'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Basic services in Iraq: a proposal

I'm crashing on the deadline to write my increasingly lengthy Hizbullah piece for Boston Review. (Celebrated 'New Years Eve' at c. 11 p.m. last night. Go figure.)

So today, I was writing about Hizbullah's impressive work in the provision of basic public services. Since the party was actually born in mid-1980s in the turmoil of a blisteringly destructive war situation, I immediately thought: Hey, why didn't the Bush administration turn to these experienced pros to do the reconstruction/rebuilding job in Najaf, Sadr City, etc, instead of the US Army and Halliburton??

Okay, silly question, I know. But still, the contrast between H's record in Lebanon and that of the US reconstruction effort in Iraq is certainly informative.

Here's a fragment from what I've been writing:

AUB professor Judith Palmer Harik has studied the party [Hizbullah] for many years now. She notes that in the chaotic, civil-war-ridden circumstances in which Hizbullah was born, its ability to provide basic social services in an effective manner-- and to provide them to all the residents in its areas of operation, not just to its followers-- won it considerable loyalty and respect. She writes that after Hizbullah took over effective control of the south-Beirut Dahiyeh [suburbs] in 1988, it almost immediately started providing a reliable trash-removal service there, and that it was a further five years before the corruption-plagued central government sent any garbage trucks into the Dahiyah at all. Moreover, writing in 2003, she noted that though the government's trash-removal efforts there still continued on a notably spotty basis, "Hezbollah still trucks out some 300 tons of garbage a day from the dahiyeh and treats it with insecticides to supplement the government's service."

A similar situation existed regarding safe drinking water:
During General Aoun's administration (1988-1990), water and electricity services in the dahiyeh were almost completely cut off due to fighting? Several wells dug by UNICEF in the area reportedly failed. With help from the Iranian government RC [the Hizbullah-affiliated "Reconstruction Campaign", or Jihad al-binaa] resolved this emergency by building 4,000-litre water reservoirs in each district? and filling each of them five times a day from continuously circulating tanker trucks. Generators mounted on trucks also made regular rounds from building to building to provide electricity to pump water from private cisterns? [In August 2001] Hezbollah still provides the major source of drinking water for dahiyeh residents.
Right across the gamut of human services--whether in the provision of schools, hospitals, public health services, rural development services, revolving loan funds to support small businesses, income support projects for the poor, or low-income housing-- the story she tells has been the same: at a time when the Lebanese government was unable or unwilling to provide these services, Hizbullah and its affiliated organizations stepped in to do so; and even where the government did step into the field at a later date, the relevant ministries still relied on the fact that Hizbullah's organizations continued to actively pick up the slack.

Harik provides some interesting glimpses into some of these activities, and presents as illustrative a report produced for the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for West Asia in 1999, that looked at the work of a sizeable rural development project run by the RC. She picked out a part of the ESCWA report that identified operational features of the RC project that, she felt, "dramatically collide with stereotypes of fundamentalist organizations as backward and perceptions of their leaders as ignorant fanatics." These features included:


Looking at the leadership from technical, human and conceptual skills of the supervisors, the organization seems to be remarkably organized. Their knowledge and ability is based on experience and educational achievement and they are quite aware of management techniques and processes. Their ability to build teamwork is obvious. They are the moral and technical reference of the group.

Although the number of employees is large (about 100), chains of command are short and communications in both direction strong... Written communication is strong and practised by all staff at all levels... Departments report progress on a weekly basis to the director-general who uses them to set meeting agendas; a four-day retreat which all employees attend is held annually in December...

A well-known private consulting and engineering company... has been contracted to undertake on-the-job training for technical staff... Linkages with bilateral donors have resulted in training programmes financed by them. All staff is encouraged to attend and participate in all events, workshops, seminars, etc. organized in lebanon by the various NGOs, syndicates, and universities.

It has recently become very hard to gain direct access to nearly all of Hizbullah's information resources on the internet. One URL that does still work at time of writing is that for the Hizbullah-affiliated Islamic Health Society, which describes its goal as being, "to bring the Lebanese community to health and social levels conducive to individuals' happiness and luxury in Lebanon according to the principles of Islam." The website reports that, acting in coordination with UNICEF and the national Ministries of Health and Education, the IHS was able during the 2001-2002 school year to provide health screenings to nearly 17,000 pupils in government schools and perform nearly 100,000 childhood inoculations in its three areas of operation: the Bekaa, Beirut, and south Lebanon. The site also reports on the provision of basic health services to 59 villages in the "liberated zone" of South Lebanon, and various other activites.

Harik writes--and the people I talked with Lebanon all confirmed-- that Hizbullah's social-service affiliates and schools provide all their services on a low-cost basis to those Lebanese who need them, whether Muslim or Christian, and that subsidies are available for very low-income users. Many Christian parents send their children to Hizbullah-run schools, especially in the south where many of these schools are often judged to provide the best education available. The budgets for the schools and all the other service-provision organizations are met from a combination of sources: user fees, government subsidies (where available), donations from Iran, support from international development bodies, and allocations from the khums, the one-fifth share of one's income that a Shiite believer is obligated to pay to Islamic charitable organizations. One researcher told me that Hizbollah-related organizations now control the significant income stream constituted by khums donations made by the numerous Lebanese Shiite emigrés in West Africa.


Harik writes that Hizbullah's commitment to, and success in, providing these services on a continuing basis is quite unique among the political parties in Lebanon. She notes, too, that its success in this sphere has-- in conjunction with the skill its political operatives have shown in their dealings with most other parts of the Lebanese body politic-- helped to build and buttress a sturdy base of political support for it in many parts of the country...

I only got Harik's book yesterday, and I've found it a good read. Luckily, from my point of view, she's not overly theoretical-- even though she's a political "scientist". But she's been around in Lebanon for long enough that she's able to present some really illuminating little vignettes, and she's clearly a thoughtful person.

I think the book can't have been an easy one for her to write. She notes in the preface that she was a new professor at AUB in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon. And in the years that followed, "Like all Americans living and working in Beirut at the time, I was deeply affected by acts of terrorism said to have been ordered by the Islamic Republic of Iran and carried out by locals about whom very little was known at the time... "

Nonetheless, in admirably objective fashion she evidently set aside her own fears, distrust, and apprehensions enough to try to understand the workings of this new force that--with Iranian help-- was bursting onto the political scene in Lebanon in those years.

Her book came out last April. More recently it's been joined on the lists by one from her AUB colleague Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh. So far, I prefer hers. His is thin by comparison, and overly loaded with poli-"sci" jargoneering.

Also, while I'm talking about this issue out in the blogosphere, I'd love to know if any of you readers has any idea what's been happening to the broad range of websites that Hizbullah used to have.

If you go to this very handy-looking portal on the Arab gateway site, it looks as though it would take you to some Hizbullah-related sites that could be a great boon for anyone (like me!) who's doing research on the topic against a tough deadline.

But most of the links given there in the collection of "Hizbullah websites" don't actually lead anywhere. I don't know when that portal-page was compiled, or how long it's been since those sites were down. Also, I have a whole list of "Hizbullah" URLs from another researcher, and none of them leads anywhere, either.

Does anyone out there know what happened?

The only three Hizbullah-related sites I've found that aren't down are the one for their weekly paper, Al-Intiqad, which is a pretty good site in Arabic but definitely lacking in the English-language department... And then we have this site which is the "personal" website of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. It's quite well organized in both Arabic and English, though it's not as up-to-date as I'd like. Then, there's the one I linked to above for the Islamic Health Society. But that one seems to cover only certain public-health type things that the IHS does, and doesn't have much info at all about the large hospitals and other health-related things that Hizbullah does.

Anyway, let me know via a comment here if you have info or any clues as to what's happening with the Hizbullah URLs there. Thanks!