The
Army Is Back, But Don't Expect
It To Disarm Hizbollah
By Robert Fisk
18 August 2006
The
Independent
Now
you see them, now you don't. Hizbollah weapons? None to be seen. And
none to be collected by the Lebanese army. For when this august body
of men crossed the Litani river yesterday, their officers made it perfectly
clear that it would not be the army's job to disarm the Hizbollah. Nor
was anyone in Lebanon surprised. After all, most of the Lebanese troops
here are Shias - like the Hizbollah - and in many cases, the soldiers
who crossed the Litani are not only from the same southern villages
but are related to the guerrillas whom they are supposed to disarm.
In other words, a typical Lebanese compromise. So whither UN Security
Council Resolution 1701?
True, the French are on their
way - or are supposed to be. It is the French - whose own General Alain
Pellegrini already commands the small UN force here - who will run the
new international army in Lebanon. But are they supposed to disarm Hizbollah?
Or fight them? Or just sit in southern Lebanon as a buffer force to
protect Israel? The French are still demanding - very wisely - a clear
mandate for their role here. But Lebanon does not provide clear mandates
for anyone, least of all the French.
The Lebanese gave their soldiers
the traditional welcome of rice and rose water when they drove over
their newly built military bridges on the Litani. But then, some of
the same villagers once gave the same traditional welcome to the Israelis
in 1982 - and to Hizbollah after that. But the Lebanese army represented
peace in our time - at least for a while - to those who are still digging
the corpses of their dead families out of the hill villages of southern
Lebanon.
It looked good on television,
all those clapped-out Warsaw Pact T-54 tanks and elderly Panhard personnel
carriers on flatbed trucks, supposedly returning to the far south for
the first time in 30 years. Of course, it wasn't true. Though not deployed
on the border, thousands of Lebanese soldiers have been stationed in
southern towns since the civil war, dutifully turning a blind eye to
Hizbollah's activities, providing none of their fighters were rude enough
to drive a truck-load of missiles through their checkpoints.
Among those Lebanese soldiers
most familiar with the south were members of the 1,000-strong garrison
at the southern Christian town of Marjayoun, who fled after Israel's
small ground incursion a week ago. And herein, as they say, lies a tale.
For their commander, the Interior Ministry Brigadier General Adnan Daoud,
has just been arrested for treason after Israeli television showed him
taking tea with an Israeli officer in the Marjayoun barracks. Even worse,
Hizbollah's television station Al-Manar - which stayed resolutely on
air throughout this latest war despite Israel's best attempts to bomb
it out of existence - picked up the Israeli tape and rebroadcast it
across Lebanon.
Prior to his arrest, General
Daoud was even rash enough to unburden his thoughts to Lauren Frayer,
an enterprising reporter for the Associated Press who arrived in Marjayoun
in time to record the general's last words before his arrest. The Israelis,
he said, "came peacefully up to our gate, asking to speak with
me by name". An Israeli officer who introduced himself as Col Ashaya
chatted to Daoud about future Israeli-Lebanese military relations.
"For four hours, I took
him on a tour of our base." the general said of "Ashaya".
"He was probably on an intelligence mission and wanted to see if
we had any Hizballah in here." But an hour after the supposedly
friendly Israeli left, Israeli tanks blasted their way with shells through
the gates of the Lebanese garrison. The Lebanese soldiers did not fire
back. Instead, they fled Marjayoun - only to find that their long convoy,
which included dozens of civilian cars, was attacked by Israeli pilots
who killed seven civilians, including the wife of the mayor, who was
decapitated by a missile.
In Beirut, all this was forgotten
as the Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, repeated that there would be no
more "states within a state" and that the Hizbollah would
leave the area south of the Litani. This statement came under the category
of "a likely story". Not only do most of the Hizbollah live
in villages south of the Litani but several of their officers made it
clear that they had told the Lebanese army not to search for weapons.
So much for the disarmament of the Hizbollah south of the Litani river.
And so much for President Bush's "war on terror" which the
Israelis claim to be fighting on America's behalf.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited