No logic in Israel faulting Indian Army

By Kesava Menon

MANAMA (Bahrain) JULY 9. As more details about the UN video-tape issue emerge, the efforts by some sections in Israel to drag a unit of the Indian Army into the controversy looks all the more irrational. It appears that the recording made by a jawan was not the only one in existence and other recordings of the very same events had been aired months ago.

The Indian Army has been unfortunately caught up in the long- running rumpus between Israel and the UN over the Lebanon border. On October 8 last year, Hizbollah guerrillas abducted three Israeli soldiers near the Lebanon-Israel border within the area monitored by the Indian contingent of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

Eighteen hours later, several camera crews shot video- clips of members of the Indian contingent towing away the two all-terrain vehicles that the Hizbollah group had used in mounting their attack. An Indian jawan had also taken a video- clip of the same towing episode.

As the vehicles were being towed away to be handed over to the Lebanese army, Hizbollah men intercepted the Indian unit and demanded that the vehicles be handed over to their possession. After a verbal altercation, the UN decided that the vehicles should be given over to the Hizbollah. A clip of this confrontation was also captured on the jawan's tape and it contained the pictures of the Hizbollah men who had confronted them.

The video-tape taken by the Indian contingent was handed over to the then Ghanian commander of UNIFIL who apparently passed it on to the UN headquarters, where it was deposited in the archives.

A day after the incident, Al Jazeera, the independent Arab satellite channel based in Qatar, had telecast video-clips of the same towing incident. Al Jazeera had presumably got their tape from some of the other camera crews that had filmed the towing episode. Nothing much was made of the incident at the time. Over Thursday and Friday, Israel's Channel Two television telecast clips of the towing incident and still photographs that purported to show the abducted Israeli soldiers in a Beirut hospital.

Channel Two claimed that the video-clips of the towing episode were exclusive in that they had been taken from the film shot by the Indian jawan. Everyone seems to be agreed that the still photographs of the Israeli soldiers in the hospital were certainly not from the Indian video-clip. It now appears that the clip of the towing episode was not from the Indian clip either. Mr. Timuar Goksel, UNIFIL spokesman, has clarified that the clips shown over Channel Two were markedly different from those shot by the jawan. No one other than UN officials had seen the Indian video-clip and they had not deemed it necessary to show the clip to the Israelis or apprise them of it since it contained no information on the circumstances in which the abduction took place.

In the light of the facts that have since emerged, the attempt by some unidentified Israeli military men and the Israeli media to drag the Indian Army into the controversy appears all the more irrational.

Unidentified Israeli military men, quoted in the media, had hinted that the Indian contingent in UNIFIL at the relevant time had watched the abduction from beginning to end, had taken video- tapes of the whole incident, had failed to warn the Israeli army in time and might have even collaborated with Hizbollah.

The Israeli media picked up on the thread and voiced demands that the Indian contingent be replaced by ``soldiers who are not liable to pressures from their immediate environs''. All this without a care for the supposedly burgeoning relationship between the Indian military and the Israel Defence Forces.

In part, the whole controversy appears to be part of the long- running rumpus between Israel and the UN over the situation on the former's northern border. Since its withdrawal from southern Lebanon last year, Israel has been vexed by the question of how it can ensure security along this border.

Lebanon has refused to deploy its army up to the border and Hizbollah, which continues in active hostility to Israel, has a free run of the border area. UNIFIL's mandate is to monitor the border and inform the UN headquarters of any violation from either direction.

Let alone preventing attacks across the border, UNIFIL units can not even warn the probable victims on either side of the possibility of an attack since this would be tantamount to the provision of intelligence.

Israel wants UNIFIL, or someone, to do something about security along its northern borders. In this episode, the Indian Army contingent in UNIFIL has been targeted as the scapegoat for Israeli frustrations.

`Row will not hit ties'

PTI reports from Jerusalem:

Meanwhile, Israel today said the controversy involving the UNIFIL's Indian battalion would not affect ties between the Jewish state and New Delhi.

``The matter should not be confused. Our argument is with the United Nations and not with the soldiers who are just instruments. We were unhappy with the disclosure of the identity of soldiers,'' a senior Foreign Ministry official said.

``It just happened that they were Indians. They could have been from any other country,'' he said.

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