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Shebaa Farms is a disputed agricultural area consisting of a dozen or so abandoned farms located southwest of Shebaa, a Lebanese village on the northwestern slopes of Mount Hermon, at the junction of Syria, Lebanon and Israel. The area is about 14 km in length and averages 2.5 km in width, at altitudes of 150 to 1,880 meters. This fertile farm land produced barley, fruits and vegetables. The Lebanese village of Shebaa is not part of the Shebaa Farms area. There is controversy about whether the Shebaa Farms are part of Lebanon or the Golan Heights, a region claimed by both Israel and Syria.

The region was captured by Israel from Syria during the Six Day War of 1967 and remained under Israeli control after the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon until 2000. The Lebanese refer to the ridge at the northern end of the Shebaa Farms area as the Kafr Shuba Hills, an area that Israel refers to as Har Dov. This ridge, also partly within Lebanon, is east of the Lebanese village of Kafr Shuba.

The Lebanese claim to this area provides a pretext or rationale for Hezbollah's continuing hostilities towards Israel and resulting cross border attacks. Israeli officials believe that any withdrawal from the area would cause another border dispute.

The United Nations and most of the world community, including Israel, agree that Shebaa Farms is part of SyriaReport of the Secretary-General on the implementation of Security Council resolutions 425 (1978) and 426 (1978), May 22, 2000.. But the Lebanese government now claims that it is part of Lebanon. The Syrian government has yet to officially reverse its long-standing position that the area is part of Syria, and every known map produced to date by the Syrian government shows the area as part of Syria.

Despite verbal pronouncements by Syria that the area does belong to Lebanon, Syria has so far refused to cooperate with the UN's and Lebanon's request to officially delimit and demarcate the border, not just in the Shebaa area but over its entire length. The Syrian government does not recognize the independence of Lebanon, Jordan, or Israel de jure, believing them to be properly part of Greater Syria.

Israel's view is that the area is not covered by United Nations UN Security Council Resolution 425 that governs its withdrawal from southern Lebanon. That resolution asks for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon according to the line its forces were positioned at before the May 14 1978 invasion. (See: Blue Line)

On May 22 2000, Israel completed its withdrawal from the south of Lebanon in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 425 The UN certified Israel's pullout January 20, 2005 UN Secretary-General's report on Lebanon explicitly stated: "The continually asserted position of the Government of Lebanon that the Blue Line is not valid in the Shab'a farms area is not compatible with Security Council resolutions. The Council has recognized the Blue Line as valid for purposes of confirming Israel’s withdrawal pursuant to resolution 425 (1978). The Government of Lebanon should heed the Council’s repeated calls for the parties to respect the Blue Line in its entirety." [http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/sc8299.doc.htm" target="_blank" >*

Lebanon's Reservations

The Lebanon parliament regards this UN certification of the withdrawal as invalid because of Lebanon's claim to the Shebaa Farms. Lebanese officials point to land deeds, stamped by the Lebanese government, that were held by a number of residents in the area in the 1940's and 1950's.

On May 19, 2005, the Brookings Institution reported that "in drawing the "Blue Line" in 2000, the United Nations looked at more than ninety different maps of the region. Only one of them—which was deemed a forgery—showed the Sheba'a Farms as Lebanese." On Feb. 13, 2006, a 'Beirut Times' article reported on a Lebanese parliament member displaying the map and revealing that it was a "fake map" with the boundary shifted. [http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=22163 Other than this purported "1966" forged map submitted to the UN in 2000, Lebanese army maps published in 1961 and 1966 specifically show the Shebaa Farms area (including Zebdine, Fashkoul, Mougr Shebaa and Ramta) as being on the Syrian side of the border. All known Syrian maps and all known Lebanese Ministry of Tourism maps also show the Lebanese-Syrian border running west of the Shebaa Farms, which would place Shebaa Farms to the east of the border and therefore within Syria. (See map in body of article)

The United Nations states:

"On 15 May 2000, the United Nations received a map, dated 1966, from the Government of Lebanon which reflected the Government's position that these farmlands were located in Lebanon. However, the United Nations is in possession of 10 other maps issued after 1966 by various Lebanese government institutions, including the Ministry of Defense and the army, all of which place the farmlands inside the Syrian Arab Republic. The United Nations has also examined six maps issued by the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic, including three maps since 1966, which place the farmlands inside the Syrian Arab Republic." UN Document S/2000/460

Origins

The dispute over the sovereignty of the Shebaa Farms originated in part with the failure of the French Mandate administrations to properly demarcate the border between Lebanon and Syria. Documents from the 1920s and 1930s show that the local inhabitants regarded themselves part of Lebanon, for example paying taxes to the Lebanese government, but that French officials often expressed confusion on the question of where the border lay. A French official in 1939 expressed the belief that the uncertainty was sure to cause trouble in the future.

While never demarcated, detailed maps showing the border were produced by the French in 1933 and again in 1945, "Beyrouth" 1:200,000 sheet NI36-XII available in the U.S. Library of Congress and French archives. They clearly showed the region in Syria, but the commission responsible for demarcating the border in the decades after the French mandate ended in 1946 did not act decisively nor delimit or demarcate this area. Border disputes had arisen frequently, leading to the formation of a joint Lebanese-Syrian border demarcation commission. That commission never made a ruling on the Shebaa Farms area, and no official demarcation of the border actually occurred. The older maps showing the Shebaa Farms in Syria continued to be used and new detailed ones were produced in the 1960's by Lebanon showing the area to be entirely within Syria. However, many local residents continued to regard themselves as Lebanese; the Lebanese government showed little interest. The Syrian government imposed itself on the region, at one point forcibly replacing the villagers' Lebanese identity cards with Syrian ones. On the eve of the 1967 war, the region was under effective Syrian control.

The disputed territory was not apparently mentioned by the Lebanese government after the 1967 Six Day War or the 1973 October War as an occupation issue and appears to have arisen only as a result of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000.

Since the controversy over the border surfaced in 2000 after the UN had certified Israel's withrawal from Lebanon as full and complete and especially after Syria's withrawal from Lebanon, various members of the international diplomatic community have repeatedly requested that Syria and Lebanon take steps to determine the exact boundary between them in the Shebaa Farms region and elsewhere, including officially registering the demarcated border with the United Nations. However, no action on this matter by the two countries has taken place.

External links

Reference

  • Asher Kaufman, Who owns the Shebaa Farms? Chronicle of a territorial dispute, The Middle East Journal; Autumn 2002; 56, 4; 576–596.

Disputed territories | Geography of Israel | Geography of Lebanon | Geography of Syria

Schebaa-Farmen | Fermes de Chebaa | Fattorie di Sheba'a | Šeba

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Shebaa Farms".

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