NAQURA (Lebanon): The fluttering whoosh of a Hezbollah rocket was instantly followed by the thud and boom of Israeli artillery. At the UN peacekeepers’ headquarters in Lebanon, just 300 meters from the falling shells, a siren screamed and a loudspeaker crackled to life.
“All personnel proceed to shelters immediately.”
In a stifling bunker with a lone light bulb dangling from the low-slung arched ceiling, the force’s commander, General Alain Pellegrini, waited out the bombardment, powerless to intervene even as the peace he is charged to keep crumbled around him.
“We are not built for such a situation,” said the stout French general at the helm of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
The 2,000-strong peacekeeping force has been in south Lebanon for 28 years and world leaders are now calling for a stronger UN force to restore calm to the war-shattered country.
“What we agreed upon is there should be an international force under UN mandate that will have a strong and robust capability to help bring about peace and help humanitarian efforts,” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after a 15-nation conference in Rome on Wednesday.
Frustrated UN officers here, inside the concertina wire of their seafront headquarters, just two kilometres from the Israeli border, provide a series of hard-learned lessons for the planners of any future force.
Soldiers here are angry, frustrated, and regularly caught in the crossfire.
They are tolerated by Hezbollah, which views them as meddling in their affairs, scorned by Israel, which accuses them of being in cahoots with the Shia guerrillas, and loathed by the local population, who say the UN has ignored their plight.
“They don’t do a thing,” said Nabil Haj, 17, who fled the village of Romaysh, near the Israeli border on Thursday night. “The world is dying and they’re sitting back and watching.”
These are professional soldiers with close hair cuts, abrupt manners, and steely eyes.
They hail from China, France, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Ukraine but are all powerless as the situation runs out of control.
Even as Hezbollah fighters launch rockets from the shade of a UN watchtower and Israel responds with artillery shells and air strikes that have repeatedly hit UNIFIL bases, they can only cower and pray. Their UN mandate forbids them to return fire unless directly attacked.
Since Israel began its offensive 17 days ago, two artillery shells have already landed in the Naqura headquarters here.
On Tuesday, one of their positions in the border town of Khiam was strafed with Israeli artillery before a bunker-busting bomb levelled the installation, killing four of their fellow soldiers.
“It happens every day, but not always with the same consequences,” said Colonel Jacques Coleville, the UN liaison officer who says he personally warned the Israelis that they were shelling the UN base before the massive laser-guided bomb made it a moot point.
“We can’t do anything. Just talk,” Coleville added.
Established in 1978 after Israel invaded south Lebanon in a bid to drive out Palestinian guerrillas, UNIFIL was meant to oversee Israel’s withdrawal, help the Lebanese government reassert control, and “restore peace and security.”
Prior to the latest crisis, 257 members of UNIFIL have been killed during its deployment. Its mandate, renewed every six months, next expires on July 31.
Israel has long been frustrated with the UN force, which it accuses of not doing enough to disarm Hezbollah and failing to keep the Israeli border secure.
“How would I disarm them?” asked Coleville. “With my telephone?”
“What is frustrating is having no means to control what either side does,” he said. “We talk to one side. We talk to the other side and then we wait for them to agree. We cannot negotiate because we have nothing to propose, nothing to give.”
A new international force, UN officials say, must be a peacemaking, not merely a peacekeeping, force.
“You can maintain peace or you can establish peace, which is the difference between peacemaking and peacekeeping,” said Coleville. “To establish peace you must be able to use force.”
Any future effective peacekeeping force, said Pellegrini, “needs to be really beefed, armed with heavy weapons and strong rules of engagement.”
Ryszard Morczynski, UNFIL’s Polish political affairs officer, warned that any force, whether they are Israeli, Lebanese, or multinational, will have a difficult time forcing the Shiite militia to disarm.—AFP