Political Dynamics Shifted During 2006 Israel-Hezbollah Conflict
16 October 2007
An interview with International Peace Academy President Terje Roed-Larsen
Terje Roed-Larsen, who has been involved for more than a decade in the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort, says the positions of parties sometimes can evolve “very radically over brief periods of time.” During an interview with USINFO Staff Writer Jacquelyn S. Porth, he also said negotiators must be ready to return to the table repeatedly in the quest for peace.
Washington -- Nowhere is the old adage “the devil is in the details” truer than in a negotiation to separate and end fighting between warring parties.
Sometimes hostilities end through the good offices of a charismatic leader, sometimes when the opposing sides realize their goals are unachievable or otherwise have a change of heart.
Norwegian Ambassador Terje Roed-Larsen has experienced the highs and lows that are part of any artful negotiation because he long has been involved intimately in various efforts to restore Middle East peace.
He recalled his personal experiences as the United Nations special envoy during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict in a recent USINFO interview that reveals the need for negotiators to be nimble and flexible.
Roed-Larsen was vacationing in Norway when the conflict broke out and then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked him to travel to the Middle East, at a time when the diplomat was serving as special envoy for the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559 -- a position he had assumed in January 2005. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 calls for the protection of Lebanon’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence. It requires the disbanding and disarming of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militia. (See full text of the resolution.)
Annan asked him to see how hostilities between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah might be halted and what would be necessary to persuade Hezbollah to release several Israeli soldiers it had abducted.
Roed-Larsen said the crisis was precipitated when Hezbollah crossed the U.N. Blue Line in southern Lebanon July 12, 2006, and entered Israeli territory, abducting two Israeli soldiers and killing three in the process. This triggered an Israeli military response, including aerial bombardment and the dispatch of ground troops into Lebanon.
GETTING TO FIRST BASE
Before leaving for Lebanon, the U.N. team -- including U.N. envoy Alvaro de Soto and Annan’s special political adviser, Vijay Nambiar -- went to Cairo, Egypt, to meet with Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa and a range of Arab foreign ministers. They were very critical of Hezbollah’s actions and put their weight behind the team’s effort to negotiate a cease-fire by issuing supportive public statements.
Meanwhile, fighting between the two sides had shut down Lebanese commercial air traffic, so obtaining transportation was the team’s first hurdle. A European government provided an aircraft to fly them to Cyprus, where a British Royal Air Force helicopter ferried them across the Mediterranean to a Beirut, Lebanon, airstrip, where they rushed through a city emptied by fighting to meet with the Lebanese Cabinet.
The Lebanese government made clear, Roed-Larsen said, that it was not consulted nor informed about Hezbollah’s attack. He said this put the government “in an incredibly difficult position,” because violence had erupted not between two governments, but between a neighboring nation’s army and a militia within Lebanese territory.
He said his team made a deliberate decision to negotiate exclusively with the Lebanese government -- not Hezbollah -- to underline the legitimacy of the democratically elected government of Lebanon. Elected Lebanese leaders were left to negotiate with Hezbollah.
KEY INFLUENTIAL PARTICIPANTS
Roed-Larsen said his team continued to consult not only with the Arab League, but also with key regional countries, including Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. He said they also consulted with the United States and France -- which long has exercised influence in Lebanon -- as well as with other European governments, particularly Spain, through the efforts of Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos.
A perilous security situation created “a difficult backdrop for the negotiations,” said Roed-Larsen, as negotiators sought to determine under what circumstances Hezbollah would accept a cease-fire and hand over the kidnapped soldiers to Israeli authorities or a third party. In the initial round of negotiations, he said, the return of the soldiers was seen as key to an Israeli agreement to stop bombarding Hezbollah targets in Lebanon and end its invasion.
[The soldiers have yet to be freed. Annan appointed a confidential facilitator to deal with the Israeli government and Hezbollah in an effort to win their freedom. These efforts continue.]
He went on to say that the parties’ initial position was quite different from what evolved subsequently. The lesson is that positions can “evolve sometimes very radically over brief periods of time,” the ambassador said.
After a debriefing at U.N. headquarters in New York, Roed-Larsen said, the team realized its previous negotiating efforts “were no longer relevant because the parties [now] had different priorities and positions.” Israel, he said, “dropped its de facto demand for the release of the soldiers as an absolute precondition for the cessation of hostilities.”
ACHIEVING THE END GAME
A peace conference of key foreign ministers, chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema, was organized in Rome in July 2006. It led to the secretary-general’s offer to work with the United States, France and other key Security Council members to try to propel the process forward.
Roed-Larsen said that effort led to further rounds of negotiations and, ultimately, to Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended hostilities and offered some preconditions for a lasting cease-fire. (See full text of resolution.)
The ambassador attributed the about-face to the parties’ realization that there could be no short-run winner. This meant each side was looking for an exit, he said, but needed political cover to make it “acceptable to both.”
Resolution 1701 not only ended the fighting, he said, “but also reinforced preconditions for a lasting cease-fire” by repeating some of the essential elements of Resolution 1559, including resolving the militia problem and a call for the soldiers’ release, as well as stipulating the need to address certain controversial border territory issues.
More information on Roed-Larsen is available on the International Peace Academy Web site.
For more information about U.S. policy, see The Middle East: A Vision for the Future.
(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
