BEIRUT: As world powers on Wednesday weighed a peacekeeping force for conflict-hit Lebanon, recent history shows that the region has often proved a graveyard or a quagmire for foreign troops.
Even before four UN peacekeepers were killed in an Israeli air-raid overnight, the international missions in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s were all marked by casualties or beset by problems.
The oldest deployment, and one that is still running, is the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO).
Based in Jerusalem it comprises troops from more than 20 nations, and was deployed in 1948 to monitor a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians that brought their war of the time to a halt.
Other UN contingents have been drawn together in response to the hostilities that have erupted and evolved in the region, including the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which emerged in 1978.
Deployed to ensure that Israeli troops had withdrawn from Lebanon after confronting the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), UNIFIL has lost some 300 peacekeepers, including four on Tuesday, according to Michael Moran, at the US Council on Foreign Relations.
The force’s mandate, renewed several times in its almost 30-year deployment, is to “restore international peace and security” and “assist the government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area.”
While the terms of a new “stabilisation force” which were being considered in Rome on Wednesday are unclear, these two aims have been frequently repeated by diplomats involved in the talks.
As world powers weigh the use of European Union or Nato troops, whose rules of engagement are generally far more robust, it is clear that US forces are unlikely to be involved.
Besides being tied up in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, US forces also fell foul of violence in Beirut in 1983.
The year before, the area was a base for PLO leader Yasser Arafat and saw fighting between Muslim and Druze militias.
In one of the most notorious incidents, Israel’s proxy South Lebanon Army massacred some 800 people.
Israel moved in again, and after a year of hostilities finally withdrew when a peace agreement was reached.
The international community, in the form of US, French and Italian troops, moved in again to police it.
But the Shia group Hezbollah, which had sprung up during Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, sparked chaos with a series of attacks, first killing 63 people with a car bomb at the US embassy in Beirut.
Its most daring attack was six months later when one of its fighters drove an explosive-laden truck into the headquarters of US and French forces and smashed against the building.
The devastation left 300 US troops dead. The attack triggered withdrawal of US troops from Lebanon.
And as Lebanon descended into chaos, Israel moved in to erect a buffer zone some 30 kilometres wide on its northern border.
Israel’s costly presence ended with a humiliating unilateral withdrawal in 2000 because of regular Hezbollah attacks.—AFP