When Peacekeepers Become Targets

The car bomb explosion Sunday that killed six UN peacekeepers from Spain and Columbia in southern Lebanon is bad omen for the possibilities of achieving durable peace and stability in Lebanon. Lebanon is a highly fractured country. In deed, Lebanon is a living example of what could happen to a country and society that have been tied into the nexus of a highly destabilized Mideast. On yet another count, targeting peacekeepers with this kind of violence will negatively affect future UN deployments in parts of the world where their deployment will be critical for saving the vulnerable from annihilation through state-sponsored violence.

It’s both sad and unconscionable that all stakeholders in the Mideast have handled their involvement in the sub-region’s politics and affairs in manners that negate their proclaimed intentions to achieve durable peace between the contending parties in the age-old crisis that bedevils the sub-region. There’s no doubt that each of these stakeholders that include the countless local Mideast-based factions, the US, the EU, France, the Russians, Israel, and several Mideast states understand that the crisis which manifests in different parts of the sub-region derives mostly from the Palestinian-Israel problem in the main. The other underlying issue in the Mideast crisis is the quest by particularly the US to realize the sort of resolution of the Palestinian-Israel problem that will guarantee indefinite upper hand for the US in the affairs of a region that retains the most known quantities of hydro-carbon-based sources of energy.

It is unfortunate that the determination by the US to realize that desire and not the quest for durable peace in the Mideast is actually what drives its Mideast policy, which tends to exacerbate rather than resolve the crisis year after year. Talking specifically about Lebanon, there is no doubt that the perennial instability that reigns in that country can directly be linked to the determination of groups and factions in the region to resist what they see as US grand design to dominate their affairs and resources. The assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri is a concomitant outcome of that perception. Granted that the assassination is unconscionable and that the perpetrators ought to be brought to justice, the determined push by the Bush White House to establish a UN tribunal charged with the responsibility to get that process underway right now is ill-advised. It is ill-advised in the sense that the situation in the entire Mideast is highly charged by current US policy. So much that the tribunal which was recently approved by the Security Council may not even take off at all even as its existence gives anti-US vested interests all over the region another cause to muddy Lebanon’s politics even further.

Mideast factions that perceive the UN as an agency through which the US pushes its Mideast policy are now targeting UN peacekeepers to dislodge UN presence in Lebanon. Their ultimate aim no doubt is to frustrate the possibility of the Hariri tribunal ever taking off. Of what use will the tribunal be if it does not take off at all? Even if it does take off, of what use will it be if it stokes rather than stems instability in Lebanon? Peacekeeping is one of the few tools that the UN can still use to save vulnerable societies from state-sponsored violence in a highly turbulent world.

Ikengacomments supports the vow by Major-General Claudio Graziano, the Spaniard who is also the commander of the 13,000 UNFIL contingent in Lebanon that the peacekeepers will remain, we must add that no party, not even the US should let itself get to the point where its policies will expose UN peacekeepers to the sort of violence which makes it difficult to deploy peacekeepers anywhere in the future. Israel’s war with Hezbollah last summer was ill-timed, and ill-advised. Not only that it was a disaster for Israel, it led to the deployment of UN peacekeepers that are now being targeted in Lebanon by an unknown group or groups with car bombs. Vulnerable societies should not be exposed to the annihilation that will result if the UN is unable to muster peacekeepers because of the wilful actions that fit the ones taken last summer in Lebanon by the Hezbollah and Israel, and the one the US took when it pressed for the Hariri tribunal.


Al-Qaida Cashing in On the Mess in Palestine
Al-Qaida's call in a video posted on the web today through it's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri for Muslims all over the world to rush support and supplies to Hamas in Gaza vindicates our consistent argument that US policy in the Mideast will rather complicate an already complex mess. Even if Hamas comes out to decline al-Zawahri's call as unsolicited, the bad blood has already been transfused. Accusations and counter-accusations will ensue and every stakeholder would discern whatever it likes from the scenario and proceed to act on the basis of that to justify its actions. The crisis will escalate endlessly, more violence will ensure and countless lives will continue to be lost, needlessly. Some interests will be served by all that though, but the cause of peace in Palestine will not be part of those.