Much blame has been lodged against UNIFIL by
the Israeli right government claiming they could have prevented violations by Hezbollah and gone after weapons etc. etc. But disingenuous claims by the Israeli government and some of their supporters around the world are nothing new. What would be new is if our modern day media actively checked these claims. But like most things anymore it won't happen. So here are some things from yesteryear about UNIFIL.
This is a quote of the French Defense Minister from the very first of Resolution 1701 and UNIFIL from an article in the "Globe and Mail" dated 8/19/06.
"At the same time, the French Defence Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, warned of a potential "catastrophe" if more troops were sent into a treacherous post-conflict area like Lebanon without the authority to take offensive action or fight if necessary.
"I remember the unhappy experiences of other operations where UN forces had neither a sufficiently precise mission nor the means to act," Mrs. Alliot-Marie said. "You cannot send out men and tell them that they should watch what's happening but that they have no right to defend themselves or fire."
She is referencing experiences like Bosnia etc. as called out by Guillaume Parmentier, the director of the France Centre on the United States at the French Institute for Foreign Relations : "That spells complete disaster, like what happened at Srebrenica" he added, referring to the town that was in a zone monitored by UN peacekeepers where thousands of Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered."
The article also references this fiasco: "For the French and others, the flaws of a weak UN mission were underlined when Serb fighters took dozens of UN soldiers hostage, including French peacekeepers, while the multinational peacekeepers were constrained by rules that allowed them only to fire only in self-defence."
So the supposed lessons learned? No not at all because the rules of engagement and responsibilities of UNIFIL were set to be more of the same but with only the "tweak" of saying they were to "support" the Lebanese Armed Forces in implementing Resolution 1701. That support was required to fall within their rules of engagement which only allowed defensive use of force. As the French pointed out you can't send in troops to conduct confiscation etc. in a scenario where they are told they can only observe and defend themselves if attacked first. In fact and unfortunately that sort of rules of engagement for peacekeeping forces is not an unusual scenario. As the article notes the failures are many.
So when all of the parties, including the sides battling each other, who created UNIFIL and 1701 performed their Dr. Frankenstein impression and gave this "thing" life they did so while knowing, based on history, how prone to failure and ineffectiveness that created entity would be. It is ludicrous later on for one party or another to claim a power for the entity to act when they were there as one of the creators and know that they took part in making that very power off limits.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/past-experience-gives-french-qualms-about-lebanon-mission/article967645/
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