Defence Forces Review 2008

At-Tiri, or Bosnia Avoided : The Irish in UNIFIL 1978 – 95
With Israeli withdrawal from much of southern Lebanon, the Irish battalion found itself on a
more complicated mission. Whereas it had, prior to the invasion, tried to prevent Palestinian
infiltrators passing north and south through the area of operations, it was now faced with the
prospect of living with Hizballah men who operated from their home villages within the Irish
battalion area. The men with the guns were no longer migrants from the north but the very men
whose property and families were supposed to be under the Irish battalions protection. The
very mandate had to be questioned, If the Irish had, in the words of the mandate, to ‘ensure
that the area of operations is not utilised for hostile activities of any kind’, how could this be
squared with the recognition by the Lebanese government – on whose invitation UNIFIL is in
southern Lebanon – of the right of every Lebanese to resist occupation
In accepting the latter right – as UNIFIL does on the ground, if not in New York – it can do
little when the Israelis bombard the UN area of operations, as they do so brutally in July 1993
killing at least 120 civilians in the whole of southern Lebanon, nineteen of them in the Irish
battalion area alone. One of the worse atrocities – an Israeli helicopter attack on a Mercedes
containing women and children – took place only metres from the Tibnin bridge. The Irish,
like the Finnish battalion to the east attempted to put vehicles into villages under fire as a
deterrent. They rescued the ‘mukhtar’ of Tibnin from his home. They helped save countless
lives by allowing Lebanese civilians into their shelters and bunkers. But many UN officers
believe today that much more could have been done to stop the slaughter within the UNIFIL
area of operations. There should have been more UN vehicles on the roads. General Trond
Furuhovde should have made UNIFIL far more visible and made his force far more mobile.
The bombardment of July 1993 was not a happy week for UNIFIL, and the results of that
week have still not been fully analysed.
Does the UN mission in Lebanon – or does the UN as a whole – need to be taken to pieces,
deconstructed and rebuilt with a new system, a new set of values I cannot help reflecting how
UN units in southern Lebanon today – and this includes the Irish battalion – are now talking of
new tactics and operating procedures to take account of the new realities on the ground. What
is the point of maintaining checkpoints when armed men cannot be denied passage on the
ground that they have the right to resist the occupying power What is the point in maintaining
a controlled area of operations if the entire area can be bombarded by Israel at will
There is talk now of an abandonment of checkpoints and a retreat to the village by UNIFIL,
maintaining high ground only for observation. At the risk of offending military minds, I
would have to say that my own experience of Lebanon and Bosnia suggests this is wrong.
Checkpoints are never abandoned in Lebanon, they change hands. An abandoned Irish UN
checkpoint will become a Hizballah checkpoint or an Amal checkpoint, or a checkpoint fought
over between Hizballah and Amal, but a checkpoint nonetheless through which UNIFIL will
itself have to negotiate passage. And a retreat to the villages will carry its own message to
Israel and the SLA which is now led by General Antoine Lahd. The abandoned checkpoints
will allow the Israelis to claim that UNIFIL no longer controls the land between the villages,
and this land will then become a free-fire zone. The villages themselves will be seen by their
occupants as safe-havens’, every bit as illusory and dangerous as the ‘safe havens’ that the UN
proclaimed so deceitfully in Bosnia.
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