Lebanon's old passions and new fears Violence returned to the streets of Lebanon last week after the government attempted to curb the power of militant Shia movement Hezbollah. The BBC's Jim Muir reports from Beirut on the very real threat of civil war. BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | Lebanon's old passions and new fears
Two summers ago, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shia Muslims were flooding into other parts of the country after fleeing their homes in the south.
They were trying to escape Israel's fury, unleashed after Hezbollah had killed eight Israeli soldiers and captured two others.
The wave of the displaced washed into the Druze mountains, into non-Shia parts of Beirut, and other areas which the Israelis were not hitting. Many people from other communities dropped everything to help.
Haitham Dabbara, a 35-year-old lawyer, mobilised his friends to raise funds and buy supplies, bedding and medicines. He took them to the schools and other public buildings where the Shia refugees were sheltering.
Haitham himself was a Sunni but that did not matter to him. He was an idealist who wanted to help the innocent victims of war.
Sectarian strife
You have probably noticed by now that I am speaking about Haitham in the past tense.
Last Thursday, just minutes after the Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, had finished delivering a fiery television address, his militant Shia fighters unleashed a devastating offensive in the Sunni areas of west Beirut.
One of the worst-hit areas was Ras al-Nabaa, where Haitham's family home was. Haitham and his parents decided to escape to the mountains for safety.
As they crossed a main road controlled by Hezbollah and its allies, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at his car. It ripped off the back of his head, and that of his mother, Amal. They died instantly.
The bodies were taken to hospital. Haitham's younger brothers, Ra'id and Ayman, were somewhere else at the time. They were told their mother and brother had been hurt, so they tried to get to the hospital.
As they crossed the main road, fighters from a militia allied to Hezbollah checked their ID cards and waved them through. They then opened fire and shot them in the back.
Ra'id was hit in the spine. He may be paralysed for life. Ayman was hit in the stomach. He should recover. They are both in hospital.
Bloodcurdling footage
There is something about civil war that brings out a viciousness rarely found in conventional combat. And it was not all one-sided.
The Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, admitted his followers had mutilated the bodies of two captured Hezbollah fighters.
And Hezbollah TV showed some bloodcurdling footage, taken on a mobile phone, of Saad Hariri's Sunni followers lynching about a dozen members of a Syrian-backed group allied to Hezbollah in the north of the country.
Make no mistake, this was, by any measure, civil war.
Not open-ended, not everywhere at the same time, but the flames of political and sectarian strife erupted in one place after another.
As tensions spread, Shias were pitted against Sunnis, Sunnis against Alawites, Druze against Shias, and so on, stirring ancient passions and vendettas, and creating new ones which will be hard to stifle.
The army commander, General Michel Suleiman, who everyone agrees should be the country's next president, circulated a message to his officers, some of whom wanted to resign.
What's happened, he said, is a real civil war that no national army in the world could confront without disintegrating. His army was under massive strain.
He only managed to hold the army together by the huge compromise of having it stand by and watch, as Hezbollah and an unruly collection of allied militias stormed the streets of west Beirut. Hezbollah, he knows, is far stronger than the army or any other faction in the land.
Had he confronted it, not only would he have lost but the army would probably have broken up on sectarian lines, as it did during the civil war of the 70s and 80s.
Strategic game
That is still a real possibility if this crisis goes much further. As well it might, if Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian backers do not get what they really want.
And what is that?
Most of the signs are that they want a controlling stake in Lebanon's political decision-making, to redress the balance that was once so strongly in Syria's favour but which swung the other way when Syrian troops had to withdraw from Lebanon under pressure three years ago, after the Americans had occupied Iraq.
The embattled Beirut government is supported by Washington and the West, but they have no real answer to Hezbollah's power on the ground.
There is no doubt there is a big strategic game being played here, between Iran and America, Syria and Israel. It is politics.
But if it goes much further, there is a good chance that what few structures are left will collapse and the country will descend into chaos and sectarian carnage.
The one sure outcome would be that many more people like Haitham Dabbara would be the victims.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 17 May, 2008 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times. 
15th May 2008
