Hezbollah warns UN over kidnap tape

Hezbollah says it will consider UN troops as spies

By Frank Gardner in Jerusalem

Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon say they will regard United Nations peacekeepers as spies if the UN hands over a film made by their peacekeepers.

The implication is clear, that Hezbollah's fighters would no longer consider UN troops in south Lebanon to be neutral. Their lives could then be in danger

The 30-minute tape, filmed by an Indian peacekeeper from the UN's monitoring force Unifil, shows UN soldiers trying to recover vehicles allegedly used by Hezbollah fighters when they abducted three Israeli soldiers last October.

Hezbollah said it did not want the UN to give Israel the tape, which was filmed on Lebanese soil.

The Israelis are still being held and Israel is demanding to see the whole tape, unedited, in the hopes it may yield clues as to how its soldiers were taken and by whom.

Israeli anger

So far, the UN has only offered to show it with the faces of non-UN personnel obscured, but even that has enraged the Lebanese.

The head of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, warned it would consider the UN as "spying for the enemy" if it handed over the tape in any form to Israel.

The UN disclosed only last week that it had the tape

The implication is clear - that Hezbollah's fighters would no longer consider UN troops in south Lebanon to be neutral. Their lives could then be in danger.

And in Israel, public belief is growing that the UN has something to hide.

Israelis are angry that the UN kept denying the existence of the tape before admitting last Thursday, with great embarrassment, that it had it all along.

Unnamed Israeli security officials say they suspect Unifil of colluding in the abduction, suggesting to the media that Indian peacekeepers accepted bribes from Hezbollah not to interfere in the kidnapping.

The UN categorically denies any connection between its soldiers and Hezbollah over the abduction.

But the row is serious enough for both the Israeli prime minister's adviser, Dore Gold, and the UN's Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, to have both flown to UN headquarters in New York to try to resolve the crisis.

International deployment?

This whole affair, however it is resolved, does not bode well for the possible deployment of international peacekeepers in the Palestinian territories.

One of the three abducted soldiers

Yasser Arafat has called for them several times now, with support from Europe and elsewhere.

But Israel, backed by the US, has refused. The Israelis believe the involvement of outside forces will only complicate the situation on the ground.

It does not trust the UN to act in its citizens' interests and the wrangle over this tape will only confirm that view.