MIDEAST: UN Flounders Amid Growing Troubles

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Ferry Biedermann

BEIRUT, Oct 28 2005 (IPS) - The Lebanese Hezbollah movement used an annual anti-Israel rally Friday to send a defiant message to the international community. It was some indication how difficult it is for the UN to deal with the crises in the Middle East.

Amid slogans of “Jerusalem, we are coming” on the group’s annual Jerusalem day parade in the south of Beirut, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah blasted two recent United Nations reports, one that requires Hezbollah to give up arms, and the other pointing the finger at its Syrian allies over the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Addressing the crowds ahead of the unarmed military parade, Nasrallah said there was provocation “from more than one international report to sabotage the relations between the Lebanese themselves, the Lebanese and the Palestinians and Lebanon-Syria ties..”

Hezbollah is effectively adopting Syria’s defiant stance in dealing with the international community. In both cases there seems to be hardly a viable alternative. For Syria to cooperate with the ongoing international inquiry will probably tear apart the leadership. For Hezbollah, the last armed Lebanese faction, to give up arms would probably lead to an end of its political dominance over the country’s large Shia community.

Nasrallah and the Syrians are clearly worried. The Hezbollah leader spent most of his time at this traditionally anti-Israel event blasting the United Nations instead. He accused the rapporteurs, UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen and German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, effectively of being in Israel’s pocket.

The Hezbollah leader’s speech highlights the new and dangerous territory that the United Nations is charting in the Middle East, where it suffered a huge loss of credibility over the Iraq conflict. Nasrallah only attacked the UN verbally, but in Iraq mistrust led to the first massive and devastatingly fatal suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003.

The Middle East is now full of pitfalls for the United Nations. Apart from the longer running Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the situation in Iraq, it is now dealing with two relatively new issues: the situation in Syria and Lebanon, and the nuclear programme of Iran, a key Hezbollah ally.

The first of these new situations seems to be developing into a rather straightforward case of state-supported international terrorism, as far as the assassination of Rafiq Hariri is concerned. What is unprecedented is that it is so well documented by a unique UN investigation.. But that does not seem to be guarantee for effective international response.

The second may be somewhat murkier. It remains hard to obtain ironclad proof of Iran’s goals in pursuing its nuclear programme, and Iran may well be within its rights to do whatever it is doing for the moment.

What does seem beyond question is that the country’s government misled the International Atomic Energy Agency for years, which may itself be a cause for censure.

The recent call by Iran’s new conservative president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad for Israel to be “wiped off the map” has reignited concerns over its nuclear programme. This was admitted even by the foreign minister of Russia. Russia has until now opposed firm international action on Iran.

Disunity in the UN Security Council after a brief interlude following the end of the cold war has had disastrous consequences for the Middle East. The clearest example is Iraq where, whatever the rights and wrongs of the invasion, the problems were almost certainly exacerbated by the United States going it almost alone.

And even on the intractable Israeli-Palestinian question, a more concerted effort by the international community might long ago have alleviated some of its worst features. There could have been a more direct approach on Israeli settlement construction in the occupied territories, and a faster and firmer response to terrorism. But the UN has all but given up on this conflict that has bedeviled the organisation since its inception.

The Security Council was reasonably united on the issue of Lebanon and Syria, first with resolution 1559 demanding the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon, and then demanding the disarming of all militias, meaning Hezbollah. It then followed through with the investigation into the Hariri killing, led by Detlev Mehlis.

But after some initial successes, the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the “plausible cause” that the Mehlis investigation found to suspect involvement of the Syrian and Lebanese security services in the Hariri killing, the way forward looks at the very least problematic.

The U.S. and France, after their divisions over Iraq, have made up in the Security Council and are supporting, together with Britain, a tough resolution demanding Syrian cooperation with the probe, including a hint at future measures if it does not. But Russia is vowing to block any resolution that may lead to sanctions on its one-time ally.

Sanctions or no sanctions, it seems unlikely that Syria will cooperate with the investigation that has mentioned highly placed family members of Syrian President Bashar Assad among its targets.

The international community seems to have very few options for dealing with Syria short of military action that will never be countenanced.

It faces the same dilemma in Lebanon, where nobody dares to confront the issue of Hezbollah’s arms. Even the current government, dominated by a pro-Western, anti-Syrian coalition, has responded to the UN report by saying that Hezbollah’s arms constitute an “internal affair”.

Iran presents a similar problem. Suspicions that the only need for its nuclear programme is military abound but there is no international consensus to act, let alone impose sanctions.

In a region where “soft power” has rarely succeeded in persuading isolated regimes and groups to change their ways, the road of sanctions and certainly military intervention seems closed in the wake of the Iraq fiasco. If there is another way of dealing with the problems of the region, now is the time for the international community to come up with it.