Excellent reading about Hizballah's controlled suburbs. As it looks, Hizballah's Pentagon, as some called dahyeh was not as controlled as many thought. Don't get me wrong, Hizballah is strong, but far from being invincible. NOW Lebanon:
The Internal Security Forces (ISF) recently implemented what it has called a "security plan" in the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut in Dahiyeh, where the Party of God has been forced to remove part of its much-coveted security cover due to a sharp rise in drugs, prostitution and street crime, much of which has been blamed on the economic fallout from the civil unrest in early May, when Hezbollah took over large parts of Beirut. Hezbollah's actions at the time may have been bundled up in a very neat and ruthless political equation, but it was an equation that failed to calculate the social and economic consequences it brought upon many within the Shia community.
According to ISF sources, within hours of the police moving in, 106 people with outstanding warrants had been arrested. Most were later released after paying their fines, and no clashes or friction between the police and residents was reported.
Meanwhile, Minister of Interior Ziad Baroud announced a halt to all illegal construction work in the area, a move that has reportedly been welcomed by both Hezbollah and the ordinary citizens of Dahiyeh, a sprawling and unregulated concrete jungle that is also home to Hezbollah's main party headquarters and which was heavily bombed during the 2006 July War. It was also, until this recent development, a no-go zone for the ISF and the Lebanese army. Any attempts to enforce the law often resulted in bloody, and sometimes fatal, clashes between Hezbollah's security and Lebanese police. The message was clear: Hezbollah was a mini-state, and the Dahiyeh was its capital.
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Hezbollah has neither a judiciary nor a police force. It can claim to be able to take on the might of the Israeli army or even take control of Lebanon in the blink of an eye, but it cannot control crime, nor can it, apparently, stop social disintegration within in its own community, despite providing social services and broadcasting moral probity through its media; hence the decision by Hezbollah to place a call to the ISF.
In other news, President Suleiman is in US, and Speaker Berri and Saad Hariri agreed to remove banners and posters from Beirut “to start with.”
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