Wednesday, August 09, 2006
What's the deal with "Shebaa Farms"?
I confess that I had not bothered to run down the controversy over Shebaa Farms until I heard George Galloway cite it to justify Hezbollah's attack on Israel. He is so eloquent and so casual with the truth that I roused myself to do a Google search. I stumbled across an article written by the BBC more than six years ago, at the time of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, that clarified the point considerably. It seems that the border between Lebanon and Syria in that area is not well settled (apparently because the French didn't bother to do it back when they had the "mandate" in that region). Israel withdrew from that part of the tiny area (less than 10 square klicks up in the Golan Heights) that was definitively Lebanon back in 2000, but continued to occupy the part that was arguably Syrian (just as it continues to occupy the rest of the Golan Heights).
The UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote in a report to the Security Council this week that the border was vague.
"There seems to be no official record of an international boundary agreement between Lebanon and Syria that could easily establish the line for purposes of confirming the withdrawal," he said.
Mr Annan proposed that all sides should adopt the line drawn after the 1974 Yom Kippur war [sic], pending a permanent delineation of the border.
This line forms the limit of the area currently monitored by the UNIFIL forces...
Mr Goksel said: "The UN is saying that on all maps the UN has been able to find, the farms are seen on the Syrian side."
The point is complicated by Syria having said the opposite, that Shebaa Farms is actually part of Lebanon. This is probably disingenuous. According to the Wikipedia entry, Lebanon's first claim that Shebaa Farms was Lebanese came in 2000, when Lebanon was controlled by Syria. Syria was backing the claim of its puppet in a transparent attempt to get back land it had lost in 1967.
The six-year old article also contains this foreshadowing:
Analysts say that peace between Hezbollah and Israel would not be in Syria's interests, because it would increase pressure on Damascus to withdraw its forces and slacken its control over Lebanon.
According to Israel Radio the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, said the withdrawal from part of the Shebaa farms area was designed "to remove from Syrian President Hafez al-Assad any excuse to encourage Hezbollah terrorism from Lebanon against Israel."
Ehud Barak was under the mistaken assumption that Hezbollah needed an excuse.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Aug 09, 10:04:00 AM:
Kofi Annan sounds more duplicitous every day. The Security Council should call him on obvious errors of fact.
The UN previously ruled this area as Syrian not Lebanese. It is to late for Kofi to start changing UN policy just to provide cover for Hezbollah's claim that they are there to retake Lebanese land.
