Defence Forces Review 2008

At-Tiri, or Bosnia Avoided : The Irish in UNIFIL 1978 – 95
Israelis could be thanked for exercising their now famous influence. If Haddad continued to
oppose UN forces, then the Israelis could say that they had failed to restrain the man whose
men were armed, fed and uniformed by Israel itself.
From the start, therefore, the Irish found themselves, in microcosm, in a situation uncannily
similar to that in which UNPROFOR – on a far greater scale – was to sink fourteen years later.
It is not difficult to see the dangers posed to Irishbatt’s early hostage outposts as a forerunner
to the humiliating and numerically far greater UN hostage-taking in Bosnia. It is even easier
to draw a parallel between Haddad and the equally ruthless and unstable Radovan Karadjic
whose promises of safe passage for UN personnel and convoys were regularly broken.
Haddad thought he was ‘commander of Free Lebanon’. Karadjic claimed he was living in a
‘Serb Republic’. And just as UNIFIL had to appeal for Israel’s help in restraining Haddad,
UNPROFOR now had to seek the help of Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic to exercise
‘restraint’ over Karadjic.
The parallels are not exact, but for the UN, they are curiously apposite. In Lebanon in 1978 the
Lebanese government – largely powerless in a capital under shellfire as Christian and Muslim
militias fought each other – repeatedly asked UNIFIL when it was going to fulfil its mandate
by ensuring that the sovereignty of the Beirut authorities was extended down to the Lebanese-
Israeli frontier. In Bosnia, another government, also largely powerless, living in another
divided capital, Sarajevo, asked why UNPROFOR could not protect the Bosnian Muslims
from their aggressors. And just as Haddad claimed that UN soldiers from Christian Ireland
should be able to understand why his Christian Orthodox and Shi’ite militiamen were fighting
Muslim ‘terrorists’ as he put it, so the Serbs several times expressed their incomprehension
as to why European UNPROFOR troops could not identify with the Greek Orthodox Serbs
against what they described as Muslim ‘fundamentalists’.
But let us return to south Lebanon in 1978. If UN headquarters in New York failed to
comprehend the realities on the ground, UNIFIL commanders did at least understand the
terrain. The Norwegians were deliberately located in a mountainous region that look not
unlike their native Norway. The Fijians were put on a coastline similar to the Pacific shores
of their own island. And the Irish were given a series of largely poor villages amid a series of
brown stony hills that appear at dusk remarkably similar to the hills of Mayo or Galway. Irish
troops could therefore, geographically at least, identify with the land in which they would
live, patrol, risk their lives and – far too often in the years to come – die.
Their initial mission was simpler than it was to become in later years. There were only two
parties involved: the Israelis and the SLA on one side, the Palestinians on the other. The UN’s
desire for neutral acronyms sometimes stunned visitors who found it hard to think of Haddad’s
gunmen as a ‘de facto force’ or Palestinian guerrillas as such harmless phenomena as ‘armed
elements’. But Haddad’s men were ill-equipped in those early years; they and the Israelis had
yet to build the huge compounds which they would later construct along the ridgeline to the
south of Irishbatt’s area of operations. Haddad’s men operated what were called ‘controls’ but
Irish troops which followed the initial 43 Infantry Battalion operated foot patrols in the wadis
between At-Tiri and Rashaf, set up night-listening posts in Wadi Seluqi and served under
instructions that permitted them to return fire if they received what were called ’firings close’,
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