Defence Forces Review 2008

Defence Forces Review 2008
upon the early years of the force in Lebanon, upon the initial events that have led the Irish
army to suffer the highest casualties of any UNIFIL unit, and upon a village which most
people in the world would never find on a map, but which many of you will know intimately,
a village called At-Tiri.
It seems to be the fate of UN peacekeeping forces that there is always one world wrong in
their title. No one in UNPROFOR any longer agrees with the word ‘protection’. Some would
say that UNOSOM should never have included the ‘Somalia’ bit, on the grounds that Somalia
no longer existed as a nation state. And there’s not doubt that the problem with UNIFIL was
that one world ‘interim’. The very first Irish officer to enter Lebanon with French UNIFIL
forces in 1978 ended up under a UN truck with me in the Lebanese Army barracks at Tyre
within twenty-four hours of the UN’s arrival. With bullets flying over our heads, he made the
weary remark which I still remember well: ‘I think we could be here for a long time, Bob’.
And I remember saying: “well hold on a moment it’s meant to be an interim force”, to which,
wisely, he didn’t reply.
From the start, what was wrong with UNIFIL was a mandate which stated that the force
would ‘proceed on the assumption that the parties to the conflict will take all the necessary
steps for compliance with the decision of the Security Council’. Now this was a very lofty
assumption indeed. The insertion of UNIFIL into southern Lebanon, it was believed in New
York, would embarrass the Israelis into leaving the far south of the country. No one in the
initial force deployment believed for a moment that Israel would want to stay. And because
of this extraordinary miscalculation, because the UN should have appreciated that the Israelis
had for two years been arming and funding heir own proxy militia in the south of Lebanon –
Major Saad Haddad’s so-called ‘south-Lebanese’ army (SLA) – UNIFIL headquarters, rather
than being based at the oil terminal at Zahrani, was set up at Naqoura, actually inside the
Israeli-occupied zone.
The Irish, who were originally to have had their battalion headquarters at Bint Jubayl, found
this village now buried deep inside the Israeli zone, and thus repaired to the old crusader town
of Tibnin, high enough on the Golan foothills to afford magnificent view of Irish forward
position, and low enough to be in the line of sight of any Israeli or Haddad tank which chose
to fire at them.
The Irish deployment contained a number of interesting, even quaint, features. In common
with other UNIFIL units, the Irish envisaged the fulfilment of the mandate and thus maintained
observation posts inside the Israeli-occupied zone, cut off from the area of operations. An
inevitably, the occupants of these vulnerable observation posts – at Ras, Blida and Mahabeb –
would become hostages if relations deteriorated between the UN and Israel or its proxy forces.
Furthermore, the Irish found themselves facing a largely undisciplined force of Lebanese
militiamen, paid and commanded by Israel but ostensibly under the orders of a cashiered
Lebanese army major whose psychotic personality could veer sharply between cloying
goodwill and ferocious anger. If Irishbatt were to fall foul of the majors’ temper, they would
have to appeal to Israel which could – if it chose – bring Haddad to heel. Israeli promises
to ‘exercise their influence’ on Haddad became one of the more fascinating psychological
experiments in southern Lebanon at that time. If Haddad stopped harassing Irish troops, the
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