UNITED NATIONS, July 17: British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on the UN Security Council on Monday to deploy a security force in Lebanon, but the United States and Israel frowned on the idea.
World leaders at a Group of Eight summit meeting in St Petersburg had raised the possibility of a force, and Mr Annan, after talks with Mr Blair, said he would push ahead with the plan as a matter of urgency.
But John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, raised a series of questions about the concept while Israel said it was too soon to be talking of sending a force.
“I don’t think we’re at that stage yet. We’re at the stage where we want to be sure that Hezbollah is not deployed at our northern border,” Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said in Jerusalem.
Security Council members heard briefings on the crisis but took no decision pending an update later this week from a task force Mr Annan sent to the region. Usually, peacekeepers do not go into a conflict until there is some kind of halt to hostilities.
‘OPEN WAR’: Ibrahim Gambari, the UN undersecretary-general for political affairs, told the council: “We are now in a situation of ‘open war’ in Lebanon.
“We cannot see how this destruction contributed to the goal of ensuring that the government of Lebanon is able to exert its control over the country, particularly the south,” Mr Gambari said.
“On the contrary, we believe such destruction increases the apparent influence of the most radical elements and their supporters.”
A Lebanese foreign ministry official, Nouhad Mahmoud, told reporters he was frustrated by demands from the United States and others that his government should disarm Hezbollah when it only had been in office for less than a year.
Instead he said there was now ‘hostility towards Israel’ among all Lebanese because of damage from the bombings.
Mr Bolton noted that a UN peacekeeping operation, known as UNIFIL, had been in Lebanon for 28 years.
“You would have to ask what would make a new multilateral force different from or more effective than UNIFIL,” Mr Bolton told reporters at UN headquarters.
He also questioned whether a UN force would be empowered to disarm and demobilise Hezbollah guerrillas, as called for in a Sept 2004 Security Council resolution.
“I think it is very important with the events as unclear and fast-moving as they are, that the Security Council not do anything to unsettle the matter further,” he said.
BIGGER THAN UNIFIL: Mr Blair said an end to violence depended ‘on the deployment of an international force into that area that can stop the bombardment coming over into Israel and therefore gives Israel the reason to stop its attacks on Hezbollah’.
European Union foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels, said member states would consider contributing to a force if one was formed. Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said it would need a robust mandate and 10,000 soldiers — five times bigger than UNIFIL.
US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said Washington wanted the United Nations to look seriously at options for boosting UNIFIL, which has been largely ineffective at stopping cross-border attacks since it was deployed in 1978. —Reuters
