FRANCE, ITALY WANT ANNAN TO CLARIFY
UN FORCE'S RULES IN LEBANON
August 23, 2006 (Bloomberg)
France awaits clarification on UNSCR 1701, which she rewrote to please her Arab clients and with her own contributions in mind.
A French text is never a simple matter. Nor does it have any fixed meaning. Nor any real meaning. It is slippery, a slippery thing to endlessly clarify in the contexts of successes and failures and opportunities. It has no force unless every comma is accounted for, until the smallest jot of the pen has revealed its manifold secrets. All parties must support a unanimous deconstruction.
¶ 1. Calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations.
What does this mean? Well, for Israel it means an immediate cessation of hostilities. But what is the deeper more subtle meaning for Hizballah whose existence is predicated on a more or less constant procession of hostilities? Has France here formulated the existential extinguishment of Hizballah? And since Hizballah can be transliterated in various forms, is every such variation covered or intended here? The French wrote it, but, mes amis, even they do not know.
¶ 7. Affirms that all parties are responsible for ensuring that no action is taken contrary to paragraph 1 that might adversely affect the search for a long-term solution, humanitarian access to civilian populations, including safe passage for humanitarian convoys, or the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons, and calls on all parties to comply with this responsibility and to cooperate with the Security Council.
What does this mean? There are those who might think this is an obvious, if redundant, provision for honoring the purpose and intended outcomes of ¶ 1. Yet consider for a moment in our obviously solid world how the atom hides itself by virtue of its teeny size and the even subtler neutrino more hidden still by virtue of its massless nothingness. Could ¶ 7, by analogy, also have imperceptible and unobvious messages? Could subtle nothingnesses be hidden in the text?
Maybe yes, maybe no. The subtle French cannot be sure what subtleties they have wrought. For example:
¶ 12. Acting in support of a request from the government of Lebanon to deploy an international force to assist it to exercise its authority throughout the territory, authorizes Unifil to take all necessary action in areas of deployment of its forces and as it deems within its capabilities, to ensure that its area of operations is not utilised for hostile activities of any kind, to resist attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties under the mandate of the Security Council, and to protect United Nations personnel, facilities, installations and equipment, ensure the security and freedom of movement of United Nations personnel, humanitarian workers, and, without prejudice to the responsibility of the government of Lebanon, to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence.
You might think this so many words authorizing UNIFIL to use appropriate means, including force, in the dispatch and defense of its mission. [Slight pause.] And you would be wrong.
How does one ensure the "area of operations is not utilised for hostile activities of any kind" if UNIFIL must defend itself in this area? And how "to protect United Nations personnel" if, as in the Côte d'Ivoire, the mandated force is discovered killing the very civilians it is enjoined "to protect [from] threat of physical violence"? Well, you begin to see the Frenchman's perplexities.
Such things must be clear to them before they can even consider how much underwear to pack. Yes, yes, there is the urgency of the fragile cease-fire in Lebanon. OK, but there is more to life than toting a gun for photo-ops. There is the life of the mind. The life of the French mind to be exact.
PFFT (What is this?): The life of the French mind 1 | Rayonnement français 0
The question is plain and simple: Italy wants to go to Lebanon to strengthen the peace process while France wants to go there to stop Israel and please Hezbollah. The two things don't match together.
Well let's see how Italy takes on and "disarms" Hezbollah.
I don't know where a lot of people get the idea that the UN peace keeping force role in Lebanon is to disarm Hezbollah, it's primary mandate is rather to try to prevent the war from breaking out again & remain neutral in this conflict, it's up to the regular Lebanese army to disarm it's militants, Israeli forces were unable to do just that in the first place, besides Unifil is not there to bail Israel out of it's botched war or even be an IDF substitute for that matter.
M. FFF,
Where do we get the idea that UNIFIL is to disarm Hizballah? Well, from the UNSCR 1701 itself, at the nice link we have provided, which you obviously haven't followed.
The resolution begins by recalling all relevant UN resolutions including UNSCR 1559, cited severally, which mandates the disarming of all militias in Lebanon. "Recalling" is a rhetorical formula meaning "consistent with and following from". ¶ 1&7 establish the resolution's purpose and responsibilities, which apply to all parties not simply the contested parties.
¶ 8.b calls for Israel and Lebanon to support a permanent ceasefire based on "security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL as authorised in paragraph 11, deployed in this area".
¶ 8.c specifies: "Full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese cabinet decision of July 27, 2006, there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state."
¶ 11.e specifies: "[UNIFIL will] Assist the Lebanese armed forces in taking steps towards the establishment of the area as referred to in paragraph 8."
That, M. FFF, is where we get the idea. Were you to read the resolution in its entirety and connect its big dots, you too might get this same idea. UN resolutions are not written like headlines, apparently your preferred information-rich source for the facts.
But you are rather notorious at Pave for posting without having your facts straight --or having no facts at all.
DGB
Well nothing like the old-fashioned way.
Rice: Not U.N.'s job to disarm Hezbollah
Updated 8/16/2006 12:21 AM ET
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The 15,000-member U.N. force being created for southern Lebanon will keep the peace and enforce an international arms embargo, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday, but it won't be charged with disarming Hezbollah guerrillas.
INTERVIEW:Excerpts | Full transcript
That "political agreement" will be the responsibility of the Lebanese, Rice said in an interview with USA TODAY. In the past, the Lebanese government has been unwilling or unable to disarm Hezbollah, a movement that is now part of the government itself. A United Nations resolution on the books since September 2004 has called for all Lebanese militias to disarm.
"I don't think there is an expectation that this (U.N.) force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah," Rice said. "I think it's a little bit of a misreading about how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan, first of all, for the disarmament of the militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily."
If Hezbollah resists international demands to disarm, Rice said, "one would have to assume that there will be others who are willing to call Hezbollah what we are willing to call it, which is a terrorist organization."
Hezbollah would find itself increasingly isolated from European and other nations, she said, and the weapons embargo would prevent it from being rearmed by its sponsors in Syria and Iran.
The first announcements of countries volunteering troops for the French-led U.N. force are likely within days, she said. The initial deployment of troops to the region could come within weeks.
The foreign ministers of Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia and France were to be in Beirut today as details of the force were being worked out. The Israeli army withdrew part of its force from southern Lebanon on Tuesday, and the first Lebanese troops are to move across the Litani River on Thursday to take control of the area.
The U.N. troops will have a "quite robust mandate," Rice said. They will be able to defend themselves and to use force "to keep the south clear of arms and armed groups." An early goal, she said, will be reopening ports and Beirut's airport.
Rice, who took the lead in negotiating the Security Council resolution, spoke for a half-hour in her ornate State Department office about the conflict.
She denied that the United States had been eager for Israel to go after Hezbollah. It was "not an issue of, you know, how much damage could the Israelis do," she said. Instead, the Bush administration saw the conflict as an opportunity to create "a fundamentally different situation" along the Israel-Lebanon border.
Critics argued that Hezbollah's political support has soared in the region for its success in standing up to Israel's armed forces. "The resolution calls for Hezbollah to stop all attacks," conservative columnist George Will wrote Tuesday. "The United Nations has twice resolved that Hezbollah should be disarmed but has not willed the means to that end."
Rice said Hezbollah's military strength had been undercut and predicted that any political benefit for the group would "be very short-lived."
"We need to let the dust settle, literally, and then the question will be asked of Hezbollah: Exactly what did they achieve?" she said. "They achieved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese. They achieved the destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and housing and neighborhoods."
She dismissed the idea that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has emerged with new standing. "Nasrallah is going to have to face what has become of those populations in the south and the great devastation that Hezbollah brought on," she said.
and
"It is wrong to say that our soldiers are going to disarm Hezbollah," Massimo D'Alema told L'Espresso in an interview made available to Reuters a day ahead of publication on Friday.
http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_25626.shtml
M. FFF,
You are right insofar as Ms. Rice is wrong.
The language of the relevant UNSCRs could not be plainer. Hizballah is to be disarmed.
Hizballah has plainly said it will not disarm, both before and after passage of UNSCR 1701, so it is a fairy tale that disarmament will just magically happen without some agency.
Lebanon is responsible for this disarmament. UNIFIL is pledged to assist Lebanon in its security responsibilities.
It is plain that neither the UN nor Lebanon nor France nor Italy nor apparently anyone other than Israel wants to take on the responsibility to disarm Hizballah. But faint-heartedness is not what is mandated in the UNSCR 1701.
Disarming Hizballah is.
DGB
