Thursday July 20, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Timur Goksel, the affable Turk who occupied that post for 20 of Unifil's 28-year existence, has long left his office in Naqoura on the Mediterranean, and is now an academic at the American University of Beirut, where he is well placed to help journalists seeking to understand the latest deadly interaction between the two countries.
"They are barely able to take care of themselves," he said of the UN peacekeepers. "How can you expect them to do their work?"
Unifil is still a ghostly presence along the border drawn by the French and British mandatory authorities in the 1920s. And as has happened before, it has again been caught up in violence it is always unable to prevent. A Ghanaian soldier was killed this week, and over the years it has lost some 250 personnel to hostile action or accidents. In the last bout of serious fighting in 1996, 106 Lebanese refugees were killed when Israeli artillery fire hit a container in a UN base where they were sheltering.
As the international community scrabbles for a way out of this crisis, unable so far even to agree on a ceasefire, discussions are already being held about a beefed-up international presence or "stabilisation force", as Kofi Annan put it. That will have to include some elements of the mission Unifil has always been charged with, but has never succeeded in carrying out. The lessons of the past suggest it will not be easy.
Unifil arrived in 1978 after a spectacular Palestinian attack inside Israel triggered Israel's "Operation Litani", which swept Palestine Liberation Organisation guerrillas away from its northern border. The blue-helmeted UN soldiers were targets from the start for Israeli monitoring and psychological warfare designed to undermine its effectiveness or ensure it never hindered Israeli operations.
The Irish UN troops, for example, were jokingly referred to as the "whisky army", and Israeli-backed Christian militiamen - known by the Unifil acronym LAUIs (Lebanese armed and uniformed by Israel) - harassed them mercilessly in their base at Camp Shamrock.
Unifil was tolerated by the Israelis but disliked for its good relations with PLO units in the area. After the 1982 invasion, when the PLO had gone but were replaced by a new Shia resistance, the UN forged friendly ties with them too. Mr Goksel helped visiting journalists meet bearded young men in the southern villages, their Kalashnikov rifles propped against the walls as they explained their determination to fight Israel's troops and intelligence agents.
The UN's white armoured vehicles became a familiar sight as they patrolled the low hills near the coast. But it is harder to operate in the more heavily wooded terrain to the east - classic guerrilla country that has seen countless clashes between the warring sides over the years.
After 1982, Unifil became little more than a helpless bystander. Its formal mission, as before, was to verify an Israeli withdrawal, restore international peace and security, and assist the government of Lebanon "in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area". It never achieved any of those objectives, as it ruefully but honestly admits.
It was at this time, as Israel consolidated its border "security zone", that Iran began to openly support the resistance, much of it by the Lebanese Shia Amal movement. Gradually there were more and more black flags and posters of "martyrs" attesting to the growth of a more militant Shia movement, which Hizbullah eventually came to dominate.
Mired in what became known as the Lebanese "quagmire" it had itself created, Israel struggled on until 2000, when the Labour prime minister Ehud Barak decided to withdraw his forces unilaterally. However, Unifil has proved no more able to stop Hizbullah attacks since then. Israeli anger was fuelled when four of its soldiers were abducted in a previous incident and the UN did nothing.
If Unifil is to be of any use in helping stabilise a ceasefire it will need many more soldiers, and heavier weapons. Its current force of 2,000, with personnel from China, France, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy and Poland, is woefully inadequate.
Since the current crisis began, Unifil has been unable to supply food and water to its own troops or deliver humanitarian aid to civilians because Israel will not guarantee their safe passage. In one incident, shrapnel from tank shells fired by the Israelis seriously wounded an Indian soldier. In another, Hizbullah launched rockets and the Israelis fired back as UN troops were escorting villagers to safety in Tyre.
With fighting still heavy, it is hard to imagine a new force being quickly assembled or deployed. John Bolton, the hawkish US ambassador to the UN, posed the right question: "You would have to ask what would make a new multilateral force different from or more effective than Unifil." The answer is that it would have to be far larger and more robust, mandated to allow the Lebanese government to truly deploy south to its own international border once Hizbullah was disarmed. However this dangerous crisis ends, that is not going to be a simple task.
Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1825197,00.html?gusrc=rss
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