Defence Forces Review 2008

At-Tiri, or Bosnia Avoided : The Irish in UNIFIL 1978 – 95
disciplined and professional army, and we will behave like one’. Nevertheless, in the days
that followed the murders of Smallhorne and Barrett, Irish soldiers could be seen wearing
their blue UN berets but with their black regular army berets clearly visible hanging from
their pockets. The meaning was clear, harassed once more and the Irish might exchange their
UN badges for the berets of their national army and fight as Irish rather than UN troops in a
foreign land.
UNIFIL officially deplored the murders of Smallhorne and Barrett, and UN troop-contributing
nations subsequently held a summit in Dublin which warned, on 2 May, that without adequate
international protection, UNIFIL might be withdrawn. In the following weeks, Irish troops
were forbidden from entering the Israeli occupation zone. They could only enter and leave
force headquarters at Naqoura by helicopter. One Irish officer who found himself in Jerusalem
had to return to Tibnin by road through Damascus and Beirut. The Irish had to wait many
more months, however before they were to learn of UNIFIL’s longterm response to the deaths
of Barrett and Smallhorne. For when the UN official history of the events of April 1980 was
published, the events of At-Tiri were heavily censored, and all mention of the murders of
Smallhorne and Barrett was expunged from the record.
The relevant volumes, written by Lieutenant Colonel J. B. Ou-Prempeh of the Ghanaian Army,
Major S.R.S. Wirkkula of Finland and Sergeant C.J.E.D. Delawrence of Ghana, delete all
mention of the Irish retaking of At-Tiri of 12 April 1980. They make no reference to the death
of at least two of Haddad’s men in that action, thus removing the reasons for the killing of
Barrett and Smallhorne. Even more disreputable however, was the decision of the UN authors
to censor out the very murders of the two Irish soldiers. Indeed the UNIFIL volume records
the destruction of four UNIFIL Italian helicopters at Naqoura, and actually states that ‘the
most serious consequence of shelling and snipping (sic) on Saturday 12 April was the loss of
medevac capacity’. On another page of their report, the UNIFIL officers record the assault on
the Naqoura headquarters, in which the helicopters were burned, as ‘the most inhuman attack
on a UNIFIL unit since the establishment of the force’. If this resume is to be believed, then the
loss of four helicopters mattered more to the UN than the murder of two Irish soldiers, whose
names and terrible end have simply disappeared from the text. Indeed, it may be noteworthy
that the annex which lists the deaths of UNIFIL troops – and from which Smallhorne and
Barrett could scarcely be censored out yet again – initially records the cause of their deaths as
‘murder’. In later volumes, however, this has been changed ‘killed in action’.
It was UNIFIL’s sense of reality that was killed off in this extraordinary history, a symbol of
the dichotomy which has plagued and diminished UNPROFOR and which remains unresolved
in so many UN operations to this day; the competing demands of troops on the ground whose
lives are in danger, and the political element in the UN’s command which is almost always
going to regard military action, whatever its causes or purpose, as an intrinsic failure of
peacekeeping. Thus, when the UN Secretary General addressed the Security Council on 17
June 1980, he emphasised UNIFIL’s ‘restraint’ rather than its determination, its need for
protection rather than its need for defensive action.Kurt Waldheim – who, of course, knew
a little about guerrilla warfare himself, though we didn’t know it at the time – believed that
UNIFIL provided ‘a vital mechanism for conflict control’ and referred to the UNIFIL troops
who had been killed as having ‘given their lives in the cause of peace’.
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