Source: Al Ahram Weekly

Who Courting Whom?Britain's decision to re-establish dialogue with Hizbullah was as much a surprise as its former decision to add the resistance movement's military wing to a list of proscribed organisations in July 2008. Both decisions suggest that the United Kingdom, perhaps under the influence of its experience in Northern Ireland, does genuinely recognise two distinctive elements to the resistance movement -- one civil, the other military. Hizbullah has 17 seats out of the 128 seats in parliament and runs a vast network of social services and welfare programmes.

On 2 July 2008 the British government added the armed branch of Hizbullah to its list of terrorist organisations. It was officially accused of supporting resistance groups in Iraq.

"The armed branch of Hizbullah lends an active support to militants in Iraq responsible for attacks against both coalition forces and Iraqi civilians," Home Office Secretary of State Tom McNuty said in a statement at that time. While some observers expected that a similar move by the EU would follow suit, ushering in a change of European policy towards the Lebanese resistance movement, this did not happen. The EU has resisted calls from the US and Israel to list Hizbullah as a terrorist organisation. It was proclaimed a terrorist organisation (both the political as well as the armed branches) in six countries including the US, Canada and Australia. This qualification enables the freezing and confiscating of the movement's assets.

The United Kingdom's policy reverse clearly undermines the validity of a long-standing view which has dominated Western policy circles, ignoring that it is a movement that is deeply entrenched in Lebanon's social and political fabric. It has evolved into a key political player on the Lebanese scene. More importantly, Hizbullah enjoys the support of the majority of the country's Shia population.

Initiating diplomatic contacts with the political wing is a step forward. However, putting preconditions or dictating the end result of such an undertaking could kill the process. One foreign office official said the motive behind such a step was to "encourage Hizbullah to move away from violence and play a constructive, democratic and peaceful role." This thinking is tremendously shortsighted. For any dialogue to be constructive and significant, such statements will have to disappear as they suggest that the only aim of the dialogue is to change Hizbullah.

Hizbullah welcomed the step, proving it puts the movement it represents before dogma. This, however, should not be taken to mean it is willing to compromise its core principles for the sake of having a dialogue with a Western government. For Hizbullah, international recognition does not figure very high on its agenda. Hizbullah leaders are more concerned with their reputation in the larger Arab and Muslim worlds following the 7 May events in Beirut.

In Hizbullah's view, the West has an inherent bias towards Israel and follows a double-standard agenda. A policy of carrot and stick is not one that works well with Hizbullah, which is confident of its power base. Hizbullah leaders understood the British move to dialogue as a sign of the party's power. "If the resistance movement was weak and defeated, why would they want to have a dialogue with it. They do not talk to the defeated and the weak," Hizbullah's Secretary- General Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech last week.

Britain maintained contacts with Hizbullah up until 2005 when contacts faded out as a result of not being useful to either party. In order to support the Lebanese government, re-engaging Hizbullah on a substantive level was crucial since it is fully represented in government. Part of this engagement was to encourage the social and political side of the party and to urge all parties to adhere to UN Resolution 1701. The British Embassy in Beirut made a strong case for the policy change.

The first round of meetings with party officials will be confined to elected MPs. In a first such meetings last January, a group of conservative MPs attended a foreign committee meeting in the Lebanese parliament, and Ali Ammar, an MP for Hizbullah bloc, was there. A second meeting is in the offing. The range of issues to be discussed will initially focus on the forthcoming elections and the implementation of Resolution 1701. It is unlikely that some thorny issues such as Hizbullah's disarmament will be discussed. At least not in the early stages of the dialogue.

There are, however, no high expectations regarding the results of the dialogue. The UK is not under any particular pressure to achieve quick results. Some Lebanese commentators viewed the decision as Britain negotiating on behalf of the US administration. Some even stretched the view to argue that the end game of this dialogue is to get to Iran. While the British government informed the US administration ahead of time of the decision to resume talks with Hizbullah, British officials insist they are not acting on behalf of the US. Regarding Iran, Britain has full diplomatic ties with Tehran and it can talk directly to Tehran and does not need to do it via a third party. The decision this time was all about Lebanon.

President Barack Obama's administration criticised the British move, refusing to make a distinction between Hizbullah's military and political wings. Obama's own views regarding the resistance movement could be understood from testimony he made during a congressional hearing in September 2006, one month after Resolution 1701 was issued. Obama advocated political and economic reform in Lebanon not as a means of mollifying Hizbullah but as a means of defeating it.

Creating "a mechanism whereby the disaffected have an effective outlet for their grievances" that "assures them they are getting social services," he explained in a subsequent interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks, will encourage Lebanon's impoverished Shia underclass "to peel support away" from Hizbullah militants and "view them as an oppressive force". Obama had previously raised the issue of Lebanon's "disaffected" Shia in congressional subcommittee hearings, but it was the first time he explicitly said that addressing Lebanon's domestic problems was critical to facilitating Hizbullah's disarmament.

When Nasrallah was asked to comment in a recent speech on 13 March on US conditions for dialogue requiring them to renounce violence and recognise Israel, his answer summed up the party's ideology in one sentence. The more important question, he said, was whether Hizbullah wanted to have a dialogue with the Americans in the first place, and if yes, "what are the conditions Hizbullah will set to accept holding such a dialogue?"