Article on UN "impartiality"
LETTER FROM JERUSALEM: IF SOMEBODY TELLS YOU THAT YOU ARE IN A U.N. SAFE HAVEN -- RUN FOR YOUR LIFE
By Arlynn Nellhaus
The United Nation Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL), there supposedly to keep peace along the UN-established border between Israel and Lebanon are a failure.
But that's not new.
UN Interim Forces seem to have chalked up a 100 percent score in that category wherever they are.
Hizbullah, the south-Lebanon based terrorist group abducted three Israeli soldiers, one an Arab, from Israel, on Oct. 7, 2000, under UNIFIL's nose, if not eyes or with, some Israelis claim, cooperation.
Since then, Hizbullah hasn't allowed the Red Cross nor anyone else to check on the kidnapped soldiers' welfare or that of an Israeli businessman they kidnapped in Lebanon, or if, indeed, they remain alive.
Now, it turns out, the UN is in possession of a tape made by an Indian UNIFIL soldier the day after the Hizbullah abductions. It shows Hizbullah gunmen getting back the cars they used in the abduction, which were being hauled away. One car is white like the UN's.
The tape could help Israel figure out what happened and why the soldiers got so close to the border that they were snatched. The suspicion is that Hizbullah, impersonating UNIFIL soldiers, lured the soldiers near them.
Israel knew of the tape's existence a long time ago. The UN hotly denied there was such a thing. Finally the UN admitted that yes, the tape existed.
Even more startling, according to the kidnapped soldiers' parents and others close to the situation, another tape exists.
A UNIFIL soldier filmed the entire kidnapping. The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv quoted a UNIFIL officer saying that Hizbullah gunmen "dragged the soldiers away like logs."
At first the UN said it wouldn't release the now acknowledged tape to Israel, that its "neutrality" would be compomised.
Israel complained bitterly. the UN then said it would release a doctored tape hiding Hizbullah gunmen's faces.
Some in Israel's military say the tape has been altered in additional ways. Israel wants the original, unaltered tapes. It also would like to talk with the UNIFIL soldier who made the tape.
But the UN, denying the request, still claiming neutrality, says it has to treat Israel and Lebanon equally. Lebanon and the Hizbullah asked the UN not to turn over the tape.
By the time we're five, most of us have learned that "neutrality" and "even-handedness" aren't synonyms for "fair." (Many times, even "fair" isn't synonymous with "fair.")
Example: Switzerland claimed neutrality during World War II. Was Switzerland "fair" when, in the name of neutrality, it threw Jewish refugees during the Holocaust years back to the murdering Germans? Was committing such acts even "neutral?"
The United Nation actually once did something good for Israel. On Nov. 29, 1947, the UN voted to partition the territory of the British Palestinian Mandate so Jews could have their own, independent country in one area and Arabs could have their own, independent country in the other.
Thank you, UN. But in those days, the UN hadn't yet come under the yoke of a membership composed of despotic nations parading self-righteousness.
At midnight May 14-15, the Jews declared their area an independent country and called is, Israel. The Arabs rejected the partition and five Arab armies invaded fledgling Israel, which survived.
UNIFIL was established in 1978 to restore "international peace and security and assist the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area."
UNIFIL hasn't come close to doing that. It has left southern Lebanon in terrorist organizations' hands. First Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, now Hizbullah. So what's UNIFIL there for? To give young soldiers from other countries a chance to see the world?
UN peace-keeping forces haven't won points elsewhere.
In 1995, the UN was supposedly protecting the Bosnian Moslem enclave in Srebrenica in Bosnia, which was besieged by Christian Serbian forces. For this purpose, a Dutch battalion had been stationed there for a year.
In exchange for this protection, the Bosnians had to hand in their weapons to the UN force. With the Moslems now unarmed, the Serbs invaded the town.
The Dutch, the UN symbol and force, not only did nothing to protect the Bosnians, but fled the scene. The result was that at least 6,000 men were murdered and most of the women and children expelled.
A video even shows the Dutch commander, Col. Thom Karremans, sharing a toast with the Serbian commander while the slaughter was going on.
Dutch historian Henri Beunders wrote, "…while the Bosnians were standing up to their knees in blood, the Dutch soldiers were standing up to their ankles in beer, being applauded by Crown Prince Willem Alexander, (Prime Minister) Kok and (Minister of Defense) Voorhoeve."
The Dutch soldiers included racists who weren't shy about giving the Nazi salute.
When the scandal broke in the Netherlands the public cried out against the Dutch force's behavior. But the heaviest punishment their leaders received was rebuke. The UN, however, didn't even do that much. The UN did nothing.
The story apparently died in the Netherlands. You never heard an international protest.
But it was this event that brought President Bill Clinton and NATO to intervene with force against the Serbs and stop the killing.
UN forces had other failures. In another example of the UN's "neutrality," described by Prof. Shlomo Avineri of Hebrew University, a UN van under UN protection traveled from downtown Sarajevo to the city's airport carrying a Bosnian Moslem deputy prime minister.
Armed Serbs grabbed the man from the UN armored vehicle and murdered him while the French UN force stood by, preserving its "neutrality."
Another example from Avineri is Rwanda. When the Hutu massacres of the Tutsi minority started, the small UN force in Rwanda was recalled under orders of Kofi Annan, then responsible for UN peacekeeping operations. He later apologized for this act, which made the Hutu genocide possible.
And all Israel remembers how, in May 1967, after Egypt's President Gamal Nasser committed the opening war act by closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships, he asked the UN peacekeeping forces in the Sinai – stationed there to keep the Israelis and Egyptians apart – to leave.
And they did! Nasser's intentions were clear. And still the UN forces left, abandoning their assignment and thus clearing the path for Egypt to roll its tanks across the Sinai to attack Israel.
That was the Six-Day War, in which Israel, uncooperatively, refused to die and the result was that it captured Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Sinai, plus the Golan Heights.
UNIFIL aroused Israeli anger long before the Hizbullah kidnappings, for Hizbullah uses UNIFIL as a shield. It launches its artillery attacks into Israel near UNIFIL posts, which UNIFIL apparently tolerates. When Israel fires back, the UN complains.
This is akin to Palestinians shooting at Israelis from behind women and children and then making political hay out of photos of the human shields hurt in crossfire.
So here we are, with the UN claiming morality, claiming neutrality, saying it has to treat Israel and Lebanon equally, but, in fact, aiding criminals.
Israel's Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer wrote to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asking why Israel and Lebanon are being treated equally when it was Lebanese who crossed into Israel to commit their act.
He asked how the UN can claim to being even-handed between Israel and Lebanon when "our citizens, not theirs, were kidnapped and it is our soldiers who have been held for the last nine months without anyone knowing their fate."
As Philip Gourevitch, author of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families told Harry Kreisler at the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, one lesson of failures of the UN during the Rwandan massacres is clear:
"If somebody says, you're a lucky man, you're in a UN safe haven, [then] you are about to get killed. It's the most terrifying thing anybody could tell you. If somebody tells you you're in a UN safe haven, run for your life! That's a terrible lesson. So the promise seems to me to be terrible . . . we might be better off saying honestly you'd better fend for yourselves, defend yourselves if you must."
Arlynn Nellhaus is a former Denver Post reporter now based in Jerusalem, and the author of Into the Heart of Jerusalem, and a freqent contributor to The Idler.
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