- Title: SYRIA: Syria's quest to regain Golan takes new shape
- Date: 28th November 2007
- Summary: (MER1) GOLAN FRONTLINE, SYRIA (RECENT) (REUTERS) AN ISRAELI MILITARY POST VISIBLE ON A HILLTOP ON THE ISRAELI-OCCUPIED SIDE OF THE GOLAN HEIGHTS WITH BARBED WIRE VISIBLE IN THE FOREFRONT, SEPARATING THE ISRAELI-OCCUPIED SIDE FROM THE SYRIAN SIDE OF THE GOLAN VEHICLES DRIVING BY INSIDE ISRAELI-OCCUPIED SIDE OF GOLAN
- Embargoed: 13th December 2007 12:00
- Keywords:
- Topics: International Relations
- Reuters ID: LVADCWOZUR8EQHQTH3XEY6E9AKFX
- Story Text: Syria is rebuilding an area just inside a ceasefire line separating the occupied Golan Heights from the rest of Syria, to provide housing for villagers who lost their homes to Israel. Their new homes will face their original hilltop village of Adnanieh, which Israel occupied in battle four decades ago.
Under the gaze of an Israeli military post, Syrian bulldozers slice through rocky terrain to build roads just inside a ceasefire line separating the occupied Golan Heights from the rest of Syria.
Apartment blocks will follow for thousands of refugees on land facing their hilltop village of Adnanieh, which was lost to Israel in battle 40 years ago along with the rest of the Golan, a fertile plateau south of Damascus.
More than 1,000 flats for refugees from Adnanieh are planned, and infrastructure is being laid out for housing schemes facing other occupied villages, government engineer Hilal al-Ghaeb told Reuters.
"There is a genuine desire of the people of this village to return to their village. There are requests for this, and these request go back to 1974," al-Ghaeb said.
Al-Ghaeb said other similar projects will take place in the future to house Golan refugees, who number 600,000 counting their descendants.
"We, God willing, are about to rebuild all the villages which were liberated from Israeli occupation," al-Ghaeb said.
The Golan is at the focus of Syria's participation in the U.S.
sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, which starts on Tuesday (November 27).
President Bashar al-Assad agreed to send a delegation only after receiving a modified copy of the agenda with a session on restarting Syrian-Israeli peace talks, which collapsed in 2000 over the Golan.
Pro-U.S. Arab governments have put pressure on Damascus to join them at Annapolis. But Syrian officials had made it clear they expect the conference to make little progress towards resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Hafez al-Assad, Syria's late president, refused an Israeli offer seven years ago to withdraw from most of the Golan without giving Syria control of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.
The elder al-Assad told then U.S. President Bill Clinton that he used to swim in the lake before Israel occupied the Golan. Bashar has stuck by the landmark laid by his father -- full Israeli withdrawal in return for peace.
After decades of neglect, Syria is pouring money into services in frontline Golan territory to draw back residents -- and help raise the profile of an issue it wants back on the international agenda.
A theatre hall is being built further east from the ceasefire line.
Workers occasionally run into mines or unexploded missiles, and United Nations peacekeepers are called to dismantle them.
The government has also launched a media campaign to highlight the Golan's richness in water and wildlife, and the fact that thousands of Syrians under occupation have refused Israeli citizenship.
This coincided with a renewed Syrian diplomatic push to regain the plateau, following international pressure that forced the Baathist government to withdraw Syrian forces from Lebanon in 2005 after a 29-year presence.
An Israeli warplane flies overhead and a tractor driven by an Israeli settler ploughs the fertile land.
Syria launched a war in 1973 that failed to regain the Golan but it won back small parts of the plateau a year later under a ceasefire agreement that has held firmly since.
The deal gave the Golan's capital Qunaitera back to Syria, but only after Israeli forces blew up the city's houses and buildings. Today Qunaitera remains in rubble as evidence of what Hafez al-Assad called "Israeli barbarity".
Officials said there was no active plan to rebuild the city. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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