Security along the Lebanese-Syrian border is "insufficient" to prevent arms smuggling from Syria, a team of experts said in a report issued Wednesday and presented to the Security Council a day earlier. The team, led by Lasse Christensen of Denmark, recommended a radical overhaul of security measures along what the 46-page report called the "Green" border separating the countries.
"The present state of border security is insufficient to prevent smuggling, in particular of arms, to any significant extent," the report said.
Five international security experts known as the UN Lebanon Independent Border Assessment Team (LIBAT) spent three weeks in Lebanon probing allegations of arms smuggling across the border with Syria.
"Not a single on-border or near-border seizure of smuggled arms has been documented to the team," the team reported.
Neither the government nor the opposition issued an immediate reaction to the report.
The Security Council reiterated last month its "deep concern" at mounting reports of "illegal movements of arms" across the Lebanese Syrian-border, amid fears of escalating strife.
The concern was raised after the council was briefed by UN Middle East envoy Terje Roed Larsen, who drew an "alarming and deeply disturbing picture" of the border situation, citing Lebanese Army reports of "a steady flow of weapons and armed elements across the border from Syria."
The team's mandate was to probe Lebanon's monitoring system along its 320-kilometer border with Syria.
The team did not visit Syria, which has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Syria closed three of its northern border posts following the outbreak of clashes at Nahr al-Bared refugee camp near Tripoli, preventing the team from witnessing operations at the crossings in questions.
The experts, who visited all four official land border points - Arida and Al-Aboudieh in the North and Qaa and Masnaa in the east - as well as Beirut's airport and seaport, acknowledged the difficulty of monitoring numerous unchecked cross-border trails and pathways that made large-scale smuggling easy.
"On the eastern border, inhabitants rely heavily on cross-border commerce, technically illegal but neither controlled nor prevented by the Lebanese or Syrian border authorities," said the report.
One of the major concerns expressed by the team was the presence of "heavily armed Palestinian military strongholds" on both sides of the border.
The report also said "political sympathies, family/clan connections or traditional corruption" were to blame for what it called a "worrying lack of performance" by border authorities.
In response, the team called for the deployment "of international border-security experts" to back up a new Lebanese "multi-agency mobile force" that would be tasked with doing a better job of stemming the arms smuggling.
The report said that current management of the border by four different Lebanese security agencies "was rather low," and recommended that the agencies get training to gain better skills at coordinating operations and sharing intelligence.
The report also said most of Lebanon's border posts are far from the border, are not fenced or secured by gates, and operate with no clear procedures to determine which goods to inspect - and which people to question.
"Therefore, the ingenious smuggler may find it quite easy to conceal not only explosives, light weapons and ammunition, but also assembled and unassembled heavy weaponry such as missiles and rockets into the country concealed in compartments and panels of cargo trucks and passenger vehicles," the team said.
The report by experts from Denmark, Algeria, Germany, Jamaica and Switzerland largely avoided comment on the touchy issue of Lebanese-Syrian ties, but suggested that Lebanese border officials set up currently lacking cooperation with Syrian counterparts.
Source : The Daily Star