Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2000, pages 28, 73

United Nations Report

After Years of Pounding UNIFIL, Israel Suddenly Needs Its Support in Lebanon

By Ian Williams

In 1978, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 425, which called upon Israel “to withdraw forthwith its forces from Lebanese territory.” In the meantime the Council mandated setting up UNIFIL, the U.N. “Interim” Force in Lebanon, and tasked it with “confirming the withdrawal of Israeli forces, restoring international peace and security and assisting the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area.”

For the last two decades it has scarcely been able to confirm Israeli withdrawal. Indeed it was brushed aside only a few years later in Ariel Sharon’s brutal blitzkrieg against Beirut, which of course petered out in Sabra and Shatila.

The nature of the UNIFIL-Israeli relationship was perhaps expressed, albeit somewhat undiplomatically, by an Irish diplomat in New York a few years ago. He said that the Israeli consul had once asked him why Dublin did not have diplomatic relations with Israel and claimed he’d replied, “When you stop sending our guys home in body bags, we might think about it.”

The Israeli attitude toward UNIFIL and the Lebanese was best expressed, of course, in the shelling of the refugees who had run to take shelter at the Qana UNIFIL camp. Over 100 were killed in an incident which U.N. investigators decided must have been deliberate, and for which Israel has yet to express the slightest contrition.

The Lebanese are used to this, of course. Their mission to the U.N. has tried for years to get the Security Council to discuss the various Israeli incursions and bombings of civilian targets. So far, they have never made the agenda except to renew the UNIFIL mandate.

Suddenly, however, there is a change of tune. If Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is to fulfill his promise to the Israeli electorate, let alone to the world, to withdraw from Lebanon, the Israeli government suddenly sees an essential role for UNIFIL. And it is not ensuring the IDF’s withdrawal.

At Israel’s behest, the U.S. has approached Kofi Annan to talk about it, not least since Ireland and Fiji have already suggested that in the event of any hostilities erupting in the wake of the evacuation, they will pull out their contingents. Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy spoke to Kofi Annan about it at the beginning of April and urgently requested him to ensure that UNIFIL hold the line.

According to the press release, an unblushing Levy told Annan “that Israel stands ready to assist and to cooperate with the U.N. in any way necessary, in order to secure calm and stability in Lebanon and to prevent escalation and bloodshed.” He added that if “the U.N. should desire cooperation, it will find Israel to be fully cooperative.” Presumably this means that Israel expects the U.N. to hold Hezbollah at bay until the Lebanese army sees fit to move up.

The question is, of course, whether Lebanon is prepared to do that, since it rather suits their presumptuous allies, the Syrians, to have the IDF tangled in the Hezbollah briar patch, thus concentrating Israeli minds on negotiations over the hitherto quiescent Golan.

If the Lebanese asked UNIFIL to go, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Ireland or Fiji, the main troop contributors, to remain. There are, of course, uneasy parallels and memories of when Egyptian President Gamel Abdul Nasser asked the U.N. peacekeepers to move out of the Sinai in 1967. The then secretary-general, U Thant, can be blamed for acting too quickly, when in retrospect Nasser was probably only kidding, but the U.N. diplomat was impeccable in his legal judgment.

One option would be to pass a resolution “re-mandating” UNIFIL under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which permits the use of force to deal with threats to international peace and security. This would be a little too richly ironic for many stomachs at the U.N., however, since under Washington’s pressure, for many decades none of the resolutions about Israel have invoked Chapter VII. One would hope that citing it against Lebanon would be too much even for hardened ambassadorial intestines.

In fact, if the main culprits of the Israeli-funded and -directed South Lebanese Army (SLA) are removed, Israel should have little to fear. Despite Israel’s continual attempts at demonizing Hezbollah, the Shi’i guerrilla group has restricted itself to attacks on the occupying forces, and generally has only attacked across the border under provocation from Israeli forces. If Israel genuinely quits its occupation zone in southern Lebanon, there is every reason to believe that Hezbollah will respect the frontier—although it will doubtless be on the watch for encroachments across the line.

Resolutions Against Iraq

The much more recent resolutions against Iraq are, of course, under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, but that does not seem to have made them much more enforceable in practice than those against Israel. The latest, 1284, is creaking its way through the U.N. bureaucracy but sticking to its timetable since the appointment of Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, as the head of UNMOVIC, the new monitoring and inspection agency. Blix expects to have his team assembled by the middle of April and can then start on the program of work for the organization.

It is barely conceivable that if the Iraqis cooperated, then sanctions in their strictest form could be suspended by the end of the year. Although, that “if” is a big one, some Western diplomats see encouraging signs in the relative lack of recent vituperation against the resolution. Indeed, originally, Baghdad had loudly declared its refusal to accept the resolutions lifting the ceiling on “oil-for-food” exports under U.N. supervision. With a silence almost as deafening as the original announcements, it has now reversed its position and is pumping and selling oil as fast as it can to take advantage of the high prices.

However unembarrassable the Iraqi government, its productivity proved embarrassing indeed to Kofi Annan and the U.N. Secretariat, which had cited the country’s inability to produce enough oil to justify doubling the amount of the oil-for-food revenues it could spend on oil industry equipment to $600 million. That was approved on March 31, along with a series of measures designed to speed up the oil-for-food contracts by eliminating the holds placed on them in the sanctions committee.

To celebrate, Baghdad refused to allow the chairman of the U.N. sanctions committee, Netherlands Ambassador Peter van Walsum, to visit the country to assess the situation. Even so, the Security Council decision means that there are now four lists of goods that are supposed to be on accelerated procedures for approval by the sanctions committee—pharmaceuticals and basic medical equipment, standard agricultural equipment, food, and educational supplies.

Most of the holds are by the U.S., and while there is doubtless some element of prejudice involved, American allies claim that in fact much of the delay is accounted for by Washington bureaucracy, where a multiplicity of agencies and committees has to sign off on everything.

The various measures to relax sanctions are the result of increasing pressure to ameliorate the conditions of the Iraqi civilians. Few, if any, countries agree with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that the deaths of thousands of Iraqi infants is a price worth paying.

However, while the U.S. is increasingly isolated and, indeed, bending on the rigor of sanctions, there is still a strong constituency at the U.N. for maintaining close monitoring. Recent finds in “oil-for-food” contracts include a neutron generator from China, supplies of the growth medium essential for biological warfare, and military specification respirators for use during chemical warfare.

Even so, there is a serious possibility of change in Washington. The oil price crisis makes American public opinion uniquely open to a reversal of policies. Gasoline prices here may be the cheapest in the industrialized world but, given the choice between continued higher prices at the pump and abandoning sanctions on Iraq, there is little doubt which would win with the great and insular American electorate.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and the author of The U.N. for Beginners, available through the AET Book Club.