Ban Ki-moon Visits Outposts of U.N. Force in Lebanon
William Hoge
April 1, 2007
New York Times
Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/world/middleeast/01lebanon.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon toured outposts of the vastly expanded United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon on Saturday and was told that the cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah was holding firm.
“We are enjoying a situation in which we have no major incidents and no open display of weapons by anyone,” said Maj. Gen. Claudio Graziano of Italy, the commander of the force, known as Unifil. “We call this Unifil 2,” said General Graziano as he showed Mr. Ban around the new base here, built on what six months ago was a barren rock-strewn hillside. 
The base is one of more than 50 that house soldiers from 30 countries. With the arrival of a South Korean battalion in June, the full complement will be 14,400 soldiers spread across southern Lebanon. 
The complex of bungalow office buildings and barracks here is situated beneath the snow-capped peak of Mount Hermon, with the Litani River three miles to the west and the disputed Golan Heights and Shabaa Farms 10 miles to the east. It is commanded by Spanish officers who were among the 12,000 new troops assigned to the area after the end of last summer’s 34-day war. 
The original United Nations force numbered only 2,000 and was much discredited in Israel for letting Hezbollah dominate the political life of southern Lebanon and build up its arsenal there.
Israel agreed to leave the stretch of borderland in Lebanon last fall only after the United Nations resolved to send in the expanded force from western armies and after Lebanon’s prime minister, Fouad Siniora, pledged to deploy 15,000 Lebanese Army soldiers to the border.
The Lebanese Army did not control the border area for nearly 40 years because of its long occupation by Israel and subsequent domination by Hezbollah.
The mission of the Lebanese Army and the United Nations force is to create a buffer zone between the Litani and the Israeli border that will be free of any weapons or armed personnel except those of the United Nations and the government of Lebanon.
Although Israeli flights continue over the area and militias have not been disarmed, the new augmented force has profoundly changed the look of southern Lebanon.
When then-Secretary General Kofi Annan toured this area at the end of August, the white tanks and vehicles with United Nations in black letters on their sides were few.
Today, there are more than 2,500 vehicles, and they seem to be on every back road. General Graziano said there are 300 patrols every day.
Asked if there were too many soldiers for the relatively small area, General Graziano said, “It could seem that way when you are at peace, but having this large force here is the best deterrent preventing another outbreak.”
Mr. Ban took a helicopter tour of the former war zone and addressed United Nations soldiers at four bases — their seaside headquarters at Naqura, the western sector command center in Tibnin, a border post known as Sheik Abbad Tomb, and here at what a sign at the entrance announces as “Base Cervantes.”
He told them that peacekeeping was the fastest-growing part of the United Nations, with almost 100,000 troops in 18 missions, and that he had chosen restructuring the peacekeeping office as his first reform move as secretary general.
“There is a much higher level of expectations,” he said, noting that he had just obtained General Assembly approval for creating a new office of peacekeeping field support.
Milos Strugar, a senior adviser to the force in Lebanon, said that the only persistent violations of the border were the Israeli flights that he said occurred on a daily basis.
He said that when challenged, Israel told United Nations officials that it could not give up air surveillance until it was sure that arms smuggling had ended and until its two soldiers who were captured at the outset of hostilities in July were accounted for.
Mr. Strugar said there were no reports of smuggling into the zone being patrolled, but he did not dispute the possibility that there are weapons hidden here.
The Security Council resolution that ended the fighting in August called for the disarming of militias in the south, but it left open who would do the disarming. The countries contributing troops to the new force were told that their soldiers would not bear that responsibility, and no one expects the Lebanese to confront Hezbollah, which is more popular than ever after holding off the Israeli military.
A United Nations official with expertise in the area highlighted the reality of the current situation by pointing out a tidy row of buildings in the town of Houla.
Asking for anonymity to avoid upstaging Mr. Ban, he said, “I have no doubt that many of those houses have arms in the basement. But it’s not Unifil’s job to go in and get them, and the Lebanese Army isn’t going to do it.”