Can Hezbollah
be disarmed? The United Nations
Security Council, the major Western powers and the government of
Lebanon have all called for
the Shiite militia to be shorn of its weapons. But how? And by whom? When it
approved the terms of the cease-fire on Aug. 16, the Lebanese cabinet stipulated
that its army would not take Hezbollahs weapons away. United
Nations officials have said that the international force that is to
join the Lebanese Army in southern Lebanon would not do so, either. And militia
leaders insist that they will not voluntarily lay down their arms. That doesnt
leave too many options, does it? And yet if Hezbollah is not disarmed, all of
the appalling destruction that Israel
visited upon Lebanon and suffered in its own territory may have accomplished
nothing, and the bloodshed just concluded may be only the prelude to something
yet worse.
Disarmament, like peacekeeping, is a confident-sounding coinage for an
improbable activity. The murkiness of the language governing the conflict in
Lebanon is, in fact, endemic to the activity itself. What does it mean to
disarm? Is it a reflexive verb a thing you agree to do to yourself? Or is it a
thing done to you?
Victors in war, of course, forcibly disarm the losers as the Allies did to
the Germans and Japanese after World War II and as the United States did to the
defeated Iraqi Army in 2003. But in a war that ends without decisive victory, or
in civil conflicts, forcible disarmament is often impossible. The fighting force
must more or less agree to disarm itself.
And disarming is the easiest part. Fighters who yield up their weapons must
then be demobilized, meaning not only that they have to be mustered out but also
that the organizations command-and-control structure must be eliminated. And
then, perhaps most crucially of all, as the Bush administration discovered to
its pain in Iraq, those
soldiers must be reintegrated into civilian society, or into the national army,
so that the rewards, or at least potential rewards, of peace outweigh those of
violence. Professionals thus refer to the entire activity as disarmament,
demobilization and reintegration, or D.D.R.
Disarmament, like peacekeeping itself, offers a set of time-tested, codified
practices that are quite effective under certain political conditions and futile
in their absence. In 2000, I visited the dusty town of Port Loko, in Sierra Leone, to see a
disarmament camp, a desultory affair in which a knot of surly ex-rebels from a
murderous force known as the Revolutionary United Front hung around waiting for
$300 payments meant to enable their fresh start as farmers. Most of them still
wanted to fight, and many probably returned to the bush. But then their leader
was arrested, U.N. peacekeepers equipped with heavy weapons were deployed in the
countryside and the R.U.F. signed a peace deal. D.D.R. resumed in earnest in
2001, the R.U.F. disbanded the following year, and by 2004 the rebels had been
fully disarmed. U.N. peacekeepers were able to leave. Sierra Leone is now
patrolled by its own army and police force, though the countrys desperate
poverty and political fragility could tip it back into warfare at any time.
Kosovo provides another more-or-less-happy disarmament situation. After a
relentless NATO bombing campaign in 1999 compelled Serbian
troops to withdraw from the province, a NATO force filled the vacuum. But the
home-grown militia, the Kosovo
Liberation Army, viewed itself as the true author of the victory and
thus was in no mood to surrender its weapons. With the K.L.A., which was itself
guilty of widespread ethnic cleansing, prepared to become a resistance force, or
possibly a national mafia, peacekeeping officials made the audacious decision to
enroll its members in an unarmed national guard, the Kosovo Protection Corps.
And though in its early years the K.P.C. was found to be secretly stockpiling
arms and was accused of serious human rights violations, the experiment has
largely worked. The chief reason for its success is that K.P.C. members have not
truly been demobilized; they have been permitted to keep their command structure
intact and fully expect to become the nucleus of a national army when Kosovo
gains its independence. There has been some talk of applying the Kosovo model to
Hezbollah, by absorbing the militia either into the Lebanese Army or into a new
national guard.
Kosovo and Sierra Leone worked not because peacekeepers got disarmament right
but because the politics were right, or because the balance of force was
favorable to peacekeepers. Otherwise, disarmament fails. In Congo, for example,
aggressive and well-armed U.N. peacekeepers largely disarmed the ragtag militias
in the northeastern region of Ituri (though owing to the governments almost
complete failure to prepare the ex-rebels for civilian life, violence has
returned to the area). But equally determined peacekeeping troops made very
little headway against the tougher and better-equipped force of Rwandan Hutus
who have been wreaking havoc in eastern Congo since they fled across the border
after the 1994 genocide. The Hutus agreed to return to Rwanda if they were allowed to organize as a
political party, but President Paul Kagame flatly rejected the demand. The United
Nations could thus neither intimidate the rebels nor offer them a better deal
than the one they already had, pillaging the Congolese countryside.
What is true of the Rwandan force is true yet more of Hezbollah. Israel
launched its air, land and sea attack on Lebanon with the goal, as Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert
put it, of disarming this murderous organization; in that regard, the campaign
failed. How, then, could any lesser force succeed? Lebanons defense minister,
Elias Murr, has defended Hezbollah and flatly asserted that the Lebanese Army
is not going to the south to strip Hezbollah of its weapons and do the work
that Israel did not. Neither will a U.N. peacekeeping force, however large.
You cannot impose peace on these people if theyre ready to fight you, as a
D.D.R. expert in the U.N.s peacekeeping department puts it. You need to be
able to annihilate them, because theyre not going to lay down their arms
voluntarily. Even robust United Nations forces do not seek to annihilate their
adversaries.
If Hezbollah cannot be forcibly disarmed, can some political arrangement
induce the militia to disarm itself? This, of course, raises a question about
Hezbollahs aspirations: is it seeking to achieve through force a goal that can
be attained through diplomacy, or through political activity? That this is in
fact the case is the unspoken premise of United Nations Resolution 1559, passed
in 2004, which sought to release Lebanon from the suffocating grip of Syria, and thus to begin a national
dialogue that would ultimately lead to the incorporation of Hezbollah into
Lebanese affairs.
Here you can look to a very different precedent: the voluntary disarmament in
2005 of the Irish
Republican Army. Like Hezbollah, which has legislators and ministers
in the Lebanese government, the hard-core Catholic resistance to British rule in
Northern Ireland had a military wing, the I.R.A., and a civilian one, known as
Sinn Fein.
This was, for decades, a distinction without a difference, for the movement as a
whole was committed to forcing out the British by calculated acts of violence.
Starting in the early 1990s, and then with increasing intensity with the
election of Tony Blair
as prime minister in 1997, the British government tried to induce the I.R.A. to
lay down its arms by offering a political path to greater self-determination.
Great attention was devoted to the mechanics of disarmament. In 1998, the
British and Irish governments established the Independent International
Commission on Decommissioning to oversee and verify the disarmament process. But
the I.I.C.D. was able to do little so long as the tortuous negotiations over
power sharing kept collapsing into acrimony and violence. The I.R.A. would
declare a cease-fire amid great ceremony and optimism, then pull the plug with a
spectacular act of violence.
Finally, after the terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists on the
London subway in July
2005, Blair made a series of gestures to the I.R.A., and the group responded by
definitively vowing to cease all military activity. Fighters deposited rifles,
machine guns, chemical explosives and even surface-to-air missiles at secret
locations in the Republic of Ireland, with Catholic and Protestant clergymen
brought in as witnesses. In September, the I.I.C.D. certified that the I.R.A.
has met its commitment to put all its arms beyond use. (The group has, however,
been accused of continuing to use violence for criminal, rather than political,
ends.)
At the time, a columnist in The Times of London explained how the underlying
dynamic had changed: Sinn Fein was once the political wing of the I.R.A.; in
the course of the past decade, the I.R.A. has become the paramilitary branch of
Sinn Fein. A paramilitary organization can choose whether or not it has a
political manifestation. A political organization in a Western democracy cannot,
ultimately, choose whether or not it has a paramilitary offshoot.
Should the parties to the violence in Lebanon work toward a similar
demilitarization of the struggle with similar disarmament mechanics? Ben Zogby,
the son of the Lebanese-American pollster John Zogby, recently made just this
suggestion in The Huffington Post. Zogby proposed, as many others have, a
political deal to grant Hezbollah its demands a swap of prisoners, the
withdrawal of Israeli troops from the disputed Shebaa Farms, adequate
representation of the politically disenfranchised Shia community in Lebanon
all overseen by a new Commission on Decommissioning.
Certainly the I.R.A. precedent shows that even brutal paramilitary groups can
ultimately be persuaded to lay down their arms. But it will prove relevant only
if Hezbollah has demands that can be satisfied by a political process, so that
over time its fighting force will dwindle into the paramilitary branch of its
political wing, and former soldiers will accept reintegration into civilian
life. Hezbollah does, in fact, aspire to gain adequate representation for
Shiites inside Lebanon, as the I.R.A. did for Catholics in Northern Ireland. But
this is scarcely its raison dêtre. Hezbollah has used its weapons on Israel,
not on the government of Lebanon; and it fights Israel with the professed goal
of destroying it. If we take Hezbollah at its word, disarmament can come only in
the wake of apocalyptic triumph.
Of course, just because you cant see your way to a long-term solution
doesnt mean you dispense with short-term palliatives: what cant be solved can
often be postponed (a nostrum the Bush administration might wish it had invoked
in the case of Iraq). The thousands of Lebanese and international troops who
will be inserted between the combatants should provide at least an interval of
calm. While the peacekeepers cannot disarm Hezbollah, their mandate requires
them to prevent rearmament by blocking the militias Syrian supply routes. This,
in turn, could persuade Israel to stay its hand. And diplomacy could then have
time to lay solid foundations before the whole rickety structure gives way.
James Traub, a contributing writer, is the author of The Best
Intentions: Kofi Annan and the U.N. in the Era of American World Power, due out
in November.
