Regarding the situation in South Lebanon, the Secreatry-General [sic] said that "both parties have to respect the ceasefire...Parties with complaints on the ground, they should come to General Pellegrini, not take matters into their own hands...It’s a bit like having a football match where one of the teams also attempts to play the referee. You cannot be a team in a football match and the referee at the same time."
Kofi Annan is a complete idiot, and his analogy is not only false but offensive.
When one is dealing with issues of life and death, you do not rely on a third party - you rely on yourself. To say that a war is like a football match is breathtaking in its naivete.
When the "referee" has a history of favoring one side over the other, he is no longer a referee - at best he is an ineffectual bystander, at worst he is an enemy.
Which is proven by the next day's press release:
On 30 August the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) withdrew from the general area of Bastra and the area south of the Kafr Shuba and Shaba villages along the Blue Line in the Eastern part of South Lebanon. UNIFIL has established checkpoints and will carry out intensive patrolling to confirm that the IDF are no longer present in this area. UNIFIL plans to handover the area to the Lebanese Armed Forces.
Notice how UNIFIL defines its role - not to catch weapons smuggling from Syria, not to ensure that Hezbollah does not re-establish itself in the vacuum - but only to see if Israel is really gone. Which will require "intensive patrolling," as if the IDF is trying to hide.
After all of the sound and fury about 1701 and the Israeli hostages and the need to disarm Hezbollah and how important it is to stop illegal arms imports into Lebanon, in the end the UN is only concerned with one thing - getting Israel out of the way so that Hezbollah can be safely re-armed with no interference from the "referee."