Defence Forces Review 2008

At-Tiri, or Bosnia Avoided : The Irish in UNIFIL 1978 – 95
At-Tiri, or Bosnia Avoided:
The Irish in UNIFIL 1978 – 95
Robert Fisk
By my calculation, it is just over 1,280 miles from Tibnin to Sarajevo. In the geopolitical
world of the United Nations, it must seem further, but the mileage interests me because, as a
journalist based in Beirut, I am repeatedly having to cross and recross the old Ottoman Empire,
from Lebanon to Bosnia and back, from the centre of the Islamic Arab lands to the very edge
of the Muslim world in Europe, from international involvement to international despair. It is
an odd journey. One week I will be walking through the street of the village of Shaqra with
an Irish army commandant, noting the mortar fragments in the sides of houses, the control
which the tiny UN interim force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) maintains over its area of operations in
southern Lebanon, and then, a few days later, I will be watching the French Foreign Legion
of the Ukrainian Army humiliated in the Bosnian capital, their vehicle searched or stolen by
Serb gunmen, their food rations confiscated, their positions mercilessly shelled.
No one can claim that UNIFIL has fulfilled its mandate. Indeed its mandate has subtly changed
over the years, an unpublished transformation to take account of its own failure. Unlike the
United Nations protection force in the Balkans (UNPROFOR), UNIFIL was formed in the
days of the cold war, in another era, at a time when the United States still supported UN
peacekeeping as a means of avoiding overseas military commitments by its own forces which
would risk a super-power confrontation.
UNPROFOR was put together when the Americans no longer feared such a war, when the
UN – far from being a means to avoid American casualties – had come to be regarded as an
expensive and impotent institution whose very weakness might suck American forces into a
conflict in which it has no national interest. UNPROFOR then slid into a massive civil and
ethnic conflict.
It is also true that UNIFIL was placed in southern Lebanon to prevent war between two parties
– the Israelis and Palestinians and by extension, the Syrian military forces inside Lebanon.
UNIFIL arrived in Lebanon in March 1978 as a direct result of an Israeli invasion. This in
turn had been set off by a Palestinian attack on Israel which had killed more than thirty Israeli
civilians, the latest in a lamentable saga of revenge and retaliation between Palestinians and
Israelis in both directions across the Lebanese border. The Israeli invasion was a failure; the
Palestinians withdrew into the Tyre pocket and north of the Litani River.
Nevertheless, there are parallels to be drawn and, I suspect, operational lessons to be gained
from comparing UNIFIL – and specifically the Irish battalion of UNIFIL – with the misfortunes
and, some would say, the disgrace of UNPROFOR. For this reason my focus will largely be
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