Haaretz
Kislev 20, 5767
Nobel laureate Desmond
Tutu said Monday that the Israeli government's failure to permit a
fact-finding mission to investigate Israeli-Palestinian violence was "very
distressing."
"We find the lack of cooperation by the Israeli
government very distressing, as well as its failure to allow the missing
timely passage to Israel," Tutu told reporters after UN officials said
Israel had blocked his UN fact-finding mission to the Gaza
Strip.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Monday
that no final
decision has been made.
"Israel heard that they
decided not to come. We had not given them a negative response, our final
decision was pending," Regev said.
"At times not making a decision
is making a decision," said Tutu. "We couldn't obviously wait in limbo
indefinitely."
The former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town said he
had accepted the mission on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council "at
short notice."
"We cancelled important commitments to make
ourselves available for this task and to submit a report by mid-December
to the council," Tutu said, adding that to take up the mission he had left
the bedside of his wife, who was in a hospital following a knee
operation.
Christine Chinkin, a law professor at the London School
of Economics, said she and other members of the a team had hoped to meet
with Israeli authorities and had therefore decided against entering Gaza
through Egypt.
"That would be one-sided. It would not give us the
full picture. It would also look as though we were going in the back
door," she said. "It was in no way at all a one-sided
mission."
Because of the failure of Israel to approve the mission
in time, the mission team had had to cancel its appointments in Israel and
the Gaza Strip with people involved in the conflict.
Tutu was to
begin leading a six-member team over the past weekend in the
northern
Gaza town of Beit Hanun to investigate the killings of 19civilians in an
Israeli artillery barrage last month.
But Israel refused to grant
the South African anti-apartheid campaigner the necessary travel
clearance, said officials in two separate UN departments who spoke on
condition of anonymity before Tutu spoke.
Tutu's team was supposed
to report its findings to the UN Human Rights
Council by Friday. It is
unclear if Israel will allow the fact-finding mission to take place at a
later date.
Israeli officials have expressed concern that Tutu's
mission was only
entrusted with investigating alleged human rights
violations committed by
Israel, and not also by Palestinian
militants.
The 47-nation council authorized the mission last month,
asking Tutu to assess the situation of victims, address the needs of
survivors and make
recommendations on ways to protect Palestinian
civilians against further
Israeli attacks.
The shelling, which
Israel said was unintended, came after its troops wound up a weeklong
incursion meant to curb Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel from the
town.
Palestinian militants frequently use Beit Hanun as a staging
ground for their rocket attacks on Israel.
"We had a problem not
with the personalities, we had a problem with the
institution," Regev
said. "We saw a situation whereby the human rights
mechanism of the UN
was being cynically exploited to advance an anti-Israel agenda. This would
do the Israelis, the Palestinians and peace in the Middle East no good at
all. This would also have done nothing to serve the interest of human
rights."
The council, which replaced the widely discredited Human
Rights Commission in June, has been criticized for passing eight
resolutions criticizing Israel in its six-month existence, but none
censuring any other government's policies.
UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan urged the watchdog last month to deal with the Mideast conflict
in an impartial manner, and said it was time to focus attention on
"graver" crises such as Darfur. After that, European countries rallied
enough support to require the council to hold a special session on Darfur,
which has been scheduled for Tuesday.
"I'm glad the council will be
discussing it, because it does underscore what makes for the credibility
of an institution or of a person," Tutu said. "Human rights violations are
human rights violations wherever they would occur."