|
The blue and white UN flag looks good in the morning over these soft, pale hills. For all of 28 years, it has flown beside Irish battalions, Nepalese battalions, Senegalese battalions, Finnish battalions, all kinds of battalions, from every worthy neutral nation you can imagine. But now the flag snaps over French battalions, Spanish battalions, Italian battalions, German naval units, over the offices of four Nato generals, two French, one Spanish and one Italian.
Unifil, the United Nations - wait for it - Interim Force in Lebanon, is now in effect a Nato force which has all this power and anti-aircraft missiles and tanks and artillery spread over these beautiful hills. It is a "buffer" force, so it claims to the Shia villages among whom it lives. It is there to "protect" them from the Israelis who bombarded them so savagely after the Lebanese Shia Hizbollah army captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others last July - and then fought off the Israeli army for 34 devastating days in which almost a hundred Israeli civilians and well over a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed (10 to one being a normal casualty count around here).
But life has changed. The Unifil force is not the friendly, neutral, soft army it used to be, backed up by Indian troops (among the best) and Nepalese (among the worst) and Fijian (among the friendliest) and Ghanaian soldiers, but a "robust" army - to use Tony Blair's distinctive un-robust semantics - with Nato soldiers trained to fire back and to take no nonsense from the militias of southern Lebanon or from the Israeli army. To which one can only say: ho hum.
A few days ago, for example, French troops got to within "two seconds" of firing their anti-aircraft missiles at an Israeli pilot who was making mock attacks on their battalion headquarters at Bourj Qalawiyeh. This, at least, is what the French Defence Minister said when she objected to Israel's continued over-flights of Lebanon. The reality is somewhat different. Ever since they took casualties from a helicopter in Ivory Coast, the French government will not deploy troops without 155mm artillery, Leclerc tanks and anti-aircraft missiles. The rockets are programmed to fire when a non-transponder attack aircraft approaches French positions; French troops - desperately trying to prevent their own missiles from firing at an indisciplined Israeli pilot - were two seconds short of allowing their rocket to shoot at the Israeli when they managed to pull the computer disk out of the firing mechanism.
[...]
Down here in southern Lebanon, of course, there are other arguments. The French and the Spanish and the Italians and even the Irish, who have returned to their beloved southern Lebanon with 160 men, are creating a new economy, buying up the milk, souvenirs, camouflage jackets and cedar trees on sale - a good enough reason to maintain Unifil in the eyes of the Shias.
And the Hizbollah - here is a fact which will not sit happily with the John Boltons of this world at the UN - are watching every car that drives south of the Litani river. For they know that if a suicide bomber attacks the French, they - the Hizbollah - will be blamed. They will not be to blame. It will be the Sunni Muslim al-Qa'idists to the north who wish to attack Nato. So Hizbollah will be the most powerful defenders of the European armies in southern Lebanon. Now there's something to think about.
| |
