LEBANON - The 'Countdown' For Hizbollah.

Against indications that the days of Hizbollah as a Shiite state within a pluralistic society in Lebanon could be numbered came a recent warning from Hizbollah's chief Hassan Nasrallah that if Syria left Lebanon this country would face another civil war.

Most opponents of the Shiite group took this to imply that Hizbollah itself might provoke a civil war and continue to fight rather than allow itself to be disbanded.

There has been tension between Israel and Hizbollah since Jan. 9, when the group's guerrillas attacked an Israeli patrol at Sheb'a Farms. This is a small piece of Syrian property adjacent to Lebanon's southern border with Israel occupied by Israeli forces since the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war and informally offered to

Beirut so that Hizbollah can continue guerrilla operations to "liberate" an Arab land.

On Jan. 11, the American ambassador to Beirut told reporters the attack was a clear violation of a 1996 ceasefire arrangement by Hizbollah, while President Lahoud and Hizbollah continued to try "making the lie a reality" about Sheb'a Farms being a Lebanese territory "still occupied by Israel". Those Lebanese politicians who are opposed to Syrian control and Hizbollah's guerrilla activities are saying that, if Damascus has really ceded Sheb'a Farms to Lebanon, this should be done formally in a resolution issued by Syria's parliament and National Progressive Front - the latter grouping a few approved political parties in Syria other than the ruling Baath.

It was alleged that Hizbollah's attack had been ordered by its sponsor, Iran, and its more immediate backer, Syria, to test the resolve of Israel on the day PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas was elected as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Ariel Sharon was getting parliamentary support for his new three-party government. (That Abbas was going to win the Jan. 9 election and Sharon's new coalition would get the confidence vote of the Knesset had been expected for weeks. Now Abbas is trying hard to have a truce between Israel and the armed Palestinian groups, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades).

It is hard to tell whether or not the fate of Hizbollah, created after Israel's mid-1982 invasion of Lebanon, was sealed by 1559. Also hard to tell is whether 1559 has sealed the fate of Syria's use of the Lebanon card in its hot bargaining with Israel.

Syria had held this card since 1974, when its forces in the Golan Heights were separated from those of Israel through a "disengagement" deal brokered by then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. At the time, Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad was made to understand - though no agreement on this was written - that, while the Golan front was to be quiet, Syria could eventually enter Lebanon to protect the Christians if and when these were to be attacked by a coalition of PLO guerrilla groups and Lebanese Muslim/leftist forces (see background in fap4aSyria1Oct18-04).

Syria "offered" Sheb'a Farms immediately after Israel withdrew from a strip of southern Lebanese territory in late May 2000, so that Hizbollah can continue its "liberation war". But at the UN Sheb'a Farms is still registered as being part of Syrian territory occupied by Israel since the June 1967 war, and so are the positions of the US and France - the co-sponsors of 1559 - and the rest of the world. So when Hizbollah attacked at Sheb'a Farms and the Israelis retaliated on Jan. 9, the UN reacted in a way different from the joint Syrian-Lebanese position.

The attack was an explosion of a roadside bomb planted by Hizbollah guerrillas which destroyed an Israeli Army vehicle, killed an Israeli officer and wounded three others. In return, Israel launched four air strikes and shelled Hizbollah positions, killing one militiaman and wounding another. A UN patrol car was hit by an Israeli tank shell, killing the French truce monitor. A Swedish officer and a Lebanese man were also wounded in the Israeli shelling. The French Defence Ministry in Paris identified the dead officer as Major Jean Louis Valet, who was serving with UN Observer Group Lebanon, which monitors the 1949 armistice line between Lebanon and Israel.

Staffan de Mistura, the UN special representative for South Lebanon answerable to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, on Jan. 10 stated: "We are asking all sides to contain their actions and to control their actions on the ground. We are in a very delicate period not only in the history of Lebanon but of the region. The whole region is going through a difficult moment. This is the time to maintain calm. This is the time not to go into escalation". De Mistura made the remarks following a meeting in Beirut with Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud, during which the two discussed Sheb'a Farms and the developments that followed the Jan. 9 attack.

(President Lahoud sent a message to President Jacques Chirac of France and to Annan expressing his "deep pain" over the peacekeeper's death. Nearly 300 UN peacekeepers have died in south Lebanon's border region, most of them since an armed peacekeeping force was deployed to the area in 1978).