DUBAI, July 5: Gulf Arab states are punishing Hezbollah for its role in Syria by expelling Lebanese expatriates linked to the group in a move that could victimise Shi’ite Muslims with no ties to the militants apart from their shared religious faith.
Set up by Shi’ite power Iran in the 1980s to fight Israeli occupation forces in south Lebanon, the Islamist group has sent its guerrillas to fight alongside the army in Syria’s civil war, leading to defeats for rebels armed by some Gulf Arab states.
The Sunni Muslim Gulf countries, led by regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia, have supported Syrian rebels with arms and money in a fight to topple President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Iran.
Denouncing what it called Hezbollah’s interference in Syria, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) last month announced its six member states would revoke the residency visas of people associated with Hezbollah and target their financial and commercial dealings in the Gulf.
The expulsions illustrate how the war in Syria has encouraged age-old tensions between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims to spread across its borders and through the region.
The US-allied GCC is a grouping of six energy-rich Arab countries comprising Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain.
During a meeting of senior GCC security officials in Riyadh yesterday, the undersecretary of Bahrain’s Interior Ministry, Major General Khaled al-Absi, said the move against the group came after the “discovery of several Hezbollah terror cells in the Gulf states, their involvement in training of terror groups … And their flagrant involvement in Syria.”
“Unfortunately, some people will pay the price without being involved,” Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, an Emirati political scientist, said of the deportations.
“But Hezbollah should be held responsible for this. Hezbollah left its national boundary and interfered in a purely Syrian matter with brazenness and stubbornness. This should not be left unheeded.”
SCORES EVICTED
At least three Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar — have evicted scores of Lebanese since the GCC announced on June 2 they were considering punitive measures against the group, according to a Doha-based security source and Hassan Alayan, a Lebanese critic of the campaign.
The security source said 17 or 18 Lebanese Shi’ites were expelled from Qatar in June while Gulf-based analysts following the matter suggested the number could be larger in the UAE.
Alayan, a spokesman for Lebanese Shi’ites who have been evicted from the Gulf, said between 20 to 30 Lebanese Shi’ites were believed to have been expelled from Saudi Arabia in the past month alone.
“I don’t know what’s their interest in expelling people who lived in their countries for decades and offered the best they could in service of these countries,” said Alayan, a Shi’ite Muslim who added that he had lived in the UAE for 27 years before being told in 2009 to leave.
Expulsions of this sort are not new, but the publicity and coordination surrounding the current campaign is unusual. For years some Gulf Arab states have made it tough for Shi’ites in general to get residency visas, especially when applying for jobs in government or government-related entities.
This is a result, analysts say, of a longstanding view among some states that Shi’ites are a security threat, mainly because of what Gulf Arab officials say is Iranian meddling in Arab internal affairs. Iran denies such accusations.
Mutual suspicion has fuelled a historic rift in Islam that began after the death of the Prophet Mohammad in 632 AD. Shi’ites, followers of the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali and his descendants, complain of systematic discrimination and neglect of their communities.
(agencies)
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