LEBANON: HEZBOLLAH'S PIONEERING 'MEDIA WARRIORS'

Beirut, 5 April (AKI) - Lebanon 1982: Under fire, a machine-gun toting Hezbollah fighter ducks for cover in the rubble of a gutted Beirut apartment block. He is not alone. Next to him crouches a comrade filming the entire scene with a rudimentary video camera. That's the image conjured up by the words of Hassan Izz ad-Din. "Whenever our fighters went into combat, they would be flanked by cameramen to document the action," ad-Din, a former chief of Hezbollah's media department, explains. "When one of our soldiers fell in battle, we could show his family the film of his heroic martyrdom," ad-Din, who today leads Hezbollah's political office in southern Lebanon, tells Adnkronos International (AKI).

Compared to those crudely-shot reportages from the Lebanese civil war two decades ago, Hezbollah's media capacity today is much more sophisticated.

In 1988 the radical Shiite group started broadcasting its own radio service, an-Nur (The Light) and in 1990 its television channel al-Manar (The Lighthouse) started beaming images to households across Lebanon, and later, much further afield, via satellite.

"Without our media activities we would never have succeeded in liberating southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation," ad-Din says of Hezbollah's military campaign that led to Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.

"The images of our military operations against the Israelis played a critical role. On the one hand they showed the Lebanese and the entire Arab-Muslim world that it was possible to defeat the Israeli military, previously considered invincible. On the other hand, our images also arrived via satellite to Israel, and that's when their public began realising the toll, especially in terms of human losses, of continuing the occupation of Lebanon."

For ad-Din, Hezbollah's first journalistic 'scoop' dates back to 1992 when Hezbollah fighters drove Israeli forces from the hill of Dabshe near the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiyye.

"The Israelis claimed they had suffered 'irrelevant losses', until we broadcast images of their destroyed tanks and wounded soldiers. It was a stunning success which led some Israelis to say: 'We have to watch al-Manar to learn the truth about our boys in Lebanon'".

Hezbollah's Da'ira al-Ilam al-Harbi, or Department for War Propaganda, was first created in 1987 and today consists of a "dozen expert cameramen, audio technicians and photographers, specially trained to cover miltary operations," ad-Din explains.

But when asked if Hezbollah's "media warriors" set the example for the Iraqi insurgents whose 'exploits' are distributed through video images on the Internet, ad-Din denies this.

"Resistance is the right of any oppressed people who have had their land occupied, but targeting civilians is terrorism. The same goes for executions filmed and then shown on the Internet or on television. These are actions that damage Islam.

"Our faith prohibits the torture and killing of prisioners of war, in the same way as it forbids the violation of human corpses or their dismemberment.

"Our videos showed the mangled bodies of Israeli soldiers," ad-Din says, refering to a 1996 broadcast when al-Manar showed the remains of members of an Israeli commando wiped out by Hezbollah fighters in the southern Lebanese town of Ansariyye.

"But these images showed that what happened was because the soldiers died in an explosion, and not because we had mutiliated their corpses."

In 2004, a French court banned al-Manar, on the grounds that it was inciting racial hatred and created a threat to public order. The station, has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism.

Although registered as a political party in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which receives backing from Iran and Syria, maintains a militia which controls most of southern Lebanon. A UN Security Council Resolution has called on all militias in Lebanon to disband.