«The Lebanese have to decide what to do with their future. We can help within the limits of our international mandate. But first of all they have to help themselves ». The finding of Stefano Del Col, general, Bersagliere, 61, from Friuli, is one of the convictions he matured in four years in command of the UNIFIL blue helmets, in Southern Lebanon. Guarding a border between two conflicting countries (Israel and Lebanon, plus Hezbollah) in a conflict region was not a quiet mission.
At the end of February Del Col left to his Spanish colleague Aroldo Lazaro Saenz the command of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon, Unifil: 10,048 soldiers from 46 countries and 850 civilians, a team of helicopters, 5 ships, an annual budget of 480 Millions of dollars. The Italian is the second largest contingent, 1,060 soldiers: the largest and most demanding of our peacekeeping missions abroad.
“Unifil’s task is to create stability that allows diplomats and politicians to dialogue,” explains the general. “We cannot replace them, we create the conditions on the ground for them to reach that light at the end of the tunnel called the peace process.”
Precisely: the mission is complex. In addition to border instability, Lebanon is unable to make the necessary political and economic reforms, it is experiencing the most dangerous institutional crisis since the civil war that ended in 1990; and a financial company considered the worst in the world in the last hundred years.
With a more limited force and mandate, Unifil was deployed in 1978 between the Litani River to the north and the “Blue Line”: 123 kilometers of uncertain and contested border. Then the South was the “Fatahland” controlled by the Palestinian guerrillas, not by the Lebanese government; today it is from the Shiite militia of Hezbollah. In the summer of 2006, the Unifil mission was confirmed and strengthened after 34 days of war between Israel and Hezbollah, stopped by a truce that was constantly in danger.
General, if Israel and Hezbollah take it back, what could Unifil do?
Continue to achieve the fulfillment of its mission.
One of the mandates established by the UN is to assist the Lebanese army so that the only military and the only weapons in the South are from Unifil and the Lebanese state. Is it achievable?
Our mission is peacekeeping, peacekeeping; not of peace enforcement, of imposition. The Lebanese forces are, according to mandate, our main partners. We have created for them a model of regiment suitable for controlling the South: a perfect but empty box, without the 1,200 soldiers expected because Lebanon has not had the funds to recruit for almost two years.