Unarmed in the Crossfire

Trapped between a sea full of Israeli gunships and hills teeming with Hezbollah guerrillas, U.N. troops hunkered down in bomb shelters Thursday while somebody else’s war raged outside.

Refugees working their way north cursed them for failing to provide enough medicine, shelter or food. Supplies at the United Nations base were running low; they hadn’t had bread in five days.

Israeli gunboats lobbed shells into the hills that rise behind the base. And Hezbollah’s fighters were at it again, shooting off rockets into Israel from a patch of turf a few football fields from the front gate.

“Southern Lebanon,” one of the peacekeepers, Ryszard Morczynski, began. He paused. “If you flatten the country and make it a parking lot, then you will disarm Hezbollah.”

Sent years ago to monitor a peace that never came to pass, the U.N. force here today is embittered and besieged, imprisoned without weapons in its base as rockets and missiles cross paths overhead.

The deaths of four of their colleagues Tuesday in an Israeli airstrike on another United Nations post only deepened the troops’ collective insecurity.

Their toothless, and ultimately futile, mission to oversee the pacification of southern Lebanon offers a telling glimpse of the fate that could await Israel in its efforts to crush Hezbollah -- and a cautionary tale for a U.S.-backed notion that international troops might fare better than the Israelis against the Shiite Muslim guerrillas.

The U.N. headquarters here, a barbed-wire-encircled sprawl that rambles downhill toward the Mediterranean Sea, is wedged in a Hezbollah stronghold. The face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini frowns down on the road; a looming model of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock is impaled on a pole just outside the base walls. The mosque, a much-invoked symbol of the Muslim-Jewish struggle for Jerusalem, is rendered here in yellow, the color of Hezbollah.

Hassan Siklawi was edgy and nervous as he drove among the offices and bunkers of the base, hunched over the steering wheel of a U.N. jeep.

He pulled hungrily on Winstons and tugged anxiously at the skin of his face.

“See, we’re working, man. Everybody’s blaming us,” he said, waving a hand in the direction of a convoy of aid trucks that rumbled toward the base gate. “We got two shells in here. It’s not easy, my friend.”

Being trapped literally and figuratively between the two sides has put the U.N. troops on edge. Nobody here ventures through the gates to the outside world without phoning the Israeli army with a painstaking description of the vehicles and their routes -- and a plea to be spared an attack.

Israel often takes hours to approve even routine trips, officials here said ruefully.

Hezbollah guerrillas also endanger U.N. troops by systematically setting up rocket launches alongside U.N. bases, either in the hope that Israel will think twice before firing back, or with the cynical aim of generating bad publicity for Israel by enticing it to bomb peacekeeping troops. They had sidled up to the U.N. bases to strike Israel at least four times in 24 hours this week, officials here said.

The telltale sounds rolled through the Naqoura headquarters Thursday: a thud followed by the fluttering, arching whine of outgoing rocket fire. Hezbollah fighters were just outside the base, shooting rockets toward Israel.

Startled officials craned their necks in the direction of the front gate. Turning on their heels, they began to herd everybody in sight toward the bomb shelters.

Heavy shelling had been going on for hours, but the Hezbollah rocket launch on the base’s perimeter posed a more serious threat. Israeli airpower might be called in to smite the Shiite fighters.

“If there’s a retaliation, it might be accurate,” Morczynski said, “or it might not.”

“They hit one yesterday,” another U.N. official muttered gloomily. “So why not today?”

The sound of jets swelled in the skies over the base. The officials walked faster. A voice scratched with unnerving, automatic calm from mounted speakers: “All personnel proceed to shelter immediately.”

Air raid sirens screeched to life in the Israeli town of Nahariya and carried over the border to the base.

“They’re taking the cover of villages or U.N. positions to act, hoping this proximity to people will be a problem to [Israeli troops] when they have to respond,” said Gen. Alain Pellegrini, commander of the U.N. force, who met with reporters inside a bomb shelter. But Israel “doesn’t take this into account.”

Fear of attack from Israel shadows life on the base, which has been struck by two Israeli shells since the outbreak of fighting.

Top officials here, who spent hours entreating Israel to cease the attacks on their observation post before Tuesday’s fatal strike, say they believe it was deliberately destroyed.

“There is at least one thing sure,” Pellegrini said. “This objective was very carefully aimed at and very professionally hit.”

Col. Jacques Colleville was on the telephone with the Israeli military that night.

He explained that the post had already been hit and damaged, and begged Israel to stop shelling, he said.

We’ll call you back, he says he was told. But nobody called. Within 2 1/2 hours of the last phone call, U.N. officials heard the post had been demolished.

“It happens every day,” Colleville said glumly. “But not always with the same consequence.”

Hamstrung by the one of the world’s stickiest diplomatic conflicts, the U.N. has turned inward. Its relevance has dwindled as its peacekeeping mission receded into the realm of the utterly impractical.

“What is frustrating is having no means to control what they do,” Colleville said. “We talk to one side, we talk to the other side, and then we wait for them to agree.

“How would I disarm them?” he joked of Hezbollah. “With my telephone?”

U.N. peacekeepers were first sent to Lebanon almost three decades ago to observe the withdrawal of Israel and the extension of Beirut’s authority over southern Lebanon.

But thanks to a weak and war-battered Lebanese government, their raison d’etre has dangled in limbo for years. Israel withdrew in 2000, but the central government never got a grip on the Hezbollah-dominated southern hinterlands.

“They never installed Lebanese units in the south. They didn’t do it,” Pellegrini said. “As they didn’t want to do it, we couldn’t oblige them to.... Hezbollah was too independent and out of control.”

The U.N. observers sat by while an unchecked Hezbollah consolidated political control over the south, built up its arsenal and girded itself to do battle once again with the nemesis across the border.

They had no choice, they say: Hezbollah could be tamed only with the use of force, which is not part of their mandate.

“You have to be able to impose international will,” Pellegrini said. “You need heavy weapons and strong rules of engagement.”

But this is the bind that will face any military that tries to tangle with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon: The organization will fight fiercely to keep its guns, and its widespread grass-roots popularity makes the militia capable of mounting a fierce insurgency.

The peacekeepers couldn’t be here, U.N. officials acknowledge, if Hezbollah didn’t tolerate them. And if they were cracking heads, they would no longer be tolerated.

Hundreds of angry refugees flooded the headquarters here Wednesday, but the U.N. had little food to give them.

The refugees were sheltered overnight in a massive tent on the base, but discontent seethed among the people. One of the refugees phoned Al Jazeera television and complained that the U.N. had set dogs upon them.

Miffed and embarrassed, U.N. troops packed the evacuees into buses Thursday and sent them off over the dusty, twisting roads that snake north through the bomb craters.