Quick: Whose side is the United Nations on in the war on terror? This might be a trick question. As everyone knows, Turtle Bay takes no sides. But some terrorists evidently believe the world body is their enemy, and Secretary-General Ban is sufficiently, and justly, concerned.

Mr. Ban recently withdrew Johan Verbeke from Beirut, although the Belgian diplomat has barely visited the country since his April appointment as special representative to Lebanon. Mr. Verbeke had to leave “for personal reasons,” a U.N. spokeswoman, Michele Montas, told me in an explanation that does not add up. Immediately after Michael Williams, a Briton, replaced him in Beirut, Mr. Verbeke was appointed U.N. special representative in Georgia. If personal issues were a problem in Beirut, would not the hot zone of Tbilisi be just as problematic?

Several sources have told me that Mr. Verbeke’s hasty departure had little to do with Lebanon’s internal issues. Instead, it followed threats on Mr. Verbeke’s life in relation to a previous Turtle Bay role. As Belgium’s U.N. ambassador, Mr. Verbeke in the last few years headed an obscure Security Council sanctions committee.

The 1267 Committee, named after the council resolution that formed it, coordinates and enforces an assets freeze on Osama bin Laden and 482 of his henchmen. Formed in 1999, when the Clinton administration enlisted the United Nations to fight terrorism in the aftermath of the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the sanctions committee evidently struck no fear in the hearts of the September 11, 2001, terrorists. Like all U.N. bodies, however, the 1267 Committee did not become extinct, even after a new administration in Washington decided to employ more muscular anti-terror measures, including the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam regimes.

According to several sources, Mr. Verbeke’s name has appeared on some of the most sinister Web sites connected to Al Qaeda that saw the sanctions committee as a symbol of the United Nations’s bias against Muslims. The threat was sufficient for the U.N. leadership, in coordination with some terror-fighting bodies, to take Mr. Verbeke out of the Muslim country. Mr. Williams, who had left Turtle Bay last year for London to serve as Middle East adviser for Prime Minister Brown, has now rejoined the United Nations. (It would be foolish for anyone serving that fast-fading British administration to do otherwise.)

It is difficult to remain neutral in the war on terror, as Turtle Bay finds out time and again. After the overthrow of the Saddam regime in Baghdad, the United Nations wanted to appear as unconnected to the liberators, asking American-led coalition troops to stay clear of its blue-flagged Canal Hotel headquarters. The result was an August 19, 2003, bombing of the poorly protected hotel, in which 22 people were killed, including the U.N. special representative there, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

While the number of the Canal Hotel bombing victims was miniscule compared to other death tolls in the larger war on terror, it is seen at Turtle Bay as a watershed event. The United Nations immediately withdrew all its representatives from Iraq. Although some personnel have since returned, the current government in Baghdad would love a significant increase in the U.N. presence in the country, Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Hamid al Bayati, told me last week. But the trauma still felt here five years after the bombing will assure that the United Nations will maintain its very low profile in Iraq.

Very influential U.N. voices, meanwhile, are urging the organization to become even more neutral. Turtle Bay is “not perceived as impartial, independent, and neutral” in the war on terror, a veteran U.N. official from Algeria, Lakhdar Brahimi, wrote recently in a U.N. report he wrote after Al Qaeda bombed the organization’s mission in Algiers. Specifically, Mr. Brahimi wrote, Middle Easterners perceive the Security Council as biased as it addresses many world problems while ignoring the “question of Palestine.”

I doubt that even with a Security Council resolution to erase Israel from regional maps, thus presumably solving the “question of Palestine,” the men who have threatened Mr. Verbeke’s life would be satisfied. Like it or not, the United Nations is seen as an instrument of a world order that the bombers of Algiers, Baghdad, and Beirut want to end. Neutrality in this war is not an option.

The United Nations has a problem taking sides with anyone, but as the Verbeke episode demonstrates, the war on terror leaves little choice.

bavni@nysun.com