Libanonkrisen drivs av alla Mellanösternkonflikter utom kontroll
I tider av internationell oro i kontroversiella konflikter kan det vara nyttigt och perspektivvidgande att läsa vad kvalificerade media utomlands skriver. Nedan bifogas sålunda två färska ledare ur Financial Times och en debattartikel om Europas dåliga erfarenheter av kollektiv bestraffning. 1. Lebanon crisis about to spiral out of control. 2. Europe can tell Israel how punishing civilians backfires. 3. A new Middle East disaster in the making.
Lebanon crisis about to spiral out of control
Published: July 17 2006 03:00 : Last updated: July 17 2006 03:00
Israel's massive bombardment of Lebanon by land, sea and air in response to Hizbollah's cross-border raid last week is now about a great deal more than recovering two Israeli soldiers seized by Islamist guerrillas - and it probably always was.
Urgent and forceful diplomatic action is needed now if this crisis is not to develop into an anarchic, borderless free-for-all that will set new standards of violence even for the Middle East.
At one level, the conflict is but the latest round in the struggle between Syria and Israel, which occupied swaths of Lebanon for 29 and 22 years respectively and used it liberally as the main arena for proxy war. That may help explain the ease with which Lt Gen Dan Halutz, Israel's chief of staff, made his outrageous threat to "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years".
Air strikes and artillery barrages, carefully taking apart the civilian infrastructure Lebanon put back after its 1975-90 civil war, are well on their way to achieving the general's aim, as well as killing scores of civilians every day. This use of disproportionate force is punishing the population of Lebanon - an act proscribed by the laws of war - for the criminal adventurism of Hizbollah and its sponsors.
Both sides, in different ways, appear to have been encouraged by the diplomatic vacuum that has developed in the Middle East. An under-examined reason for this is the debacle in Iraq, which, far from enabling the US topursue a radical new freedom agenda in the region (tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism) has paralysed the Bush administration. Washington, for example, recoiled from tough action against Syria even though there was an international consensus to pursue the regime of Bashar al-Assad for its role in the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese premier, last year. Even though Syria was forced to withdraw from Lebanon, Hizbollah, its ally, remains the single most powerful actor there.
Israel also perceives the US to have lost its nerve about Arab democracy as votes flow to Hamas, Hizbollah and Iraqi Shia Islamists. It notes the discomfiture of Washington's Sunni allies, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, at Shia advances and Iraq's sectarian war and it is trying to persuade the world that Shia Iran is behind every leaf that stirs in the region.
Tehran, for its part, will not be unhappy with the perception that its Hizbollah allies can establish a balance of terror over the Lebanon-Israel border if the conflict over Iran's nuclear ambitions eventually turns violent.
The US and its Group of Eight colleagues need to damp down this conflict urgently before it spirals out of control. The short-term objectives are: a ceasefire; helping Lebanon to rein in Hizbollah and deploy its army on the border; and the international isolation of Syria. Longer term, the imperative is to re-engage in regional peacemaking.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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Europe can tell Israel how punishing civilians backfires
By Mark Mazower
Published: July 16 2006 18:51 : Last updated: July 16 2006 18:51
In 1949, Europeans spearheaded an international move to outlaw collective punishment. This came after two world wars in which they had witnessed whole towns and villages razed and civilians executed, conscripted for slave labour or deliberately made homeless. To break with this past, the Fourth Geneva Convention outlawed collective punishment and reprisals against non-combatants. How far away this all seems today.
First in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon, the Israeli army has abandoned Geneva’s restraints, retaliating against the kidnapping of its soldiers by blowing up power plants, oil refineries, airports and roads.
As water and electricity supplies run low, humanitarian disaster beckons. Of course, the 1949 Geneva conference, remarkable though it was, certainly did not make collective punishment disappear, in either peace or war. In Stalin’s heyday, entire ethnic groups were deported from their homes in eastern Europe. In their colonies – from Malaya to Kenya – European powers still drew on collective punishment laws to face down armed nationalist insurgencies. In the 19th century, colonial policemen had relied on such decrees to combat cattle thieves and brigands. But there was a military application, too.
Among “civilised” states, the laws of war ruled out collective punishment, or strictly limited it on the grounds of proportionality. Applied to small wars against racial “inferiors” in Africa and Asia, however, military men highlighted the need for “harsh, exemplary deterrence” among “savages” whose fanaticism would otherwise blind them to the superior force of their foe.
The significance of the idea of proportionality, on which the laws of war lay such stress, was thereby minimised, notably where the Middle East was concerned. In the 1920s the French shelled Damascus and the British dropped bombs on villages in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, the British brought their Collective Punishment Ordinance to Palestine. Following their departure, Israel, like other post-colonial states, found Britain’s approach to public order remained useful. In the occupied territories, in particular, its armed forces have over the years become addicted to collective punishment as a key weapon in the struggle against snipers, suicide bombings and missiles. Forced relocations, closures, curfews, house demolitions and the destruction of vineyards and orchards have become commonplace.
What started as a matter of collective fines has escalated into tank fire and aerial bombardment. Frustrated at the Israeli Defense Force’s inability to stop Hamas rocket attacks, a respected Israeli commentator now seriously proposes firing an artillery barrage at “a Palestinian locale” every time Israel is hit. The chief of the Israeli general staff, rather less anxious about international reaction than his defence minister, is reported to have wanted to “punish Lebanon and blast its civilian infrastructure back 20 years”. Thus, the principle of collective punishment has been extended to an entire country and threatens to precipitate a regional war.
But although the Israelis may be understandably frightened by the durability of their opponents and the range of their weaponry, they have not necessarily chosen the wisest response.
One reason for the virtual unanimity behind the 1949 Geneva prohibition on collective punishment in wartime was the sense that it was both morally unpalatable and militarily ineffective. Recent history suggested collective punishment usually played into the hands of well-organised and popular insurgencies. The latter may deliberately provoke it – as resistance groups frequently did in wartime Europe – because it often brings new recruits, weakens alternative sources of authority and discredits the perpetrators.
Like Tito’s Yugoslav partisans, militants can retreat and regroup, knowing that anything short of their total annihilation – almost impossible to achieve – will count as victory. Civilians in Gaza and Lebanon may blame Hamas and Hizbollah for provoking Israel but they will blame the Israelis as much if not more. As some of the politicians are well aware, because collective punishment on this scale receives little but condemnation internationally, it will intensify the diplomatic predicament of the Israeli state. This seems a high price to pay for allowing the IDF to flex its muscles.
Who will save civilians from their suffering, and Israel from itself? Not the US, which is paying the price for disengagement. America’s Middle Eastern allies are deeply worried but hamstrung. The threat of a US veto weakens the role of the United Nations Security Council and, because any success Washington may have in restraining Israel is likely to be kept private, it will recoup little credit for anything it does achieve. China is preoccupied with North Korea, and Russia has little leverage. That leaves the Europeans.
In spite of the fact that it is Israel’s number one trading partner, the European Union has still not managed to make its voice count. Yet a regional war will affect Europe more than the US, and the knock-on effects domestically will be incalculable.
The Europeans now urgently need to force a ceasefire. With more power at their disposal over Israel in particular than they realise, they should draw once again on their own memories of occupation. The painful lessons that led them to Geneva are no less valid today than they were in 1949.
The writer is professor of history at Columbia University
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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A new Middle East disaster in the making
Published: July 14 2006 03:00 : Last updated: July 14 2006 03:00
It is hard to underestimate the dangers of the present escalation in hostilities in the Middle East. Palestinian militants to Israel's south in Gaza, and Hizbollah guerrillas from across Israel's northern frontier with Lebanon, have conducted cross-border raids and seized one and two Israeli soldiers respectively, bringing down a hail of rockets and shells on their populations.
This has, of course, happened before. But the regional context has never been worse. The invasion of Iraq broke the Iraqi state, fragmented the country, triggered sectarian war and proliferated jihadi extremism. Iran fears it will be attacked and keeps its proxies - among them Hizbollah - on a war footing. The international community, led by a US that has forfeited nearlyall legitimacy in the Arab and Muslim world, has allowed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to slide towards a fait accompli in Israel's favour - a land-grab that will guarantee bloodshed for generations to come.
And now, a weak Israeli government is allowing the country to be sucked back, or rather suckered back into asymmetric warfare by weaker but wily opponents.
Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, and Amir Peretz, his defence minister, are not from the warrior class that has traditionally made up Israel's governing elite. They appear to be trying to establish their credentials by lashing out, and allowing an army command with its pride wounded by the recent raids to call the shots.
In the past, situations similar to this have led to disaster. In 1982, Israel's stricken former prime minister Ariel Sharon, then its defence minister, used a flimsy pretext to invade Lebanon to crush the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The result was a two-month siege of Beirut that killed 19,000 people, destroyed Israel's reputation and gave rise to Hizbollah. Israel's last invasion of Lebanon, in 1996, was meant to crush Hizbollah. The Shia Islamist movement emerged greatly strengthened while Israel's image was further besmirched by the massacre of refugees at a United Nations base in Qana.
Israel's reprisals this time are disproportionate, illegitimate under international rules that outlaw the collective punishment of entire populations and have already resulted in heavy loss of civilian life, especially of children.
Neither side can easily claim the moral high ground, since Israel and its opponents such as Hizbollah have both used hostage-taking and assassination as instruments of policy and, all bluster aside, have an established record of negotiations leading to prisoner exchanges. But Israel's threat to launch a prolonged offensive against Lebanon, perhaps extending to Syria, while simultaneously stepping up air strikes against densely populated Gaza, cries out for international intervention.
Writing recently in Haaretz, Yossi Beilin, Israel's former justice minister and architect of the Oslo accords, recalled the procession of US presidents - Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton - who had devoted intense effort to Middle East peace-making, every bit as important to Israel's future as supporting it. The present Bush administration, by contrast, was "nearly entirely absent . . . when Israel needs a powerful third party".
Quite so. This is no longer - if it ever was - some regional squabble. In present circumstances, every bit as much as during the cold war, a shot fired in the Middle East will echo around the world.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006