SHIELD: U.N. Force Takes Key Role Amid S. Lebanon Violence : U.N. Role: Trying to Shield Lebanese From Violence

A shortwave radio in the white jeep crackled to life every few minutes.

“Frenchbatt, this is Finbatt. We have five Israeli APCs (armored personnel carriers) approaching our position. I’ll let you know as soon as we know which direction they’re going.”

“Ghanbatt, this is Finbatt. We have an IDF (Israel Defense Forces) civilian patrol possibly headed toward your checkpoint. . . . They’re in two vehicles--a yellow Mercedes and a green BMW.”

The radio messages were part of a largely unseen “war” that in recent weeks has flared in southern Lebanon alongside the increasingly bloody fighting between occupying Israeli troops and a Shia Muslim-led Lebanese guerrilla movement trying to hasten Israel’s withdrawal from the country.

The troops in this hidden campaign are almost 6,000 United Nations soldiers stationed in the south, who now see their main task as trying to shield about 300,000 residents of the area from the ravages of the better-publicized guerrilla war.

“Within our mandate, what we can do is try to keep the violence down,” said Col. Tenhunen Juha, commander of the Finnish battalion (Finbatt) of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). “That means we have to be able to persuade the Israelis to let us witness what’s happening.”

As a handful of American journalists discovered while visiting several UNIFIL units in southern Lebanon on Monday, the U.N. troops don’t rely on persuasion alone.

“Every step they are taking, we can monitor,” said the deputy Finbatt commander, Lt. Col. Hannu Paronen.

Warning to Deploy

In the wake of Israel’s new “iron fist” policy against southern Lebanese villages suspected of harboring guerrillas or weapons, the main object of the surveillance is to give U.N. troops enough warning to deploy in a village before an Israeli army raiding party arrives for a surprise search.

The U.N. troop presence, said another official, acts as a “restraining influence” on the Israelis, who earlier this month killed 37 men during a raid on the village of Zrariye, which is just outside the area patrolled by U.N. soldiers.

In addition to keeping a close eye on Israeli troops, the U.N. peacekeeping force has become a primary source of information for newsmen trying to keep track of events in southern Lebanon. And its accounts of Israeli actions often differ sharply from the versions released by army headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Not surprisingly, relations between the Israeli military and the U.N. force have taken a sharp turn for the worse under Operation Iron Fist.

‘We Are Coexisting’

“We are working in the same area--we have to have very strained relationships, obviously,” said Juha. “We are not cooperating. . . . We are coexisting.”

The antagonism turned into a minor diplomatic incident last month when Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin referred to French UNIFIL troops in a closed Knesset (Parliament) committee hearing as “bastards.” The Israeli press reported the remark, and the French Foreign Ministry summoned Israel’s ambassador in Paris to protest.

Rabin’s ire stemmed from a confrontation on Feb. 14 between French troops and Israeli officers who scuffled in the village of Borj Rahhal over Israel’s plans to destroy three houses allegedly linked to the guerrilla resistance.

Last Friday, Rabin’s predecessor and the architect of Israel’s war in Lebanon, Ariel Sharon, charged in a speech to Israeli industrialists that the U.N. force cooperates with terrorists in southern Lebanon.

Mandate to Expire

The U.N. troops’ mandate from the U.N. Security Council expires on April 19, and some Israeli officials have reportedly been working behind the scenes to persuade countries that contribute peacekeeping forces to withdraw their support.

Rabin said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz a month ago that “personally, I wouldn’t ask for UNIFIL’s mandate to be renewed, although I wouldn’t oppose it either.”

For a brief period after Israel’s new national unity government took over last fall, officials in Jerusalem had only good things to say about the U.N. peace force, which they envisioned as part of a negotiated security arrangement in southern Lebanon that would precede a military withdrawal from that country.

Talks with the Lebanese on that subject collapsed early this year, though, and now Israel has announced plans for a unilateral pullout. In the new scheme, Israel sees a continued U.N. presence just north of its border as possibly interfering with its intentions to indefinitely maintain a “security zone” in southern Lebanon.

Request From Lebanon

U.N. troops first came to the region in March, 1978, when the Lebanese government asked for help in the wake of a cross-border Israeli attack against guerrillas of the Palestine Liberation Organization. UNIFIL’s mandate has been periodically renewed ever since, usually at six-month intervals.

The force includes units from the Fiji Islands, Finland, France, Ghana, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Senegal and Sweden. Most of the national contingents are responsible for a particular zone within southern Lebanon, with the French and Finnish units deployed in the areas of most active anti-Israeli resistance.

When the Israeli army raided seven southern Lebanese villages last Dec. 13, in what turned out to be a forerunner of the “iron fist” policy, the U.N. force admittedly was caught off guard, with none of its men in the towns. And it was right after that Israeli operation that the U.N. troops changed tactics.

In Israelis’ Path

Now, in addition to permanent U.N. checkpoints throughout the region, individual units are responsible for specific groups of villages. As soon as the Israeli military makes a move, the shortwave radios begin crackling and U.N. units take up position in all the villages in the Israelis’ path.

When an Israeli mechanized company showed up here in Maaroub early Monday morning, for example, a squad of French UNIFIL troops--easily identified by their baby-blue helmets or berets--was already on hand. And a dozen more arrived soon afterward, including a Finnish major and a Fijian naval officer from U.N. troop headquarters at Naqoura, on the Lebanese coast just north of the Israeli border.

American reporters were prevented by Israeli troops from going beyond the outskirts of the village during the raid. However, one French soldier could be seen in the tower of the town mosque, from which he could observe Israeli search parties and the walled schoolyard in which Arabic-speaking Israeli interrogators questioned all the men in the village over age 16.

A Blindfolded Prisoner

U.N. observers also were stationed in the schoolyard and on a nearby hill, where Israeli security agents questioned one prisoner who was brought there blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back.

According to the accounts of resident and U.N. officers, the Israeli operation at Maaroub was typical of those conducted in at least 17 other villages during the last month. (Some of the towns have been hit two or three times in that period.)

An Israeli mechanized company, consisting of about 100 men, 15 armored personnel carriers, one tank and several trucks, arrived soon after 6 a.m. The men were ordered by loudspeaker to the school, while women and children were told to stay in their homes.

The locked school doors were forced open with explosives, and the men were divided into two groups--those over 40 and those younger. Each was then questioned individually by one of four Israeli interrogators. “They asked us where did we put the weapons,” said Fiyad Dimashk, 32, an English-speaking schoolteacher.

Blasting Open Doors

Meanwhile, other Israeli soldiers searched house to house, blasting open locked doors with automatic rifle fire. According to a U.N. officer on the scene, the Israelis found two new Kalashnikov assault rifles in one house but no other weapons.

They did not find what U.N. officials said was clearly the real focus of the Maaroub operation--Mohammed Shehadi, identified by Dimashk as director of the local school and an official in Amal, the major Shia Muslim militia.

Interrogators asked all the village men about him, and before the Israelis left at about 1 p.m., they bulldozed the house of Shehadi’s 57-year-old father into a pile of dirt and concrete. His was not the house in which the assault rifles were found, U.N. officials said.

An Israeli army announcement on the operation Monday night said that a large quantity of weapons had been found in the village and that two “terrorists” were killed trying to escape.

Two Bodies Found

U.N. officials said there were no clashes at the village, but in nearby Qalaouiye, headquarters of the Finnish battalion, the Finns’ chief operations officer, Maj. Lauri Ovaska, said that early Monday morning his troops found the bodies of two men near a Litani River crossing at which the Israelis have set ambushes for infiltrators from the north.

Papers on the men identified them as Joseph Alidia, 25, and Wajih Hassan Farbatt, 20. No weapons were discovered near the bodies, Ovaska said.

The U.N. officer added that the two were found in almost the same place as three other bodies discovered by Finnish troops on March 14. He described those three as having been so riddled with bullets, fired at close range, that the faces were obliterated.

The Israelis announced the same day that three “terrorists” had been killed in a clash with Israeli troops at an unspecified location east of Tyre.

Checking for Bombs

After the Israelis left Maaroub on Monday, U.N. engineers were called in, at the residents’ request, to check out the village for possible bombs. U.N. officials said they have received similar petitions ever since an explosion in a mosque in Maarake killed 12 people two days after an Israeli raid on that town.

Lebanese officials accused Israeli security agents of having rigged the Maarake blast--a charge the Israelis have denied.

U.N. spokesman Timor Goksel said that in only one case have U.N. troops found anything suspicious after an Israeli raid. That was on March 15, when they discovered a green Mercedes-Benz with a Lebanese license plate packed with explosives outside a house that the Israeli army had bulldozed in Barich.

“It’s difficult to say how it got there,” Goksel said of the vehicle. U.N. troops towed the car out of the village and blew it up.

There is clearly no love lost between Israeli and U.N. troops. Other than the top officers, they did not even speak to each other during the operation here in Maaroub.

Asked what he would do in the Israeli position, another UNIFIL source who requested anonymity responded: “I’d resign.”