Shoe Shine Boys

One part of this excellent interview by Michael Totten caught my eye. Totten is interviewing Toni Nissi, the head of an NGO advocating international intervention to disarm Hizbullah. Nissi is talking about the average Shia in South Lebanon:

"'Believe me,' Toni said. 'They don't like Hezbollah. But they don't believe in Lebanon. You know what Nasrallah says all the time on the TV? They want to make us the dust boys again.'

I believe Toni means 'shoe shine boys,' a common phrase in Hassan Nasrallah's polemical speeches. There are some rich and middle class Lebanese Shia, of course. But many, if not most, are poor. They shine shoes, clean houses, and wash the cars of rich Christians and Sunnis. Hezbollah does not make them rich, but Hezbollah does give them pride."

Shoe shine boys are ubiquitous in my upscale area of Beirut. They are instantly identifiable, even without their equipment. They are generally brown-skinned, with ragged t-shirts hanging off their skinny bodies. They crouch near street corners and watch the passersby closely, looking for potential customers. The progression of age parades before your eyes; teenage boys carry their wooden shoe shine box, adults hawk prayer beads or some sort of lottery tickets. Those who have been cut off from even this tenuous existence sit on the sidewalk, often with their children, simply begging.

Hizbullah has been called the "revenge of the Shia." It cannot make its shoe shine boys rich, but it can give them a sense of power, of having their beliefs heard on an international scale. Long a neglected religious sect, many Shia desperately want to be more than the lowest servants of other Lebanese.

By any military standard, Hizbullah lost last summer's war with Israel. Bint Jbail, Hizbullah's headquarters on South Lebanon, looks like it was subject to a World War I bombardment. But this was never about money or casualties for many Shia -- their leaders were on the front page of international papers! Israel(and the US, they say) had taken their best shot at Nasrallah, and he was still standing! The protest camp currently stifling downtown Beirut's economy is the same story. The camp has political demands -- but it is also an end in of itself. The Shia are saying: we are taking over this area where you eat and shop. You will listen to us now.

Is this particularly fair? No. The instinct is to compare it to a child's temper tantrum. But then again, the decades of economic and political exclusion of the Shia by the other Lebanese sects was not fair either. And, unless Lebanese leaders can find a way to give the Shia a stake in the country's future, they should become used to many future "tantrums."