Despite its recent impotence, the UN can still help Lebanon, leading diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi tells Lara Marlowe
Lakhdar Brahimi helped end the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war and laid the foundations for the embattled post-war governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. Few, if any, other diplomats are equally at ease speaking English, French and Arabic, or discussing the fate of the world with Henry Kissinger or Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq.
Brahimi's intimate understanding of east and west, the Muslim and Christian worlds, and his ability to see all sides of a conflict, made him an invaluable adviser to two United Nations secretary generals. Born to a land-owning family in French colonial Algeria in 1934, he is at the same time a Muslim Arab with a revolutionary past and an establishment figure who lectures at Ivy League universities and writes for prestigious foreign policy journals.
For 34 days this summer, Brahimi stood by "with great sadness and sympathy" as his beloved Lebanon again plunged into war. "Like every Arab man, woman and child, I felt a lot of anger that the international community was just watching while Lebanon was being destroyed," he says in an interview in his Paris apartment. "Nobody has explained to me what benefit the destruction of Lebanon has brought," he adds bitterly. "The Israelis killed more children than combatants . . . Hizbullah seem to have been 'collateral damage'. How can this happen in the 21st century, when we are all steeped in the rhetoric of human rights?"
Despite the Lebanon debacle, Brahimi still believes in multilateralism and the United Nations.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called for an immediate end to fighting, convened an emergency session of the Security Council when Israel killed at least 28 civilians in a shelter in Qana, and when Resolution 1701 was finally passed on August 11th, he regretted that it had taken so long.
Disarming Hizbullah was the main Israeli war aim and is a chief provision of Resolution 1701.
For a decade after he brokered the Taif peace accords that ended the Lebanese civil war, Brahimi pleaded with Western governments to shore up the Lebanese army and make Syrian troops leave, as provided in the agreement. But no one listened. Now he believes that Hizbullah can be disarmed "as a political process, not a military activity".
France this week backed out of a leadership role in the new Unifil (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), in part because the force's mandate is murky. In 2000, the "Brahimi Report" on UN peacekeeping concluded that "the UN does not fight wars", as Brahimi recalls. "If you want to fight wars, you need a multinational force and a country that is willing to lead it." It wasn't the UN's fault that the Security Council was not able to stop the war quickly, Brahimi insists. "The United States prevented the UN stopping the war, supported half-heartedly by the United Kingdom," he says.
Brahimi blames the current Middle East impasse on the US. "International law is not respected by the most important country in the world," he says. "What kind of 'new world order' are we going to have if the strongest say, 'International law is not for us'? We have one superpower that is stronger than anything the world has known, even the Roman empire. How are we going to live with this elephant in our midst?"
The only counterweight to US power is for other countries "to raise their voices more strongly", Brahimi adds. "They raised their voices a little before the Iraq war, but they were ignored. If they raised their voices a second time - the Europeans, Japan, China, India - America will have to listen."
Brahimi says he understands Israel's logic that "stupid Arabs understand only force", though he believes it is wrong. "Every time they've hit the 'stupid Arabs', they have created a new monster. Hizbullah didn't exist when they invaded Lebanon in 1982. Hamas didn't exist when the first Intifada started . . . Israel always talks about being part of the West. They may be part of the West culturally, but physically they are in the Middle East. They have got to live with these people in the Middle East."
In a speech on August 14th, President George W Bush called Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan - countries closely associated with Brahimi - "three fronts in the world war against terrorism".
"Sometimes one feels that people who speak of the war on terror think there is a race on earth called terrorists," Brahimi remarks. "And when you finish them off, then the problem is solved . . . There is no military solution to this war on terror. When you have a Jack the Ripper, you ask 'Why did he do it?' But when someone straps a bomb on his body, you don't ask why. If you find out why, perhaps you can prevent this from happening."
IN AN OPINION piece in yesterday's New York Times, Brahimi reproached the US for shipping military hardware to Israel while resisting calls for a ceasefire to allow the "root causes" of the war to be addressed. Among those "root causes", Brahimi says, are "thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel . . . military occupation and the injustice that has come with it". Even if the ceasefire holds in Lebanon, Brahimi says, "we can go further down the slope (in the Middle East). Things can become worse in Gaza, the West Bank and Iraq."
He is slightly encouraged that "the British are starting to say we have to move to the mother of all ills - Palestine". The Palestinian issue underlies unrest in the Middle East, he says, and UN Security Council resolutions provide a ready-made framework for resolving it.
Though Brahimi vehemently opposed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, he went there to pick up the pieces and "alas", he says, set up the first interim government. In Baghdad in April 2004, he was the first official to warn of the slide towards civil war. "The Iraqis, Americans and British were extremely angry with me," he recalls. "Now civil war is raging." Brahimi believes talk in the US of partitioning Iraq into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish states is dangerous.
"The alternative to a united Iraq is chaos for a very long time that will not be contained within Iraq . . . You cannot prevent civil war by building walls," he adds, alluding to the new US strategy of building walls between Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods in Baghad.
One of the biggest mistakes made by US and British occupation forces, Brahimi says, was "handing the police 100 per cent over to religious militias". Asked what he would do if he were the US administration, he says: "We all have to accept that Iraq is not working. You cannot solve a problem by saying it doesn't exist." He believes it is necessary to involve "regional players" in Iraq and convene a conference where all Iraqis would be represented, similar to the Afghan conference he organised in Bonn and the Taif conference he organised for Lebanon.
Brahimi was a 20-year-old student at "Sciences Po" (the Paris Institute of Political Studies) when the Algerian war of independence broke out in 1954. Despite his privileged background, he joined the National Liberation Front (FLN), becoming the guerrillas' representative at the Non-Aligned Conference in Jakarta, then in Tunis and Cairo.
"I belonged to an organisation that was called terrorist," says the man who is today one of the world's most respected diplomats. "Some of the people who were with me threw bombs in cafes, killed civilians. The first man our people killed was a French teacher. Of course it makes you feel uneasy . . . "
Regarding his own career - he was an ambassador from the age of 24, had long stints as Algeria's ambassador to London, then became Algerian foreign minister before beginning a career with the UN - Brahimi says only that "I have tried to work honestly wherever I have been".
If he feels remorse, it is for his native Algeria. "We should have done much better than we did," he says of the FLN leaders who took power after independence. "We had no experience. We did our best, and our best wasn't good enough." The 1990s, when some 150,000 Algerians died in a war between security forces and Islamist militants, were "the tunnel, the black hole", Brahimi says. He pleaded with colleagues in the military-backed regime not to organise parliamentary elections, because it was obvious that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was going to win.
In January 1992, Brahimi supported the cancellation of the elections. "Now I am not sure whether it was right, because of all the dead," he says, wondering out loud whether it would not have been better to let the FIS take power.