Even UN admits Blue Line is not a border - Hizbullah

05 November 2008

BEIRUT: An agreement between the United Nations and the Lebanese government confirms that the UN-mandated Blue Line is not the international border between Lebanon and Israel, a Hizbullah spokesman said Tuesday. When the Blue Line was established, Hussein Rahhal told The Daily Star, there was "an agreement between the Lebanese government and the UN [that] the Blue Line is not the border."

In widely published comments Monday, Hizbullah's international relations officer, Nawaf Moussawi, warned that "we should be attentive to attempts to consider the Blue Line a border line, which strips Lebanon of millions of square meters from its national soil."

"Zionist terrorist organizations," he said, "moved the border line from what was established in 1920 to a new line in 1923 which stripped Lebanon of seven villages and 20 farms."

"We cling to our rights in combating the Israeli breaches and are responsible for combating these aggressions," he added.

Timor Goksel, the former spokesman for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) which is charged with, among other things, patrolling the Blue Line, called Moussawi's statement "unusual."

Statements like these, he said, haven't been heard in some time.

Hizbullah has generally emphasized other areas, Goksel noted, but added that "it's always been there in the background."

In the early 1920s, following World War I, France and Britain negotiated the border between France's mandated territory in Lebanon and Syria and Britain's mandate in Palestine. The agreement incorporated a series of Lebanese villages into Mandate Palestine.

This colonial border agreement, affected by the influx of Jewish immigrants into Mandate Palestine, was reinforced by the Armistice Demarcation Line between Lebanon and Israel in 1949.

After Israel withdrew from most of South Lebanon in 2000 after a 22-year occupation, the United Nations established a line of withdrawal, known as the Blue Line, to be monitored by the United Nations peacekeeping forces in the South.

Retired Lebanese General Amin Hotteit, who participated in the negotiation process that created the demarcation line, told The Daily Star that "the mission of the Blue Line stopped in August 2000" because it was a line of withdrawal.

He added that "Israel and the international media want to create the Blue Line as an international border."

Hotteit said that in 2000 Lebanese officials used their "documents and maps" to clearly show that the border was distinct from the Blue Line.

Chafiq Masri, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut, also noted the difference between international borders and internationally mandated demarcation lines.

"In the year 2000," he said, "the secretary general of the UN announced that the Blue Line was, according to his terms, the line of withdrawal - the operational line ... That had nothing to do with the boundary."

The Lebanese government, he continued, submitted a letter of protest to the secretary general noting Lebanese areas that remained under occupation, like the Shebaa Farms and a series of villages and strategic points along the border.

In 2000, Masri said, the UN seemed to consider the Shebaa Farms area Syrian. But following cartographic work done in coordination with Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended hostilities of the summer 2006 war, there was some acknowledgment that the area was indeed Lebanese - a claim backed by both Syria and Lebanon.

The fact that the Shebaa farms area is separated from Lebanon by the Blue Line, like the villages and farms mentioned by Moussawi, "indicates that it is a line to be respected [but] not a boundary," Masri said.

"Violations," he added, "are always there" from Israel - by land, air and sea - and other non-governmental actors.

Belgium extends Unifil role, but will cut troops

BRUSSELS: Belgium will extend the mandate of its peacekeeping contingent in Lebanon but plans to cut troop numbers by almost a third, the Defense Ministry said Tuesday.

The Belgian contingent will remain part of the UNIFIL peacekeeping force until at least August although it will be slashed to 216 troops from the current 335, a spokesman said.

The cut is mainly due to the closure of a Belgian field hospital near Tibnin, South Lebanon.

Most of the Belgian troops in the more than 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission are involved in demining.

A Belgian was killed in September carrying out such duties.

South Lebanon is littered with unexploded Israeli munitions from the 2006 conflict, particularly bomblets from cluster munitions.

The UN estimates that around 40 percent of the 1 million cluster bomb submunitions dropped by Israel failed to explode.

UN deminers have now cleared 43 percent of the affected areas, but at least 30 Lebanese civilians have been killed by such ordnance left over from the war. - AFP

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.