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What passing bells for those who die as U.N. peacekeepers?

Ramesh Thakur

The Israeli contempt for U.N. peacekeeping and the deaths of unarmed international observers will make countries much more reluctant to contribute to a bolstered or replacement force.

PHOTO: AP

IN THE LINE OF FIRE: Peacekeepers observe a minute of silence in Naqoura, Lebanon, on July 30, during the memorial service for the four observers killed when Israel bombed a U.N. observer post in Khiyyam.

IN 1999, I organised and chaired a workshop in Budapest on the fallout and longer-term implications of the Kosovo war. I asked retired Air Marshal Ray Funnel, chief of the Australian Air Force during Gulf War I in 1991, to address the question whether this was the first war to be won by air power. ("With respect, professor," he said, "that's a stupid question." But that's another story.) During the question and answer session, someone asked him whether the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was deliberate or accidental.

"With all the authority I have as an air force officer," Air Marshal Funnel replied, "let me assure you that there is no way that bombing could have been deliberate. The American military just doesn't operate like that, and that would have been too stupid an act to be a deliberate decision."

Another participant in the project was Lt. Gen. Satish Nambiar, former deputy chief of the Indian Army and the first commanding officer of the U.N. Protection Force in the former Yugoslavia (and now head of USI in New Delhi). He countered (to vigorous nodding assent from our Chinese participant) that "With all the authority I have as a retired army general and someone who knows Belgrade quite well, let me tell you there is no way that the hit on the Chinese Embassy could have been accidental."

The seeming contradiction is in fact resolvable. For both statements to be true, the strike was not due to a high-level policy decision in Washington, nor an example of "stuff happens," but an operational decision by a lower level "rogue" field commander or targeting officer.

Similarly, from everything I know and believe about Israel, it is inconceivable that the U.N. post was targeted as a matter of deliberate policy. But from all that is already known, it seems equally implausible that deaths were caused merely by an accidental strike or operational error. Official Israeli policy will be judged by the punishment meted out to those responsible for the atrocity.

The U.N. position in Khiyyam has been well known to the Israeli Defence Force for many years and was clearly marked. The Israelis had given assurances that the U.N. posts and personnel would not be struck. On July 18, U.N. monitors made ten phone calls between 1.20 p.m., when an Israeli plane dropped a bomb 300 metres from the patrol base, and around 7.17 p.m. Lt. Col. John Molloy, the senior Irish peacekeeper in Lebanon and a key liaison officer with the IDF, gave six warnings about the Khiyyam post that were "very specific, explicit, detailed and stark." In New York, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Jane Lute phoned the Israeli mission, and then appealed to Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown to follow suit, reiterating protests and calling for an end to artillery shelling and aerial bombardments.

After the hit on Khiyyam, the U.N. secured IDF agreement for safe passage for two of its armoured personnel carriers which arrived around 9.30 p.m. but were attacked by Israel. Israel also fired on peacekeepers sent to dig out the bodies. Ireland's Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern remarked that the incident "raises questions about whether this was an accident."

Lightly armed U.N. peacekeeping forces are not meant to stand up to and resist an Israeli military incursion across the international border. Their central purpose is to give effect to a pacific intent, not to check a war of choice. This makes them easy targets. By the end of 2005, a total of 2,227 personnel had died while serving in U.N. peacekeeping operations, some in accidents, others killed on duty. They sacrificed their lives for a cause above and beyond even national defence, for an abstract principle of international duty. There is no higher calling nor nobler cause.

With apologies to Wilfred Owen, what passing bells for those who die as U.N. peacekeepers — only the monstrous silence of the disunited nations? In response to the death of three of its soldiers killed and the kidnapping of two, Israel unleashed an orgy of destruction and cruelty whose victims have overwhelmingly been civilians caught in the crossfire.

In response to four unarmed and neutral U.N. peacekeepers being killed by Israel, against the background of repeated pleas over six hours to stop before a tragedy occurred, Kofi Annan denounced this "apparently deliberate targeting" of the U.N. post. Would I want as my Secretary-General someone who is complicit through silence when his own peacekeepers are killed? He can soften and back-pedal subsequently, but I for one am glad he spoke up when he did.

When some Western leaders and editorialists shift the blame for the death of U.N. observers to Hizbollah and the U.N., on the twisted reasoning that the U.N. should have withdrawn them from a war zone, they are effectively outsourcing the setting of their international moral compass to Israel. As Israel encounters stiffer than expected resistance and world outrage and condemnation rises of the mounting human toll, calls grow for a ceasefire followed by the deployment of a fresh peacekeeping force. The nature and prospects of a new mission will depend crucially on whether it is conceived and designed as a force to reward or punish Israel for its aggression, or disarm Hizbollah and stop it from attacking Israel.

Israel's U.N. Ambassador is publicly contemptuous of the current U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon. He mockingly notes that "Interim in U.N. jargon is 28 years." His condescension betrays an ignorance of history. The United Nations had been extremely reluctant to establish a peacekeeping force in the aftermath of Israel's 1978 invasion of southern Lebanon. It succumbed to U.S. pressure because Washington wanted to rescue Israel from the ill-advised invasion, but inserted the word "interim" in the name as a compromise. The force has been renewed every six months partly because of the reluctance to admit failure, partly to prevent Israel from reaping the fruits of aggression, and partly because the force has performed many functions of a de facto local municipal authority and overseen a repopulation of the region under its stabilising auspices.

The open Israeli contempt for U.N. peacekeeping and the deaths of unarmed international observers will make countries much more reluctant to contribute to a bolstered or replacement U.N. force. Having privileged its historic role as the ultimate guarantor of Israel's security over the minimum degree of impartiality required to play an honest broker role, can the U.S. organise a multinational peacekeeping force?

Any U.S.-led or NATO force would be seen, resented, and resisted as Israel's instrument. The U.S. and its coalition of the dwindling are tied down in an increasingly lethal civil war in Iraq whose daily average civilian death toll has reached 100. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, challenging NATO forces across increasingly expanding areas of the country. Enlarging the theatre of conflict to Lebanon will merely confirm many Muslims' suspicions of NATO as the armed wing of the Christian West against the rest.

Sadly, it may be futile to expect significant progress on resolving the Middle East conflicts until a prior exorcism of the historical guilt over the Holocaust by the West, which explains their lack of balance.

(Ramesh Thakur is senior vice rector of the United Nations University [Assistant SG of the UN]. His most recent book is "The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect" [Cambridge University Press]. These are his personal views.)

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