BEIRUT, 24 April 2005 — There were bagpipers in Scottish tartan, hundreds of soldiers coming to attention with all the snap of Sandhurst and a banner proclaiming “Duty Unto Death”, which could have been a chapter title in the dreadful old G.A. Henty novels of empire that my parents once forced me to read. I had to pinch myself to remember yesterday that this corner of the British Empire was actually southern Lebanon.
But there was nothing un-British about the Assam Regiment, whose battle honors go back to 1842 and whose regimental silver still bears the names of Victorian colonels of the Raj. It was Malcolm Muggeridge who once observed that the only Englishmen left were Indians.
The Assam Regiment’s 15th Battalion is India’s contribution to the United Nations’ peacekeeping force along the Israeli border — Israel’s listening posts were stitched across the brown snows of Golan high above us yesterday — and its soldiers, from the seven northeastern states of India, have turned out to be among the most popular of UN units for two simple reasons. They help with much of the veterinary work among the poor farmers and — shades, here, I suppose, of the new hi-tech city of Hyderabad — they repair all the computers in local schools. But there was one salient feature of the battalion’s UN medal parade yesterday; the other units which had sent their officers were almost all non-Western.
There were Fijians and Nepalese and Ghanaian soldiers but only a smattering of French and the odd Australian UN observer. When the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon — UNIFIL — was at its height during the Israeli occupation, its soldiers tended to come from richer countries, from Ireland, Norway, Finland and France. Now it is the poorer countries whose soldiers are spread across the hills between Tyre and Golan.
India’s army can also be found on duty in the Democratic Republic of Congo and, shortly, in the Sudan and Ethiopia. The UN’s global reach seems thus to be revolving more and more around non-NATO forces. Our superior Western armies, I suspect, are much happier in Bosnia or illegally invading Iraq. Lord Blair of Kut Al-Amara is not going to waste his men on the Israeli border. Cyprus is quite enough for the British.
But all this does raise an important question. Do nations which we once called “Third World” make better peacekeepers? Would it not be more appropriate — if this is not already happening — to have soldiers who understand poverty keeping the peace in lands of poverty? When the Irish first deployed to Lebanon in 1978, Ireland was still a comparatively poor nation, and its soldiers instantly formed great affection for the Shiite Muslim farmers and their families who lived off their smallholdings in the stony hills and valleys. Ireland, I have to remind myself, now fields a full battalion in Liberia, and Irish troops can be found in Kabul, Pristina and Monrovia. And as the Indians were addressed by their commanders yesterday, there came the names of Somalia, Cambodia and Angola. I can remember now, amid the corruption and terrors of the Bosnian and Croatian wars, how the smartest and the most disciplined contingent turned out to be not the French or the Canadians but the Jordanian battalion on the Serb border.
There was a time, back in 2002, when George W. Bush was threatening the United Nations when I was asked in New York if I “believed in the UN”. It was a bit like being asked if one believed in God or the Devil, which I’m sure George Bush does. I did reply that, yes, I believed in the UN. And I still do.
It was in Bosnia that I had a long discussion with a Canadian UN officer about the worth of the United Nations. We were under quite a lot of shellfire, so this probably concentrated our minds. His theory was quite simple. If we’d had a United Nations in 1914, it might have stopped World War I. “I don’t think there would have been a Somme or Verdun if the UN had been there,” he said. “And despite everything that’s gone wrong in Bosnia, it would have been far worse — much more like World War II — if the UN wasn’t here.”
The debacle in Somalia hardly supports this view, but have the Americans done any better in Iraq? Once the UN was discarded, in went the US Army and Lord Blair’s lads and now they’ve got an insurgency on their hands which is growing in intensity and where no Westerner — or Iraqi for that matter — can walk or drive the streets of Baghdad without fear of instant death.
Duty Unto Death might suit the Indian battalion in Lebanon but I doubt if many US troops would adopt this as their regimental motto. For some reason, we believe that our Western armies do the toughest fighting, but I’m not sure that’s true. The Indian Army served in Sri Lanka, whose suicide bombers would make even Iraq’s killers look tame. “You had to drive everywhere at a hundred miles an hour,” one of India’s Sri Lanka veterans once told me. “I don’t think I’ve ever fought a force like theirs.”
So here’s a satanic question. What if the UN had sent a multinational force into Iraq in the early spring of 2003? What if we could have had Indian troops and Nepalese soldiers rather than the American First Infantry Division moving up the Tigris and Euphrates under a blue banner? Could it have been a worse mess than we have in Iraq today? If Saddam Hussein could have his weapons of mass destruction destroyed by the UN — and they were destroyed by the UN, were they not, because we know that there weren’t any there when we invaded? — might the UN not also have been able to insert military units after forcing Saddam to disband his regime?
No? Well, in that case, how come Syria’s regime in Lebanon is crumbling under UN Security Council Resolution 1559? Yesterday, even Jamil Sayyed — the pro-Syrian head of Lebanon’s General Security, a figure more powerful and very definitely more sinister than the Lebanese president — stepped aside, along with one of his equally pro-Syrian underlings.
True, it was the French and the Americans who pushed for Resolution 1559. But how many of us will stand up today and admit that the UN is doing in Lebanon what the United States has failed to do in Iraq?
