Fear of vacuum if Israel leaves Lebanon

By Jack Redden

TIBNINE, Lebanon (Reuters): Twenty-two years after United Nations troops entered Lebanon, the goal of getting Israeli forces out looks nearly complete but doubts hang over their other mission of restoring Lebanese government authority.

The Beirut government, which would bear responsibility for any attacks across the restored Israeli border, said on Wednesday it could not guarantee security if Israel left without signing peace with Syria and Lebanon.

"It's a very uncertain scenario at the moment," said Commandant Tony Kiely, spokesman for the Irish detachment of the UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon based at Tibnine. "We try to foresee what may happen but we have no way of knowing."

The mandate given when UN forces arrived after Israel's 1978 invasion was to confirm Israel's withdrawal and help the Lebanese government secure the area up to the border. Israel is at last honoring the UN Security Council order to leave, but Beirut has shown no willingness to extend its authority.

A precedent for the Beirut government's policy is its failure to move the Lebanese army into the Jezzine pocket, which Israel's local militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), abandoned a year ago in the face of guerrilla attacks.

President Emile Lahoud, echoing neighboring Syria, said he would not guarantee security to Israel until it addressed demands to return Syria's Golan Heights and repatriate 360,000 Palestinian refugees registered in Lebanon.

If peace talks with Israel to resolve those questions do not resume, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) which has been observing the conflict all these years will face a vacuum along the border.

If UNIFIL takes positions in Israel's old zone while holding its current area, Kiely estimated about 2,000 extra UN troops would be needed. That would bring the force back to the level of some 6,500 it had when first formed.

But UNIFIL would not be moving in to prevent attacks on Israel. Even if their mission included that role -- which it doesn't -- the blue-bereted UN peacekeepers could not accomplish what decades of Israeli bombardment has failed to do.

That leaves great uncertainty over future stability in the area, a region of rocky ridges topped at present by Israeli and SLA strongholds and deep wadis where guerrillas slip by unseen with bombs and mortars.

With Christian, Druze, Muslim Sunni and Muslim Shi'ite villages dotting the landscape, there are fears of a settling of scores after a pullout, especially against members of the SLA. While the SLA includes different religions -- four Druze and two Sunnis have died in the past week -- it is mainly Christian.

Senior officers -- possibly 150 of the 2,500-man SLA -- are expected to gain refuge abroad, but the fate of others is unclear.

However, many residents of south Lebanon accept that membership in the SLA was not always by choice: while some were believers in the alliance with Israel, others found it the only way to earn a living or were coerced into serving.

With the Lebanese army unlikely to impose control and UNIFIL unable to, personal disputes will probably have to be resolved locally. Of far greater importance for the Middle East is control over future fighting against Israel.

While Hizbollah has never said it will stop fighting Israel after a withdrawal, it is an indigenous movement formed to drive Israel from Lebanon. The group is backed by Iran and Syria, which Israel fears might want continued attacks, but the war-weary population of south Lebanon are unlikely to agree.

"Everyone is happy when there is an attack on the Israelis in Lebanon," said a Shi'ite living on the edge of the Israeli zone. "But once the Israelis are on the border, what reason is there to fire?"

If Hizbollah and other Lebanese groups cease their guerrilla role and become normal political parties -- they are already in parliament -- that still leaves other militants.

Lahoud raised the prospect of Palestinian attacks, a reminder that Israel's war in Lebanon began against guerrillas fighting to recover their homeland of Palestine, not Lebanon.

Villagers in the south, where there is little sympathy for Palestinians, say they would not let Palestinians or any other outsiders disrupt the emergence of a peace most have never seen.

But Lebanese warnings of potential attacks reinforce the fears of Western experts that it would not be hard for a power like Syria to provoke border incidents. Israel has already threatened severe reprisals on Lebanon if it is attacked.

For UN troops facing the prospect that Israel's withdrawal will spawn worse violence, a resumption of Israeli-Syrian peace talks is the main hope. "It would appear to be essential," said Kiely.