose faith in its army it will mark the beginning of the end for this entity.”Nevertheless, Hamadah's hint that Hezbollah might be willing to disarm to some extent as part of a Lebanese political settlement (or, at least, that Hezbollah's continued possession of all its weapons "is not sacrosanct") might be a signal worth paying attention to. Or it might not. Is this, possibly, a straw in the wind? That remains to be seen.
--Jeff Weintraub
====================
Figaro (Actualité | In English)
August 3, 2006
Trad Hamadah: 'Hezbollah's weapons not sacrosanct'
[Malbrunot] Will
[Hamadah] For the past three weeks Hezbollah has been giving the Arab armed forces a lesson.
[Malbrunot] Does Hezbollah support the idea of an international stabilization force to be deployed in southern
[Hamadah] The Lebanese Government and Hezbollah do not agree to negotiate under fire, while the occupation continues. We demand an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops. Then Hezbollah will be ready to talk with the international community about the dispatch of a force, its mandate, its personnel, and its resources. But this force must resolve the pending problems, not create others. Following Qana, Hezbollah still supports the Al-Sanyurah plan for resolving the conflict, a plan that is similar to that advocated by
[Malbrunot] Supporting the Al-Sanyurah plan means accepting the Lebanese Government's recovery of sovereignty throughout the territory. So does Hezbollah agree to be disarmed?
[Hamadah] The first point is correct. As for Hezbollah's disarmament, it depends on what national defence strategy is chosen after the war, once all the political groupings resume the national dialogue. If we then succeed in defining a defence system based on the Lebanese Army, without Hezbollah's weapons, we will have no problem with that. We have no fondness for weapons. The question of our armament is not in a sacrosanct one. Our weapons are not and end in themselves. They serve to resist
<< Home