Destruction in a residential area that was destroyed in an Israeli bombardment is seen in the southern suburbs of Beirut Aug. 15. Israel�s war with Hezbollah guerillas opened the door to accusations on both sides of war crimes. Israeli aircraft and artillery killed more than 850 Lebanese during the 34-day conflict, most of them civilians, and left a moonscape of ruin. Hezbollah pummeled northern Israel with thousands of rockets that killed 39 civilians among the total Israeli war dead of 159. Photo: AP/World Wide Photos

This delicate political game of gaining populist allegiance through Lebanon’s post-conflict reconstruction period is pitting Hezbollah’s construction wing, Jihad al-Binaa, against Lebanese governmental and quasi-governmental reconstruction organizations like the Lebanese Civil Defense, the Development and Reconstruction Council and the Higher Relief Council.

According to analysts like American University Professor Judith Swain Harik, Jihad al-Binaa has won the initial battle of hearts and minds in large part because they are the most experienced in reconstruction.

Jihad al-Binaa, which translates to “reconstruction campaign,” first started in Iran after the Iranian revolution, and was exported to Lebanon in the early 1980s to deal with reconstruction needs in the neglected Shia areas of Lebanon.

“This is an interesting organization because it is chock-full of professionals—contractors, engineers, architects, demographic experts—anything to do with reconstruction,” Prof. Harik told IPS. “And because many of them were educated abroad and came back to a depressed job market, Hezbollah had a huge pool of professionals to choose from for this reconstruction work.”

Indeed, representatives for Jihad al-Binaa estimate more than 2,000 engineers and architects are involved in the monumental task of assessing the huge swaths of destruction throughout southern Lebanon, the southern suburbs of Beirut and in pockets of northeastern Lebanon like Baalbek. That number is likely much higher given the fact that Jihad al-Binaa has received hundreds of volunteers from both the professional and civilian ranks—many of whom are not Hezbollah members.

Since the Aug. 14 ceasefire, Jihad al-Binaa head Kassem Aleq said that of the more than 15,000 houses affected in southern Lebanon, more than 80 percent have been surveyed for structural damage and for assessing what type of compensation Jihad al-Binaa would be able to offer.

Critics of Hezbollah like Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze community in Lebanon, question where Hezbollah is getting the more than $190 million it is said to have in its coffers to compensate the mostly Shia victims of the war. Few analysts doubt that at least some of this money is coming from Iran, but Mr. Aleq told IPS that the money had mostly been raised by donor campaigns inside Lebanon and from its diaspora in Europe and Africa.

Still, Mr. Jumblatt and others in the staunchly anti-Syrian March 14 coalition say that the fact that Hezbollah is compensating people autonomously is a further indication that Hezbollah seeks to remain outside of the Lebanese national framework.

Prof. Harik says that Jihad al-Binaa has spent years outside this framework, developing its relationship to the Shia community in ways that the government was unwilling to entertain. She points to the efforts of Jihad al-Binaa to modernize and rebuild the dilapidated school sanitary facilities in Dahiyeh in the 1980s and its work in single-handedly revitalizing the water and sewage systems to the southern suburbs in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.

Prof. Harik believes there are several obvious parallels to the first Israeli invasion in 1982 and the recent conflict with Israel. Both invasions left the Lebanese government cash-strapped, and there is a parallel in the government’s response in attending to the needs of a displaced Shia community victimized by Israeli aggression.

“Successive governments leading up to now, like the [former Prime Minister Rafik] Hariri administration, have put building priorities on revitalizing the downtown area of Beirut, and money was not going to the southern suburbs and to peripheral areas of the country like the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon,” she explained.

“Jihad al-Binaa has simply filled the vacuums left by the government, because there has been little political will to deal with revitalizing areas of the infrastructure that were seen as being too hard to deal with,” Prof. Harik added.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese government’s veneer of unity surrounding the reconstruction effort is cracking. Fadl Shalaq, head of the Development and Reconstruction Council, resigned Aug. 23, saying he disagreed with Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s reconstruction plan. Analysts say his resignation puts into question the transparency of the government’s reconstruction plan, especially given the nearly $1 billion raised during a recent donor conference in Sweden.