Lebanon: Hizbullah, the Shia Muslim Lebanese Party of God, could gain from the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon despite a resolution in the European Parliament yesterday stating: "If clear evidence exists of terrorist activities by Hizbullah, the council should take all necessary steps to curtail them".
To the displeasure of President George W. Bush, European countries, especially France, argue that Hizbullah, like Hamas in the Israeli-occupied territories, is a political movement and say that it would be counterproductive to brand it as a terrorist organisation.
Israel accuses the group of assisting Palestinian suicide-bombers.
"This is totally untrue," said Abdallah Kassir, one of 12 Hizbullah MPs. "The Palestinians don't need Hizbullah. They were a resistance force long before we were.
"We learned from them."
Hizbullah earned respect across the Arab world by driving Israel out of southern Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation.
UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demands the withdrawal of all Syrian forces from Lebanon, also calls for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias.
When the resolution was drawn up last summer, France wanted the departure of Syrian troops while the US insisted on the disarming of Hizbullah.
The US demand divided the anti-Syrian opposition and provided ammunition to Syrian loyalists, who portrayed 1559 as an Israeli plot.
France persuaded the US that it would be better to set the issue aside.
In Beirut at the end of February, the US deputy undersecretary of state, David Satterfield, said publicly that disarming Hizbullah was no longer a US priority.
A front-page report in yesterday's New York Times said that the Bush administration was "grudgingly going along with efforts by France and the UN to steer the party into the Lebanese political mainstream".
"If Bush is really democratic, then he must recognise all political forces in Lebanon, including Hizbullah," Sayyid Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, the highest Shia Muslim religious authority in Lebanon, said in an interview yesterday.
"When Satterfield came here, he saw only members of the [ anti-Syrian] opposition. He did not contact Hizbullah."
The easing of US pressure on Hizbullah has coincided with the party's show of force on Tuesday, when 500,000 people turned out in central Beirut in response to a call from the group's leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah.
Having maintained a degree of neutrality for three weeks after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, Nasrallah declared himself a friend of Damascus. "No one can drive out Syria from Lebanon's mind, heart or future," he declared.
There is widespread speculation that Damascus will rely on Hizbullah, not the discredited pro-Syrian political establishment, to protect Syrian interests in Lebanon after the withdrawal.
"Everyone knew that Hizbullah was the largest political grouping in Lebanon," says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University and the author of Hizbullah: Politics and Religion.
"What really threw everyone off-balance was the demonstration that the Shia are the most unified community in Lebanon. This was the first time they held a rally downtown, not in the southern suburbs," said a source who had been an intermediary between the murdered former prime minister and Hizbullah.
"For the first time they are out in the open, in the forefront of negotiations with the opposition, the media and demonstrations."
The source predicted that the rival Shia political party, Amal, which under Syrian patronage held nearly twice as many seats in parliament, would rapidly lose influence.
"Nasrallah spoke [ at Tuesday's rally] not only as an Islamist and pan-Arabist, but as a national statesman," Ms Saad-Ghorayeb said.
"Hizbullah is well suited to filling this power vacuum right now. That is definitely the role that Hizbullah is seeking to play."
That role will be tested today, when Nasrallah leads a demonstration in the northern Sunni Muslim city of Tripoli.
Sheikh Fadlallah, who was born in the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq, rejected the fashionable idea of an arc of Shia power extending from Iran to Iraq and Lebanon.
As revealed by the US investigative reporter Bob Woodward in Veil, Fadlallah was the target of a car-bomb planted by the CIA, with Saudi support, in Beirut's southern suburbs in 1985.
The bomb killed 80 people, but it missed Fadlallah.
So Fadlallah seemed a good person to ask about the assassination of Mr Hariri.
"Political assassination in Lebanon is the work of intelligence services," he said.
"It could have been Israel. It could be other Arab nations. It could be [ Sunni fundamentalist] Salafists."
Fadlallah's allusion to other Arab nations was the first hint from a Syrian ally that Syria might be a suspect.