BERLIN — As American officials sound the alarm over what they call a resurgent threat from the Shiite militant group Hezbollah,
thousands of its members and supporters operate with few restrictions
in Europe, raising money that is funneled to the group’s leadership in
Lebanon.
Washington and Jerusalem insist that Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed
terrorist organization with bloody hands, and that it is working closely
with Tehran to train, arm and finance the Syrian military’s lethal
repression of the uprising there. Yet, the European Union continues to
treat it foremost as a Lebanese political and social movement.
As Israel heightens fears of a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s
nuclear sites, intelligence analysts warn that Iran and Hezbollah would
respond with attacks of their own on targets abroad. Israeli and
American officials have attributed the Bulgarian bus bombing last month that killed six people, including five Israeli tourists, to Hezbollah and Iran, saying it was part of a clandestine offensive that has included plots in Thailand, India, Cyprus and elsewhere.
While the group is believed to operate all over the Continent, Germany
is a center of activity, with 950 members and supporters last year, up
from 900 in 2010, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said in its
annual threat report. On Saturday, Hezbollah supporters and others will
march here for the annual Jerusalem Day event, a protest against Israeli
control of that city. Organizers told the Berlin police that the event
would attract 1,000 marchers, and that two counterdemonstrations were
also likely.
Hezbollah has maintained a low profile in Europe since the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, quietly holding meetings and raising money that goes to
Lebanon, where officials use it for an array of activities — building
schools and clinics, delivering social services and, Western
intelligence agencies say, carrying out terrorist attacks.
European security services keep tabs on the group’s political
supporters, but experts say they are ineffective when it comes to
tracking the sleeper cells that pose the most danger. “They have real,
trained operatives in Europe that have not been used in a long time, but
if they wanted them to become active, they could,” said Alexander
Ritzmann, a policy adviser at the European Foundation for Democracy in
Brussels, who has testified before Congress on Hezbollah.
The European Union’s unwillingness to place the group on its list of
terrorist organizations is also complicating the West’s efforts to deal
with the Bulgarian bus bombing and the Syrian conflict. The week after
the attack in Bulgaria, Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
traveled to Brussels for a regular meeting with European officials,
where he called for the European Union to include Hezbollah on the list.
But his pleas fell on deaf ears.
“There is no consensus among the E.U. member states for putting
Hezbollah in the terrorist-related list of the organizations,” Erato
Kozakou-Marcoullis, the foreign minister of Cyprus, which holds the
European Union’s rotating presidency, said at the time. “Should there be
tangible evidence of Hezbollah engaging in acts of terrorism, the E.U.
would consider listing the organization.”
The stark difference in views reflects the many roles that Hezbollah has
played since it emerged in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion in 1982.
Hezbollah’s militant wing was responsible for a string of kidnappings
and for sophisticated bombings at home and has been accused of bombings
abroad. But the group also became a source of social services that the
shattered Lebanese government was incapable of providing, and has
evolved since then into a political force with two cabinet ministers and
a dozen seats in Parliament.
“They are quite professional in this, and this is something some Western
donors are admitting that has a positive impression on some Western
politicians,” said Stephan Rosiny, a research fellow at the Institute of
Middle East Studies at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies
in Hamburg.
That in turn provides a rationale for the group’s charitable networks
among Lebanese immigrants in Europe. “They may collect money for their
institutions, but they aren’t operating publicly,” Mr. Rosiny said. “As
long as they aren’t involved in politics and aren’t operating openly,
they are tolerated.”
From all indications to date, it is an arrangement that Hezbollah is
eager to preserve. The group’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, has
said that a European blacklist would “destroy Hezbollah. The sources of
our funding will dry up and the sources of moral political and material
support will be destroyed.” And Hezbollah’s defenders note that no hard
evidence has been produced tying the group to the Bulgarian bus bombing.
Experts question how effectively European police officials are keeping
track of the kind of serious, well-trained operatives capable of staging
attacks versus counting up donors to funds for orphans of suicide
bombers. “I don’t believe that they are able to monitor Hezbollah
activities because Hezbollah is such a professional player,” said Guido
Steinberg, an expert on terrorism with the German Institute for
International and Security Affairs.
“The supporters that march the streets with a Hezbollah flag are not a
threat to national security,” Mr. Ritzmann said. “We’re more concerned
with small groups — a car dealer, a grocer, or whatever, who operate in a
traditional way like a sleeper cell would operate.”
Europe has long been more tolerant of militant Islamic groups than the
United States. Before the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda maintained a media
information office in London. Much of the planning and organization for
the attacks took place in Hamburg, Germany, where the plot’s leader,
Mohamed Atta, lived.
American officials privately complained for years about Germany’s
reluctance to crack down on businesses that circumvent sanctions against
Iran. The pressure appears to have paid off, with Germany last year agreeing
to include the European-Iranian Trade Bank, based in Hamburg, on a
European Union blacklist. On Wednesday, German police officials arrested
four men suspected of sending special valves to Iran for use in the
building of a heavy-water reactor.
Yet, where the American and Israeli governments see Iran and Hezbollah
gearing up their long-dormant capacity for international terrorism,
Europeans strongly differentiate between an international terrorist
network like Al Qaeda and what is viewed here as a conflict pitting
Israel and the United States on one side against Iran, Syria and
Hezbollah on the other.
Some analysts say that Shiite groups like Hezbollah pose less of a risk
than Sunni militant organizations like Al Qaeda. “The greatest danger
from Islamist militants comes from the Salafists, not the Shiites but
the Sunnis,” said Berndt Georg Thamm, a terrorism expert in Berlin,
referring to a hard-line branch of Sunni Islam. He cited as examples the
man who confessed to killing seven people in southwest France this year
and the gunman who killed two United States airmen at the Frankfurt
airport last year. “As far as Europe is concerned, Hezbollah is not what
is moving it at the moment.”
The perception gap across the Atlantic is so great that American
officials sound more concerned about the threat posed by Hezbollah to
Europe than the Europeans themselves. “We assess that Hezbollah could
attack in Europe or elsewhere at any time with little or no warning,”
said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism
coordinator, last week as officials from the Treasury and State
Departments accused Hezbollah of working with operatives of Iran’s Quds
Force of the Revolutionary Guards to train and advise Syrian government
forces.
The Netherlands declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization in 2004,
saying that it did not distinguish between the group’s political and
terrorist wings. Britain distinguishes between the parts, listing only
the militant wing.
“The British see it as a tool: if you change we take it off the list,”
Mr. Ritzmann said. “The French don’t think it’s smart to put them on the
terrorist list because they’re such a political actor.”
Mr. Thamm said, “There is no unified common assessment of Hezbollah.” He
added, “And that is not something that will change in the foreseeable
future.”
Skeptics here in Europe say that as Hezbollah has become more political
the group has moved away from its terrorist past, if not forsaken it
entirely, and that Israel is stoking fears as it seeks to justify an
attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Some experts say that security officials on the Continent are resistant
to blacklisting the group because they seem to see a tacit détente,
where Hezbollah does not stage attacks and European law enforcement
officials do not interfere with its fund-raising and organizational
work.
“There’s a fear of attracting Hezbollah’s ire and eventually inviting
Hezbollah operations in their own countries,” said Bruce Hoffman, a
professor of security studies at Georgetown and a terrorism expert.
“Why pick up a rock and see what’s under it?” he asked.
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