Canada - UN observer killed by Israeli bomb in Lebanon during 2006 war

February 4, 2008

Canada whitewashes the death of its own

Original link: The Daily Star (Lebanon)

By Marc J Sirois

Canada's official report on the deaths of four United Nations peacekeepers -
including a Canadian officer - at Israeli hands during the summer 2006 war
in Lebanon is a slap in the face to those who died and their families, to
those who wear the same uniforms, and to those who selflessly serve the UN
around the world. In essence, it took an official board of inquiry almost 17
months to determine less than what was obvious within hours of the attack:
that the incident was "tragic," that the deaths were "preventable" and that
the Israeli military was "responsible."

Many facts of the case are not in dispute. On July 25, 13 days after Israel
began making war on Lebanon in response to Hizbullah's capture of two of the
Jewish state's soldiers in a cross-border raid, Major Paeta Hess-Von
Kruedener and three colleagues were on duty at Patrol Base Khiam, operated
by the UN Truce Supervision Organization's Observer Group Lebanon (OGL). In
the hours preceding the fatal attack, 14 aerial bombs landed within 500
meters of their position, and 19 artillery shells impacted within 150
meters. Some munitions actually hit the compound, resulting in severe
damage. Repeated protests were lodged with the Israeli military, but the
firing continued. In fact, the last thing the observers did was to report
three consecutive incidents of "firing close" at 7:15 p.m, 7:16 p.m., and
7:17 p.m.

A few minutes later an air strike destroyed the base's main building,
killing Hess-Von Kruedener and his colleagues. The weapon involved was a
"Joint Direct Attack Munition" (J-DAM), a high-precision, satellite-guided
500-kilogrambomb supplied to Israel by the United States. When efforts to
reach the position by radio failed, an evacuation plan that had been
scheduled for the next morning was moved up, and a team from the Indian
Battalion of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon headed for Patrol Base Khiam.
There they found the main building in ruins and spent the next several hours
recovering bodies; they located three (including Hess-Von Kruedner's) but
had to call off the search the next night because special equipment was
needed and because the area remained under fire. The fourth body was
recovered in early August.

According to the report, neither the Israeli military nor the UN was "fully"
cooperative with the investigation. Especially in the case of the former
(seeing as how it was Israeli fire that killed the victims), one expects to
find at least a degree of resentment in the relating of this refusal to be
forthcoming. Instead there is only the bland prose of the cautious
bureaucrat. And in other parts of the document, every effort is made to
excuse questionable Israeli actions, to ignore them altogether, and even to
shift the blame elsewhere.

One example has the board bending over backward to rationalize Israeli
firing habits of the sort that killed the four OGL officers - and more than
1,000 Lebanese civilians - by concluding that Israeli ground attacks
supported by air and artillery strikes were "typically focused on specific
operations against a specific target," that these were "directed toward
Hezbollah positions, lines of communication and infrastructure;" and that
the resistance placed non-combatants at risk by being "well integrated with
the civilian population and infrastructure." In other words, in spite of
considerable evidence to the contrary, the report insinuates that the
Israelis did not mean to destroy Patrol Base Khiam or even to blast away
indiscriminately, only to root out enemies hiding among civilians.

Two paragraphs later, the report gets to the crux of the matter - and here a
new standard of absurdity is established. Throughout the document, the names
of interviewees have been widely but ineffectively censored from the public
version, including the removal of the names but not the positions of UN
peacekeeping officers whose identities are a matter of public record. But
under the rubric "Cause" on pages 23 and 24, the board has outdone itself:
Here the passage has been excised in its entirety. A similar glaring white
space follows another tantalizing (albeit misspelled) entry on pages 51 and
52: "Ordinance [sic] dropping on the Patrol Base."

Where it is impossible to do otherwise, the report is straightforward: An
Israeli bomb killed the men involved, the UN communications network
functioned as intended, liaison with the Israelis sufficed to end earlier
bombardments but not the fatal one, etc. In virtually every other way,
though, an obvious effort is made to avoid mention of facts that suggest
Israeli culpability on some level and to expand on those that have less (or
even no) relevance, for example:

Plenty of space is dedicated to communicating the confusion that can envelop
"non-linear combat" as a conventional military confronts a non-conventional
one on a battlefield with few if any front lines. This sounds suspiciously
like the stock excuse commonly trotted out by the Israelis whenever they
kill civilians - which, needless to say, is often.

There are also explanations of the day-to-day operations undertaken by UN
peacekeeping units in the region, of the general environment in which they
operate, and of what they were doing on July 25, 2006. There is much less
explanation (to be precise, none) of the repeated occasions on which Israeli
forces have harassed, endangered and killed UN personnel in Lebanon and
other countries where peacekeeping and/or observer missions are present.
There is also an explanation of why, after UN commanders determined that
Patrol Base Khiam was "no longer safe," they put off the evacuation mission
until the following morning. "The decision," the report says, "was based on
several considerations including waiting for the situation to become less
tense, allowing time to coordinate movement through the liaison network, and
conducting the move during daylight." There is, however, no allusion to the
actual source of the danger involved: i.e. the Israeli attack helicopters
and fighter-bombes that were making a habit of blowing up anything that
moved (and many things that did not) in South Lebanon, including ambulances,
clearly marked media vehicles, and civilian cars.

Where the really important findings of the lengthy investigation should be,
there is only blank paper. The recommendations only make matters worse:
Nowhere do they meaningfully address the real issues at stake, or even some
of the - pointedly Israeli - failings acknowledged earlier in the document.

For these and other reasons, the report is not just an insult to all those
who read it. It is also raises more questions than it answers. If the board
was not even willing to mention the possibility that the Israeli military
acted with, at best, wanton disregard for the welfare of UN personnel (not
to mention civilians), or to reveal what is sees as the "cause" of the
incident, what options are we left with? Were Major Hess-Von Kruedener and
his colleagues deliberately assassinated because they reported or witnessed
atrocities, were they the unfortunate victims of an unintended (although
obviously not unpredictable) mistake, were their deaths due to the latent
hostility that marks much of Israel's interactions with the UN, or is the
truth a mix of these and/or other possibilities?

Until someone has the guts to risk being tarred as an "anti-Semite" because
he or she is willing to take the Israelis to task, we will never know. Just
ask the survivors of the USS Liberty, a US Navy ship in international waters
that Israeli forces attacked for several hours in June 1967, killing 34
American servicemen. They have never obtained justice, and the careers of
many of those who have tried have been forever damaged.

Marc J. Sirois is managing editor of THE DAILY STAR.

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