Yehuda Blum, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, has charged that a statement issued here last Thursday by the Security Council president, which indirectly censured the Palestine Liberation Organization was “yet another demonstration at the United Nations of the double standard in everything involving the PLO” but not the only one in that statement.
The statement by the Council president, Porfirio Munoz Ledo of Mexico, condemned the June 19 killing of two Fiji soldiers of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) by PLO terrorists, but the statement did not refer to the PLO by name, but to “armed elements,” a UN euphemism for the PLO.
Blum recalled, in his charge, on Friday that most of the 64 UNIFIL casualties died directly or indirectly from PLO actions. Blum said that this was still “the first time that the Security Council has at all seen fit to pronounce itself when the PLO has been responsible for the killings. In that sense,” he remarked, the statement “is a new departure and a welcome one.”
But Blum also noted that the Council president’s statement was “almost congratulatory of the PLO since it expresses encouragement at the establishment of ‘a group … to investigate these events.’ In contrast with previous practice, that ‘group’ was not established by the UN or UNIFIL but by those responsible for the slaughter of the Fijian soldiers — that is by the PLO itself.” What it all really meant, he observed, was that “the terrorists are being left to police themselves.”
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