On Monday, the United Nations Interim Force Lebanon gave the U.N. Security Council the evidentiary basis to impose new sanctions on the Lebanese Hezbollah. But because Russia holds the U.N. hostage and most U.N. member states despise Israel, new sanctions are very unlikely to be forthcoming.
Still, what’s going on here is unquestionable. Israel recently launched an operation to clear Hezbollah tunnels into its territory. Now UNIFIL has found that “after further technical investigations conducted independently in accordance with its mandate, UNIFIL at this stage can confirm that two of the tunnels cross the Blue Line. These constitute violations of U.N. Security Council resolution 1701.”
That’s prima facie grounds for U.N. Security Council sanctions against Lebanese Hezbollah. After all, resolution 1701 ended the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war after being accepted by both nations’ governments and passed by a unanimous Security Council. That resolution committed Lebanon to stopping Hezbollah from militarizing its southern territory and ending its armed activities. While that expectation of Lebanese action against Hezbollah was absurd in the context of Hezbollah’s stranglehold over Lebanese politics, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, did offer his support for the resolution. In turn, considering that the U.N.’s own independent inspection of Hezbollah tunnels has confirmed they are in breach of resolution 1701, it naturally follows that the U.N. Security Council now impose sanctions on Hezbollah.
But even though a security council meeting will be held on Wednesday and that Russia voted in favor of resolution 1701 in 2006, Vladimir Putin’s government is unlikely to vote to sanction Hezbollah now. China might do so in order to further entrench its position in Israel, but Russia won’t. Vladimir Putin knows Hezbollah’s proximate relationship to Iran gives him leverage over both Iran and Israel. When it comes to real interests and power, U.N. resolutions are irrelevant.
So once again, the U.N. is about to prove just how useless it has become, and why it is in desperate need of reform.
