3rd Dcember 2000

English language gets a UN facelift

For one thing, it has failed to distinguish between "military intervention" and "humanitarian intervention," and for another, it has never been able to draw the line between "terrorists" and "freedom fighters."

The United Nations, which is making an unsuccessful attempt at bridging the gap, remains divided because politics continues to dictate the language of war.

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) decided to unleash its fire power on the former Yugoslavia last year, the killings were justified on the grounds that they were committed in the name of a "humanitarian war."

The Western powers clearly failed to make a distinction between "military intervention" and "humanitarian intervention."

The phrase has been kicked around so often that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has weighed in with his own observations.

"Let's get right away from using the term humanitarian to describe military operations," he notes.

If the abuse of the English language is permitted to continue, he argues, we will not be far off from a dangerous new concept: "humanitarian bombing."

The term may well apply to justify outside military intervention in civil wars, ethnic conflicts and separatist movements as in Sri Lanka, India, China and Russia.

"I myself believe, and I think it is implicit in the UN Charter, that there are times when the use of force may be legitimate and necessary because there is no other way to save masses of people from extreme violence and slaughter," he says.

But that such cases, he argues, should be rare, and it is the job of the international community to make them rarer.

And such military intervention should not, however, be confused with "humanitarian action."

"Otherwise, we will find ourselves using phrases like humanitarian bombing, and people will soon get very cynical about the whole idea," he adds.

Meanwhile, the growing violence in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem has also revived another battle over semantics: the dividing line between a "terrorist" and a "freedom fighter."

Syria and Lebanon, two hardline Middle Eastern neighbours, argue that rock-throwing Palestinians are freedom fighters battling to oust an occupying power.

And any acts of violence by Palestinians are, therefore, justifiable acts against heavily-armed Israelis.

Resistance to Israeli-occupation was not terrorism", says Houssam Asaad Diab, the Lebanese delegate.

To most Arabs, Israeli attacks on mostly unarmed Palestinians are clearly acts of "state terrorism".

Lebanon's position is that there should be a distinction between criminal terrorist acts and acts of people fighting against foreign occupation.

But the Israeli delegate Aaron Jacob, citing the recent bombing of a school bus and the detonation of a car bomb in the heart of Israel, argues that it was disingenuous in the extreme to portray the situation as attacks against defenceless Palestinian children.

"Israeli soldiers had been responding to 1,300 recorded armed attacks," he said. Violence was not justifiable, he said, even if they were perpetrated in the name of national liberation.

As a result of the charges and counter-charges, the UN's Legal Committee last week failed to obtain unanimous support for a draft resolution that condemned persistent worldwide acts of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable - regardless of the objective.

The resolution, which also called for joint international action to eliminate terrorism, was adopted by a vote of 131 in favour to none against but with two abstentions (Syria and Lebanon). About 49 countries were not present at voting time.

The resolution also urges member states not to finance, encourage, provide training for, or otherwise support terrorist activities.

Diab said that Lebanon strongly condemned all acts of terrorism, including organised violence such as murder, the taking of hostages and aircraft hijacking.

But Israeli-occupation and actions against Palestinian civilians remained one of the worst forms of terrorism and must be condemned.

Lebanon has also insisted that there should be a clear definition of terrorism, and that the criteria for that purpose must be established.

"It was the inalienable right of peoples to restore their independence and sovereignty," he said, adding that the draft resolution before the committee did not reflect that view point.

Responding to Cuban charges of American-inspired terrorism against Cuban President Fidel Castro, US delegate Robert Rosenstock laid out the American position: "Terrorism was committed by individuals", he said. "States committed violations of international law.