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."
How could you tell? I thought those folks were at anger volume 11 all the time.
Moral relativism has a downside. Who knew.
A career UN bureaucrat is as useless as a milk bucket under a bull.
LOL! THAT is funny. Good one!
"They (the UN 'peacekeepers') always boogie at the first hint of trouble."
Unless they can be human shields for terrorists.
I spell relief as... N A P A L M
Nothing smells better than burning napalm in the morning!
"People were enraged collectively in Lebanon, everybody against the Israeli indiscriminate onslaught,"
To talk of an indiscriminate onslaught (only 1% of Beirut was touched) is a blood libel against the Jewish people. But then Egeland is a Norwegian and we've all seen what Norwegians have been up to in recent weeks - publishing cartoons in prominent newspapers which compare Olmert to SS officers, calling for the destruction of Israel, openly siding with Hezbollah.
The Quisling nation has not altered a jot since the vast majority of citizens collaborated with the Nazis to murder half of Norway's Jewish citizens. It really is a vile country.
Don't make the Muzzies angry, they might do something like, uh, crazy.
"They blame suicide bombing on "desperation of occupation". Let me tell you the truth. The first major terror bombing committed by Arabs against the Jewish state occurred ten weeks before Israel even became independent.
On Sunday morning, February 22, 1948, in anticipation of Israel's independence, a triple truck bomb was detonated by Arab terrorists on Ben Yehuda Street, in what was then the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Fifty-four people were killed, and hundreds were wounded. Thus, it is obvious that Arab terrorism is caused not by the "desperation" of "occupation", but by the VERY THOUGHT of a Jewish state."
http://www.betar.co.uk/articles/betar1126275187.php
bttt
President of the World Maronite Union, Sami El-Khoury, said reports on Christian support for Hezbollah is misleading. “Contrary to Western press reports, indicating high percentages of Christian support for Hezbollah, 90 percent of Christians, 80 percent of Sunni and 40 percent of Shiites in Lebanon oppose Hezbollah,” he said.
“Hezbollah is the issue,” said the Rev. Dr. Keith Roderick, Washington representative of CSI and secretary general of the Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights. “A misrepresentation of the position of most Lebanese Christians is underway.”
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20060804/23495.htm
Egeland needs to find another line of work. He is stupid enough to be be proud of admitted failure.
Ah, yes, Jan Egeland - what was his nickname again? Stinge-Bob?
Drawing a nice UN paycheck.
I have been involved and observed UN operations since 1965. You want anger? You should have been in the Middle East following the Six Day War of 1967. Oh, and let's see, there was the anger following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Oh, that's right. There was the anger following Operation Desert Storm. And, finally, there was the anger following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The truth is the Muslim world is just one angry place. While they hate us, they leave some room to hate their governments and then themselves. By the way England was involved in Southern Sudan during the years when hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese were killed or allowed to starve to death. What Israel is doing to Lebanon is child's play compared to recent Muslim depredations in Southern Sudan and Darfur.
hyperbole
Mideast is Virginia/Maryland. This other usage must be Euro-speak.
And who, exactly, is doing all this 'polarizing'? I'd day it's the radical Muslims brainwashing the younger generation in the victim politics they've been dishing out since the 1920's.
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