Abstract
One difficulty the United Nations faced from the beginning was to know whether — or how — to deal with civil wars. Theoretically the organization was not established to deal with domestic conflicts. These appeared to be explicitly excluded from its authority by Article 2(7), prohibiting its intervention in matters within domestic jurisdiction. Yet in a cold war world of diminishing distances, a large proportion of the wars that occurred were civil wars in which there was often some external involvement, overt or concealed. In deciding whether to become involved in such cases one question the organization had to decide was: did the fighting derive only from internal causes, or had there been in addition some intervention from without?
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Notes
Urquhart, Hammarskjöld (London, 1972) p. 269.
It has been suggested by an experienced observer who was present in Lebanon at the time that the group’s reports reflect a ‘mixture of futility and fatuousness. It was clear that the observers, by their own account, were in no position to gather conclusive evidence concerning infiltration. There was ample opportunity for men and supplies to have passed unnoticed; where partial evidence was gathered, it could not be confirmed. Yet both reports went so far as to draw presumptive conclusions that had the effect of minimising the Lebanese government’s case at the UN. … From my conversations in the years after the crisis, with a good many persons of widely varying allegiances in Lebanon, it seemed clear to me, that, whether a significant amount of infiltration had occurred was not a serious issue among the Lebanese themselves. It was generally recognised that it had’ (M. Kerr, ‘The Lebanese Civil War’, in Evan Luard (ed.), The International Regulation of Civil Wars (London, 1972), pp. 87–8).
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© 1989 Evan Luard
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Luard, E. (1989). Lebanon and Jordan. In: A History of the United Nations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20030-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20030-6_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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