Hizbollah says Arab world to blame for India distance

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, March 13, 2007 : The Arab world, and not India, should be blamed for the huge psychological distance that has grown between these two regions and for allowing New Delhi to come closer to Israel, Hizbollah representative Ali Fayyad has said.

Refusing to criticise India for voting against Iran’s nuclear programme at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Fayyad pointed out that New Delhi should, in fact, use its influence as a big country to intervene in the growing standoff between Iran and the western world.

In an interview on the sidelines of a big conference called ``War, Anti-Imperialism and Resistance in West Asia,’’ the Hizbollah representative spoke freely and frankly about the ``big mess in the Arab world today.’’

``We accuse Arab countries, we hold them responsible for allowing such a big country like India to come close to Israel. The Arab states have no effective foreign policy, they have lost many friends in the world,’’ Fayyad said bluntly.

So much so that the splintered Iraqi resistance, increasingly fundamentalist and even somewhat criminalized, ``should learn from the Hizbollah movement in Lebanon, unify itself and end the American occupation of Iraq,’’ he added.

This is the first time in recent memory that New Delhi has allowed a spokesman of the Hizbollah into India. Considering that major Left leaders like Prakash Karat and A B Bardhan are set to speak at the conference tomorrow, it seems as if New Delhi is making a deliberate attempt to balance the perception that the Manmohan Singh government leans heavily in favour of the US and Israel.

In full flow, Fayyad did not deny that the Hizbollah wielded great influence in West Asia and the Gulf. But he modestly insisted that since the Hizbollah was a Lebanon-based movement, he did not want to get involved in the internal politics of Iran.

``Iran’s nuclear programme is an Iranian issue, it has nothing to do with the Hizbollah,’’ Fayyad said.

On Iran’s perceived determination to abrogate its obligations to the NPT and go nuclear, Fayyad indicated that this was a Western conspiracy. ``Today, even the Iranian religious leadership is saying that nuclear weapons are horrible and that Iran will not pursue that path,’’ he said.

At the conference itself, the audience seemed hugely relieved as it occasionally erupted into a denunciation of America’s invasion of Iraq, its perceived readiness to attack Iran and generally a wholesome critique of the ugly superpower.

When one of the participants, Kamal Majid from Iraq, pointed out that India better be warned that after Iran, it would be India’s turn, there was much good-natured cheering, much like a college night-out.

To a question from this reporter, on choosing between the secular dictatorship of saddam Hussein and America, Majid pointed out that at least Saddam Hussein did not destroy whole cities in an attempt to install democracy.

But other participants, like Fawwaz Traboulsi, an intellectual with the Lebanese American university and Ali Atassi, a journalist in Beirut, pointed out that this was no choice at all. In fact, Hizbollah’s Fayyad added later that the Hizbollah had major differences, ``from the root,’’ with Islamic groups like the Al-Qaeda.

But Fayyad made no bones about blaming the Arab regimes for the ``mess within the Arab world.’’ The Arab world, he said, ``is completely divided about all issues,’’ whether it was the infighting in Palestine or in Iraq.’’

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