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UN: Security on Lebanon-Syria Border Lax
Ya think? This report is UNFIL's way of disowning responsibility for a situation they helped to facilitate last year.
Security along the Lebanon-Syria border is too lax to prevent arms smuggling and Lebanon should quickly establish a mobile force to intercept any weapons, a U.N.-appointed team said in a report obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The team said the four agencies that manage Lebanon's side of the border don't coordinate operations or planning or share intelligence. In addition, most of Lebanon's border posts are far from the border and operate without clear procedures to determine which goods to inspect and which people to question.

The situation makes it easy for a determined smuggler to move explosives, light weapons and ammunition, and even heavy weaponry such as missiles and rockets into Lebanon concealed in trucks and passenger vehicles, the team said.

While the five-member team said it found "widespread professional will to secure the borders of Lebanon," it also found "the present state of boder security was insufficient to prevent smuggling, in particular the smuggling of arms, to any significant extent."

"The assessment was further strengthened by the fact that not a single on-border or near-border seizure of smuggled arms has been documented to the team," the 46-page report said.

The team said Lebanon's failure to stop any arms smuggling "is troubling" and shows the need for a solution that will dramatically increase the ability of enforcement agencies to detect weapons.

The U.N. Security Council authorized the independent mission to assess how the frontier is being monitored following reports of arms smuggling across the border.

Weapons transfers to Hezbollah militants are banned under the U.N. resolution that ended last summer's 34-day war between Israel and the Iranian- and Syrian-backed fighters.

The team recommended that Lebanon create a multi-agency mobile force to combat arms smuggling; adopt international standards for immigration and cargo checks; relocate border posts close to the border and establish cooperation with Syrian border guards.

Trends in other countries indicate that Lebanese seizures of gasoline, clothing and other items could be an indication that weapons are also crossing the border, the report said.

It said heavily armed Palestinian refugee camps in the border zone constitute "a major obstacle" to border security, it said, and the incomplete delineation of the Lebanon-Syria border also poses difficulties
Posted by: lotp 2007-06-27
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=191823