WASHINGTON — A little more than a decade after its emergence unleashed one of the deadliest waves of extremism ever witnessed in the Middle East, Lebanon's Hezbollah is going legit.
Once a clandestine movement with unknown leaders, Hezbollah now is a legal political party and part of the largest bloc in Lebanon's Parliament.
Once heard from only via anonymous phone calls and unsigned communiques, it now communicates through a small media empire including two television and four radio stations.
Once a political and financial subsidiary of Iran, it now conducts public fund-raisers at home and abroad, collects taxes from its faithful and reflects a growing diversity of political views.
Once associated with suicide bombings and kidnapings, it now runs one of the largest social welfare programs in Lebanon, costing tens of millions of dollars and, in some ways, outdoing the state.
The transformation, which has occurred over the past two years, reflects a classic pattern of evolution by radical groups from terrorism to participation in the political systems they have been trying to bring down.
Recent history is littered with examples: Menachem Begin's Irgun in Israel in the 1940s; Jomo Kenyatta's Mau Mau in Kenya in the 1950s; Mozambique's Frelimo in the 1970s; Colombia's M-19 in the 1980s. Most recently, Palestine Liberation Organization guerrillas evolved from Israel's nemesis into its partners in peace, governing Jericho and the Gaza Strip.
Hezbollah's transformation is far from complete. Authorities on four continents link bombings in Argentina, Panama and Britain last month to a militant cadre in one of Hezbollah's many wings.
But counterterrorism officials and Middle East experts estimate that as much as 80% of Hezbollah--Arabic for the Party of God--is now engaged in legal political, economic and social programs.
"Hezbollah metamorphosed into much more than a terrorist group or militia. Only a small number, proportionately, are hard-core terrorists," said Bruce Hoffman, co-director of the Center for Terrorism and Conflict Studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "Probably less than 1,000 are on the front lines of terror."
Since Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s under Iran's patronage, most of the Shiite Muslims attracted to it have been lured less by its fiery rhetoric than by its social services, from health care to farming cooperatives to subsidized taxis. Its activism contrasted conspicuously with the collapsed Lebanese government.
