Time for UN peacekeepers in Lebanon?

The Arab foreign ministers, in their most recent meeting, have described the Middle East Road Map drawn up by the Quartet -- US, EU, Russia and the UN -- as dead. The Non-Aligned Movement has accused Israel of undermining the peace process, and called for an international force to be deployed in the area.

The G-8 meeting held at St. Petersburg, where President Bush sounded a discordant note, as opposed to Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin, resolved to send an international stabilization force into Lebanon to contain the relentless Israeli destruction of Lebanese and Palestinian infrastructures and rising civilian casualties.

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The Summit blamed extremists forces of trying "to destabilize the region...to plunge the Middle East into chaos and provoke a wider conflict." The leaders called on Israel to end military operations, for early withdrawal of Israeli forces form Gaza, and release of Palestinian Ministers and Parliamentarians to which Israel as yet is to pay any heed.

Kofi Anan who called for an immediate cease fire, an idea which reportedly did not appeal to President Bush, flew to Brussels for talks with European Union's Javier Solana, and is fleshing out plans for a UN Stabilization Force which, if approved by the Security Council, would go to the troubled area in greater number than UNFIL set up in 1978 to oversee the volatile Israel-Lebanon border.

Domestically, if Israel can deal a death-blow to Hezbollah, then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can dictate a de-facto border in the occupied area. On the other hand, the conflict now has become between Hamas and Hezbollah, both having increased their popularity among their people and Israel.. A lot, therefore, would depend on the international peacekeepers ability to contain the explosive situation.

The term peacekeeping was referred to by Dag Hammarskjold as belonging to "chapter five and a half" of the UN Charter because chapter six provided for mediation and fact finding while chapter seven provided for more forceful measures such as embargoes and military intervention. UN peacekeeping has been described as non-aggressive use of military force to help nations in conflict to reach a settlement.

Paradoxically, though the conflict zones needing peacekeeping operations by the UN are generally located in the South, the underdeveloped regions of the world, who become victims of civil wars and disasters either man-made or natural, and those who organize the interventions are mainly from the industrial North, the countries from the South were often the ones opposing these operations.

The recommendations of the Brahimi Report, produced by the UN panel set up after UN inaction resulting in massacre at Srebenica and genocide at Rwanda, inter alia, of enhanced UN capacities for peacekeeping was seen by some of the Southern governments as a Trojan horse for rampant intervention by the North. Even though the Brahimi Report was broadly welcomed by the Millennium Summit and endorsed by the UNSC Summit (2000), its critics saw the attention given to peacekeeping as distraction from priority that should have been given to social and economic issues.

Besides, the report's suggestion that stronger and more centralized analytical capacity was needed for conflict prevention and management as being potentially intrusive in their domestic affairs, worried some Southern governments. This Southern wariness can be explained by their apprehension of greater chances of unanimity among P-5 due to disappearance of Cold War bipolarity; greater awareness of G-8 countries of global interdependence and that democracy deficit in any part of the world if tolerated could fuel conflicts adversely affecting their interests; and increasing possibility of the West by-passing the UN if necessary (as in Kosovo and Iraq).

Added to these newly emerging factors, was the fact that over several decades UN declarations on strengthening humanitarian assistance had stressed the principle of state sovereignty and the need for consent of the state requiring humanitarian assistance.

Admittedly, since the Cold War, the inadequacy of peacekeeping force as an effective instrument has been felt in places where civil war is still in progress, where consent for the presence of the peacekeepers is fragile and they are accused of being partisan. In such cases, the Grotian doctrine, named after Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, justifying forcible intervention to protect people from genocide has been advanced. But such intervention need not be without UN blessings.

As UN Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor points out, peacekeeping remains exactly the kind of mission where using the UN has advantages because: (a) UN peacekeeping allows burden sharing, (b) UN peacekeeping has brought peace and democracy to Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and East Timor, and eased US burden in Haiti and Afghanistan, (c) UN peacekeeping is highly cost effective as the UN spends less per year on peacekeeping than the New York fire and police departments.

Susan Rice, a senior State Department official in the Clinton administration, however, contends that notable, even dangerous weakness remain in the UN's capacity to mount and sustain effective peace operation. In particular, according to Susan Rice, UN continues to fall short in the realm of rapid response to crises -- a weakness which can be overcome through the adoption of early warning and preventive response to conflict; rapid deployment of trained, equipped and capable forces, civilian police and civilians to respond to swiftly unfolding crises; and political will of the UNSC members to respond effectively to crises and to finance peace operations.

Susan Rice and Shashi Tharoor appear to be on the same wave-length in their assessment that while regional organizations/individual states may try to mitigate crisis and stabilize conflict zones (Australia in East Timor, Britain in Sierra Leone, and France in Cote D'ivoire) there is no substitute in the long term for the UN.

Madeline Albright feels that traditional UN peacekeepers lack the mandate and the might to succeed where combatants oppose international presence. She finds one possible solution in the UNSC authorizing an appropriate major power to organize a coalition and enforce the world's collective will e.g. US led intervention in Haiti, Australian rescue in East Timor, and British action in Sierra Leone. Albright recommends an international system of crisis management that is pragmatic, episodic and incremental necessary to deter people with guns by people with more and bigger guns. While such operations may yield results one has to be vigilant that P-5 does not hijack the global desire for peace to serve their own political interests.

Despite Francis Fukuyama's incorrigible optimism that mankind's ideological evolution and final form of human government has been achieved and end of history has been reached, it is difficult to ignore Samuel Huntington's hypothesis "that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or economic. The great division among human kind and dominating source of conflict will be cultural."

This has similarity with the hypothesis of historian Bernard Lewis about clash of civilizations between Islamic and Western civilizations partly because, as Lewis writes, "Islam was never prepared, either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs and practiced other forms of worship." One cannot but wonder whether the Israeli policy of wanton aggrandizement acquiesced by the developed world is not a convoluted expression of civilizational war under the rubric of terrorism in the Middle East.

Many people have wondered over the years about the reasons behind Zionist hold on American politics. Former Irish Prime Minister John Burton urged the Europeans in particular to recognize the influence of the evangelical Christianity on US public opinion and particularly on the Republican party because of its belief that the Second Coming can only occur when all Jewish people have been converted to Christianity and therefore the Evangelicals have special religious interest in the preservation of the state of Israel.

To Colin Powell, who was then a key player in the Middle East crisis, Israeli reservations about the Quartet-produced road map was less important than the security for Israel as the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland remained a crucial issue for any settlement of the Palestinian problem. It is equally important if the US is to play any meaningful role in the resolution of the crisis then there has to be an unambiguous US position of not acquiescing on the undeclared status of Israel as a nuclear power despite Israel's repeated refusal to sign Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMTC) because in Israeli eyes it would be suicidal.

This "nuclear ambiguity" according to McGeorge Bundy (of Kennedy era) and William Crow Jr (former head of CIA) is a significant impediment to arms control and non-proliferation because no Israeli government can make a convincing case that no state needs to fear a nuclear Israel unless the Jewish state is threatened with extinction.

In the final analysis, Israeli aberrant behaviour, not fully reflected in the Middle East statement of the St. Petersburg Summit, has to be reined in. US Jewish lobby and November Congressional elections, however important to President Bush they may be for the moment, are of far less importance from historical perspective when history will judge that one country was allowed to detain ministers of another country and diminish the sovereign authority of a country (recognized by UNSCR 1559 in the case of Lebanon) by brute force.

It cannot be acceptable that millions of people should live in despair just because of one country, Israel (who does not need any body's protective umbrella), that has to be treated as the West's sentinel in the East. Besides, continuing US neglect of a just solution of the Palestinian problem will in all probability make President Bush's aim to spread democracy throughout Greater Middle East a distant dream. Sooner the Middle East crisis is resolved, the better it will be for the international community.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.