Posted on 08/11/2006 9:22:48 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
GENEVA - U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said Friday the anger on all sides in the Middle East is the greatest he has seen in two decades of trying to help the troubled region make peace.
"I've never seen nations as polarized as during this recent visit," said Egeland, who was in Lebanon, Israel and the Gaza Strip at the end of July.
"People were enraged collectively in Lebanon, everybody against the Israeli indiscriminate onslaught," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "In Israel, they were a united front to support the strong military measures. In the Palestinian areas, I've never seen them as full of hatred collectively as now. It has to be defused."
Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said he was counting on the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution that will stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and serve as a first step to finally concluding a peace settlement in the Middle East.
"Everybody wants now to find a permanent political solution," he said in his office in the world body's European headquarters. "This has now become a powder keg. You have really to defuse it. You cannot just delay further conflict."
Egeland said the tensions were the worst he had seen in the more than 20 years he has been working to promote peace and human rights in the Middle East, including a stint as a soldier in the U.N. force in Lebanon in 1978 and involvement in securing the Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO in the 1990s.
Egeland said the Israel-Hezbollah fighting could be stopped immediately if there is the will because it isn't protracted and there are only two parties, not 20 as in the Sudanese region of Darfur, which has been wracked by conflict since 2003.
The Security Council has to come up with a resolution that will be respected, Egeland said.
"We've seen resolutions that are effective and we've seen resolutions that are ineffective, and an ineffective one doesn't help us at all," he said. "There has to be some teeth in it and there has to be pressure on the parties to respect it.
"Every day of non-decision in the Security Council costs lives," Egeland said.
Hundreds of Lebanese have already died and the numbers are likely to start going up sharply soon, he said.
"Imagine the predicament of the civilian population. On the one side they've been asked by Israel to leave because it's too dangerous to stay. At the same time, now the Israelis say that they will fire at any truck moving that has not been cleared as a humanitarian convoy by the U.N. or the Red Cross," Egeland said. "The people are really in a desperate situation."
He said it was impossible to predict how many people will die.
"People do not start to starve immediately in a place like Lebanon if they are cut off. For weeks they can eat from whatever reserves they have. Disease does not start to spread immediately. But after a few weeks, there are no more coping mechanisms. Sick people die. Hospitals stop to function, and that has already started because they do not have fuel. Wounded people die because they cannot get medical attention.
"It's not going slowly to the worst, it's going dramatically down after a few weeks in this kind of a situation, and that's why it's so urgent to stop it all with a U.N. resolution and get a cease-fire."
He said that by some measures, the situation for civilians in Congo, Sudan's Darfur region and Iraq is worse than it is in Lebanon, but that the number of Lebanese who have fled their homes was very high.
He said the tensions in the region have made it very difficult to avoid offending parties to the conflict.
"It's part of our lives as humanitarian workers to try to be impartial and neutral in political minefields," Egeland said. "But this one has been particularly difficult to tread. I feel that they are weighing my every word."
"Israel was outraged when I said that it was clearly excessive, clearly disproportionate, and I said a war where you kill more children than armed men — there is something wrong with the way of waging hostilities. Hezbollah was outraged when I said that they are blending in to the civilian population, and it's cowardly to blend in among women and children. It's tough."
Boy...you and I posted that seconds apart!!!! We both picked that same line out!
Good. Keep the Islamo-fascists in a state of perpetual excitement, and they'll be easier to push over.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, seen here with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, called on Iran and Syria to respect the terms of a resolution adopted by the UN Security Council in a bid to end a month of fighting between their ally Hezbollah and Israel.(AFP/HO-UN/Mark Garten)
IIRC, this is the guy who criticized the US for 'not giving enough money' during the Southeast Asia Tsunami in 2004.
Jan Boy. You is dumb
"....in the last 20 years including 1978...."
Got it. I vote for an immediate UN resolution that you go and take some remedial math lessons.
... but in all that time it has never occurred to him that he might be using the wrong techniques.
No doubt. They all need to convert to Jesus and discover real peace.
Glad to see that the UN big wigs do not come with any preordained conclusions.
Never noticed the Kofi can look at two cameras at the same time.
Just proves how useless the UN is and how Islam is anything but peaceful.
His crowning achievement was the Oslo Accord.
He should have been dethroned a long time ago for that one, imo.
Instead, the UN rewards incompetence and mediocrity.
Naaaaa .. they are dumber then a box of rocks
They always boogie at the first hint of trouble.
Too bad, Jan. This time we will have a better plan, and if that means that your overpaid humanitarians and peacekeepers have to get real jobs, that's fine by me.
Seems like he pretty much exposes just how freaking silly he is with that one statement alone.
No Kidding.
This guy is an international political drama queen.
You are 100% right. Its not about breaking the military, especially in this war. Its about breaking the will. They either have to learn to love us or learn to fear us. We can safely assume love is out of the question.
Surgical strikes do not inspire fear. They do nothing to break the will of the people supporting the terrorists. The smart bomb is horrible invention in that regard. Wars end because of how awful they are. When we try to clean war up, we get exactly what we see now. Wars that do not end.
Love of fear. We currently have neither but either will suffice.
---called on Iran and Syria to respect the terms of a resolution---
Yeah, I'm sure they were just waiting to have someone set them straight...
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