26 March 2007

BEIRUT: The din of construction has continued unabated in Beirut districts like Hamra and Achrafieh since the guns fell silent after last summer's war, but in the capital's devastated southern suburbs not a single building permit has been issued in the past seven months.

Though the government has refused to formally cede control of the Dahiyeh's reconstruction - and donor funds - to Hizbullah lest it consolidate the party's de-facto autonomy in the battered neighborhood, it has not put forward a plan to rebuild the hundreds of apartment buildings destroyed during the war.

Whether the state is unwilling, unable, or too weak to extend its authority into Haret Hreik and other Dahiyeh neighborhoods by taking the reins of the reconstruction effort, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's administration certainly does not want Hizbullah to take credit for rebuilding and gain even more political capital within the Shiite community. 

There are a host of competing explanations for the delay. According to one theory, the state is shoring up its control of South Lebanon - where Hizbullah's authority is diluted by the presence of Amal - before going into Dahiyeh, where Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's grip is uncontested. Others claim that the March 14 coalition does not want to begin rebuilding so long as the possibility of another war with Israel looms on the horizon. Many argue that the government is simply not capable of the task at hand, so it is hindering the rebuilding process in the hope of undermining popular support for Hizbullah.

"It was obvious since the first week of the war, when the government did nothing in the form of relief, that they wanted to change the mood toward Hizbullah," said Bassem Cheet, the former logistics coordinator for the Samidoun Relief Center during the war.  "After the war the government started saying, 'we want to be a unified country, we will no longer tolerate a state within a state,'" he added. "OK, then do your work. But either they can't have a monopoly over the reconstruction or they don't want to do their work."

The disparity between March 14's rhetoric of Lebanese unity and the state's glaring inactivity in the southern suburbs has ensured that the strategy of undermining Hizbullah will not work, Cheet argued. If frustration with Hizbullah is indeed on the rise, as government officials contend, it has not translated into increased support for Siniora's administration.

"People do not trust the government to rebuild their homes. A lot of them see March 14 as an internal enemy that punished them for resisting Israel," Cheet explained. "They see a really simple equation. There are people attacking us and people defending us. People in the South live under the threat of Israel every day, and Hizbullah protects them."

Indeed, Hizbullah's credibility in the Shiite community has allowed the party to bypass the government's refusal to give it control of donor funds. Shortly after the war, Jihad al-Binaa, the construction company affiliated with the resistance, incorporated a separate unit, the Waad project, to lead the reconstruction of the Dahiyeh. Most residents of completely destroyed apartment complexes in the southern suburbs have signed power of attorney for their properties over to the Waad project, and many of those who have received government compensation have also transferred it to Hizbullah. Dahiyeh residents were not compelled to hand over their indemnities and reconstruction authority to Jihad al-Binaa - they did so voluntarily.    

"It was just easier to sign it over," said a former resident of Bir al-Abed who gave Jihad al-Binaa power of attorney over his now uninhabitable apartment. "Hizbullah is the only one with a plan to rebuild and we trust them to do it. There's really no other option."

What little cooperation there was in the immediate aftermath of the war came to a grinding halt in November when all five Shiite ministers in the Cabinet resigned their posts and the government refused Hizbullah's demands to give donor funds to the Waad project.

That same month the government began disbursing indemnities to individual residents of destroyed buildings through the National Fund for the Displaced and other state institutions. Since then Siniora's administration has chosen to work on what one Higher Relief Commission (HRC) staffer called "the executive level since everything in Lebanon is politicized."

"We have nothing to do with Hizbullah anymore. We tried to coordinate with them at first on a building plan for the Dahiyeh, but it didn't work out," the official said on condition of anonymity.

"Hizbullah wanted us to give them the money to spend, which is ridiculous," the official added. "They are acting like their own state. I mean, Qatar and Saudi Arabia did not give us money to give to them."

The chairman of the Lebanese Transparency Association, Ghassan Mattar, referred to the current reconstruction stalemate as a "tug-of-war" pitting the government - and international donors - against Hizbullah, and to a lesser extent Amal.

"We are faced with a dilemma because donors insist that funds be channeled through the state apparatus so this is the government's policy, but Hizbullah wants to take credit for rebuilding," Mattar told The Daily Star. "It's our position that civil society should be overseeing things because we are disinterested."

Though the HRC has contracted the firm Khatib and Alami for the retrofitting of partially destroyed buildings, by its own admission the government has no plan for the southern suburbs, where it says that the reconstruction challenge is "much more complicated then in the South." Each destroyed building in the Dahiyeh has multiple residents - many of whom do not have ownership certificates for their units - and most structures do not comply with the existing zoning regulations that date back to the 1960s.

"Imagine there is an eight-floor building in the Dahiyeh, with 16 different households all claiming real-estate rights over a unit. They all have to agree on a strategy for the building to be reconstructed," one former civil servant who is also a Hizbullah member told The Daily Star on condition of anonymity. "The government is not paying building residents as a unit, and they are not giving money to the Waad project. They are paying individuals, who can use indemnities to pay bills, settle debts, or spend it on whatever they want. There should be an institution or an established organization sanctioned by the state to oversee construction."

Though the government has dispatched a few teams to rehabilitate partially destroyed apartment complexes in the southern suburbs, it has proposed no alternative to either the Waad project or doling out indemnities to individual households.

The former civil servant also accused Siniora's administration of actively obstructing Jihad al-Binaa's work recently by not recognizing the power of attorney documents. "I'm not optimistic that the reconstruction will begin soon. Hizbullah will eventually pay out of their own pocket, but it will take time," he said of when the rebuilding will begin. 

With no system to determine ownership, the government has rejected some requests for compensation while accepting others with comparable property deeds. Even people willing to pay construction costs out of their own pockets have been denied permits, he said.

The government was evasive when asked to explain its system for awarding compensation.

"Sometimes one paper can be substituted for another. It's all a big headache," said HRC communications officer Roula Hamadeh. "But we have no choice but to look at each claim separately on a case-by-case basis."

Even if Hizbullah or the government were ready to start construction tomorrow, no new structures in the Dahiyeh will be fully legal until amended zoning regulations go into effect. A committee convened by the Order of Engineers and Architects with representatives from all parties, including Amal and Hizbullah, drafted a modified law for the Dahiyeh last year, which is still awaiting parliamentary approval.

Until then, the Order of Engineers and Architects cannot issue any building permits for the Dahiyeh, said its treasurer, Mohammad S. Fatha.  "If they go ahead and build without permits they will be violating the authority of the government," Fatha warned.

To get around the dubious legality of new apartment blocs in the Dahiyeh, the Waad project has not made many changes to the "existing urban design scheme," a Jihad al-Binaa official said off the record, since Hizbullah has not authorized the release of information to the press on this subject. 

"It will be pretty much the same and if we do make any infrastructure changes we will have to get this approved by the government, but Parliament has to meet first to amend laws," he said.

Though the flow of government compensation to Dahiyeh residents has slowed down lately, the official insisted that the Waad project is well under way. He refused to specify when building would start but said he had a "rough idea" of the timeframe.

Some hold Hizbullah responsible for the delay, accusing the party of exploiting the reconstruction process to further its own political agenda. Since a humanitarian disaster was averted after the war, rebuilding immediately is not imperative, said Lokman Slim, who runs Haret Hreik-based Umam Documentation and Research, an organization dedicated to maintaining memories of the war.

"I don't think the reconstruction is taking longer than it should. Hizbullah is doing what the state should have done - they are taking the time to reshape the neighborhood in order to consolidate their authority over the Dahiyeh and greater Haret Hreik," he said. "The government is weaker than Hizbullah. They don't have the balls to say publicly, 'we don't want to give money to Hizbullah,' so the Ministry of the Displaced says, 'we want to distribute money individually.'"

According to Slim, the March 14 movement does not want to deal with reconstruction in the Dahiyeh at all and is happy to subcontract responsibility for the Shiite population to Hizbullah.  "The destruction caused by Israel is an opportunity for the government to break Hizbullah's grip, but March 14 doesn't want to meddle in Nasrallah's playground so they are fine giving responsibility to a group that is not even registered as a party with the Information Ministry," he told The Daily Star. "It's a question of political culture. Why don't we let the Phalange dispense an independent engineering branch?

"As long as [MP Saad] Hariri wants to be the fuhrer of the Sunnis, and [MP Walid] Jumblatt allows no dissent among the Druze, and [Lebanese Forces leader] Geagea considers [Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel] Aoun a heretic, the government will not even try to break Hizbullah's monopoly of Shiite political voices," he argued.

Evidence supporting Slim's argument is not hard to find. The cab driver who had accompanied The Daily Star to Slim's home - and insisted on waiting because he perceived the neighborhood to be dangerous - smiled when hearing the news that a Shiite resident of Dahiyeh was opposed to Hizbullah.

"I hate them too. I'm from Chouf, I am PSP," he said, pulling down the passenger-seat visor to reveal a framed photo of Jumblatt, who heads the Progressive Socialist Party.

"I love Jumblatt, he is strong," the driver added before spitting on the floor to indicate his distaste for Jumblatt's rival, Talal Arslan.   

Even when defending its handling of the reconstruction effort, March 14's arguments tend less to exonerate the government than to speak to the state's neglect of the Shiite community and the sources of Hizbullah's support. 

"No matter what people say in the South on the ground there are government agencies working," the HRC's Hamadeh maintained defensively.

"In the Dahiyeh they said, 'give us money or nothing.' So we are not dealing with them. We are doing retrofits now, and they are not obstructing our work because in the end any money going into the Dahiyeh ultimately helps them. We hear people are not happy with Hizbullah now.

"Nasrallah started telling people after the war, 'don't deal with the government, they are not protecting you," she added. "But when we started paying indemnities they lined up around the block." 

Maybe residents of the southern suburbs would be equally receptive to the government if it advanced a plan to rebuild their homes.