No solution in sight

France's boycott of today's Security Council meeting of potential contributors to a "stabilisation force" exposes a growing European-US rift over Lebanon, reports Gamal Nkrumah

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Today, the world is scheduled to determine Lebanon's future at the United Nations Security Council meeting of potential contributors to an international force in the country. The main purpose of the force, according to the United States, is to strengthen the Lebanese government's political and military leverage to encompass southern Lebanon. Practically, that means curtailing Hizbullah's military and political influence.

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ALL THAT REMAINS: Photos of loved ones among the debris of houses destroyed by Israeli missiles in the Southern Lebanese village of Srifa on Tuesday. An estimated 35 bodies are believed to be buried under the rubble; A plume of smoke billows in the Lebanese border village of Aita Al-Shaab after it was hit by Israeli artillery yesterday

The meeting takes place following the Israeli massacre of innocent civilians sheltering in a residential building in the southern Lebanese village of Qana on Sunday.

As the world watches helplessly on, defenceless Lebanese civilians continue to suffer under the Israeli onslaught. In Qana crushed bodies still lie beneath the rubble while in Tyre a makeshift morgue has been established for the victims as their families are forced to wait for a lull in Israeli attacks before they can organise proper burials.

The UN Security Council's reaction to the massacre was swift, though lukewarm.

"The Security Council expresses its extreme shock and distress at the shelling by the Israeli Defence Forces of a residential building in Qana," read a UN Security Council statement issued following an emergency meeting on Sunday. Israeli air strikes are also designed to hamper humanitarian relief assistance, leading the Security Council to urge "all parties to grant immediate unlimited access to humanitarian assistance".

On Tuesday the UN head apologised for not being able to come up with anything stronger: "A great majority of Security Council members wanted stronger language," Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in an interview with the Pan-Arab satellite television channel Al-Jazeera. "The statement which was issued was weaker than what I asked for."

As for today's Security Council meeting, Annan told Al-Jazeera how he envisioned the deployment of an international stabilisation force, saying he thought the "force might remain for a period of up to two years". He stressed that the main purpose of the force was to strengthen the Lebanese army, and urged Hizbullah to disarm and concentrate on turning itself into a political party as opposed to a resistance movement.

France, the UN Security Council permanent member expected to be most willing to contribute troops to the force, announced yesterday that it would not be attending the Security Council meeting of potential contributors.

"France will not take part in a meeting that it considers premature," a French official told the news agency AFP yesterday. Observers believe the French position to be a sign of a growing emerging trans-Atlantic rift over the Middle East.

The fact that France has refused to participate comes as a serious blow to the credibility of today's meeting. France, Lebanon's former colonial master, contributes to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) formed in the aftermath of Israel's Israeli 1978 Operation Litani which resulted in a 22-year occupation of parts of southern Lebanon.

The history of UNIFIL in Lebanon has been checkered, and it has been universally criticised as ineffective, failing repeatedly to prevent the Israelis from hitting Lebanese targets. The UNIFIL mandate in Lebanon, set to expire on 31 July 2006, was extended this week for one more month. After that it is hoped that the UN will be able to authorise the deployment of the multi-national "stabilisation force" in Lebanon.

France insists that the UN meeting on the deployment of an international force can take place only after a political understanding has been reached with Lebanon on the mandate of that force. Britain, ever ready to accommodate US demands, believes that despite French objections today's meeting might yield something tangential.

"I'm confident that by tomorrow we'll be in a position to have discussions in the council on a text which actually takes us forward," Britain's UN Ambassador Emyr Jones-Parry told reporters yesterday.

Marwan Hamada, the Lebanese minister of communications and one of the architects of the anti-Syrian 14th March Movement, told Al-Jazeera yesterday that "the European position is closer to the French position than the British one". He also said the EU was edging closer to the Lebanese government on the nature of the "stabilisation force". The Lebanese position, Hamada reiterated, is that a ceasefire must come first, while the US and Israel insist that any ceasefire can only be part of a wider package.

Hamada said that Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, a former EU envoy to the Middle East, who was in Beirut yesterday before traveling on to Damascus, had arrived with a message from Brussels -- where on Tuesday EU foreign ministers had called for an immediate end to hostilities but fell short of calling for an immediate ceasefire owing to British and German pressure. Hamada believes the EU is now working towards having two consecutive Security Council resolutions rather than the US- proposed single package.

But the real dilemma, he says, remains the composition of the multi-national force. "Lebanon will not accept anything other than a UN-mandated force." NATO forces are not an acceptable option for Lebanon. "We are not," he said, "ready to replicate the Anglo- American model in Iraq."