by Metransparent correspondent in South Lebanon
Najah Khalil
More than a year after the Municipal elections, a municipal committee under the name of “Religious Waqf Committee” emerged from Hezbollah with a mission of conducting a census of surveys and determine the religious properties and Waqfs in the Shiite regions of Lebanon.
Committee members first made a survey inclusive of the regions of Tyre, Sidon, Nabatiyeh, Marjayoun and Bent Jbeil, then constrained their work to municipalities won by Hezbollah, to the exclusion of municipalities controlled by the Amal movement or by a coalition of Hezbollah and Amal.
This partisan religious Waqf committee then decided to circumvent the law concerning Lebanese religious communities which makes the Higher Islamic Shiite Council the only official authorized manager of the Shiite community’s Waqfs, just like other Lebanese communities supervise their own Waqfs. These Waqfs and properties include vast lands as well as Shiite mosques, Husayniehs, cemeteries and a large number of institutions which give its proceeds to the poor of the community.
After their surveys and the identification of the donors for these Waqfs, the Hezbollah committee registered the properties in the name of “all the people in town” when it was previously named by the Supreme Islamic Shiaa Council as “public charity properties”. Thus, the municipal councils became the sole authority to deal with the properties.
Supreme Islamic Shiaa Council objected on this issue, prompting the Council’s Abdel Amir Qabalan to issue a decision which designates all mosques, Shiite mosques, and cemeteries as public property. The “Religious Waqfs Committee” indirectly replied that the registered properties still belonged to their owners and that the Supreme Council has no authority on them, since most of the properties where houses of worship were built in Shiite regions were offered as a “courtesy” of rich shiites to the people of their towns, and thus were still private properties.
Observers noted that the Religious Waqfs Committee made large financial paymensts to donators of religious properties in order to put its hands on the properties- in completion of earlier efforts to seize state properties as well as take hold of “communal” lands in South Lebanon.
In certain cases, ownership of some of the Waqf properties have been transferred in the real estate registry to Hizbullah partisans rather than to “all the people of the town”.
This usurpation of waqf properties has been achieved with the blessings of prominent muftis of the Shiite Council who were given appropriate bribes.
Translation by: Aline Karim