Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon is calculated to emphasise his country’s influence in the region – and much more – writes Lindsey Hilsum.
If there were an international prize for stirring it up, President Ahmadinejad would win hands down.
His latest exploit is a visit to Lebanon to trumpet how much Hezbollah and its supporters love him. He’s going down to the Israeli border this afternoon, and threatens to throw stones over the fence.
The visit is calculated to emphasise Iran’s influence in the region, point up the fragility of Lebanon’s tinderbox Sunni-Shi’ite-Druze-Christian-Liberal-Islamist coalition politics, and indicate that Israel remains vulnerable on its northern border. He lost no time in claiming that “friends were being framed” (ie: Syria and Hizbollah) for the 2005 murder of the Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the most explosive issue in Lebanese politics.
“The Iranian president’s visit to Lebanon thus captures in a single moment, place and personality all these fears,” writes Rami Khoury in the Daily Star, Beirut’s English-language newspaper.
Mr Ahmadinejad arrived yesterday “with all the theatre of a conquering hero”, blowing kisses to a crowd mustered by Hezbollah to line the streets.
Those planning to attend the Beirut Film Festival may have been less ecstatic, as the censors decide it would be tactless to go ahead with a showing of Hana Makhmalbaf’s new film Green Days about the opposition in Iran.
So much for Lebanon’s reputation as a bastion of free speech in the Middle East.
Hezbollah officials say the Iranian government has spent nearly US$1 billion on reconstruction in southern Lebanon since the 2006 war with Israel. They’ve also supplied most of the reported 30,000 rockets Hezbollah says it has ready to lob over the border.
The visit points up the fault lines of the Middle East – between Shi’a and Sunni, Persian and Arab. Iraq’s Shi’ite majority is in the ascendant – its Sunni population feels under threat. Shi’ite Hizbollah exercises huge influence in Lebanon. Bahrain recently locked up 23 Shi’ite activists, accusing them a ‘terrorism’.
President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon may have been designed to annoy the US and Israel, but it will worry many Arab governments as well.