- Another war on terror. Another proxy army. Another
mysterious
massacre. And now, after 19 years, perhaps the truth at last...
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- The eyes of the world are on Afghanistan, but today a
Belgian appeals court is due to consider a case with disturbing
contemporary
parallels. Robert Fisk reveals shocking new evidence that the full,
horrific
story of the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1982 has not yet been
told
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- Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as
she recalls the chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that
overwhelmed
her just over 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982. As one of the survivors
prepared to testify against the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon - who
was then Israel's defence minister - she stops to search her memory when
she confronts the most terrible moments of her life. "The Lebanese
Forces militia [Phalangists] had taken us from our homes and marched us
up to the entrance to the camp where a large hole had been dug in the
earth.
The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot a Palestinian.
The women and children had climbed over bodies to reach this spot, but
we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in front of us and there
was a roar of shouting and screams from the women. That's when we heard
the Israelis on loudspeakers shouting, 'Give us the men, give us the men.'
We thought, 'Thank God, they will save us.'" It was to prove a cruelly
false hope.
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- Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her husband
Hassan,
30, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing in the
crowd of men. "We were told to walk up the road towards the Kuwaiti
embassy, the women and children in front, the men behind. We had been
separated.
There were Phalangist militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside
us. I could still see Hassan and Faraj. It was like a parade. There were
several hundred of us. When we got to the Cité Sportif, the Israelis
put us women in a big concrete room and the men were taken to another side
of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the camp and I could no longer
see my husband. The Israelis went round saying 'Sit, sit.' It was 11am.
An hour later, we were told to leave. But we stood around outside amid
the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men."
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- Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for
Hassan and Faraj to emerge. "Some men came out, none of them younger
than 40, and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still
inside. Then about 4pm, an Israeli officer came out. He was wearing dark
glasses and said in Arabic: 'What are you all waiting for?' He said there
was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There were Israeli trucks moving
out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn't see inside. And there were jeeps
and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it
got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very nervous.
But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there was
no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I never saw
my husband again."
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- Today, a Belgian appeals court will begin a hearing to
decide if Prime Minister Sharon should be prosecuted for the massacre of
Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut
in 1982. (Belgian laws allow courts to try foreigners for war crimes
committed
on foreign soil.) In working on this case, the prosecution believes that
it has discovered shocking new evidence of Israel's involvement.
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- The evidence centres on the Camille Chamoun Sports
Stadium
- the "Cité Sportif". Only two miles from Beirut airport,
the damaged stadium was a natural holding centre for prisoners. It had
been an ammunition dump for Yasser Arafat's PLO and repeatedly bombed by
Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut so that its giant, smashed
exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The Palestinians had earlier
mined its cavernous interior, but its vast, underground storage space and
athletics changing-rooms remained intact. It was a familiar landmark to
all of us who lived in Beirut. At mid-morning on 18 September 1982 - about
the time Sana Sersawi says she was brought to the stadium - I saw hundreds
of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, probably well over 1,000, sitting
in its gloomy, dark interior, squatting in the dust, watched over by
Israeli
soldiers and plain-clothes Shin Beth (Israeli secret service) agents and
men who I suspected were Lebanese collaborators. The men sat in silence,
obviously in fear. From time to time, I noted, a few were taken away. They
were put into Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles - for
further "interrogation".
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- Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, inside
the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps, up to 600 massacre victims
rotted in the sun, the stench of decomposition drifting over the prisoners
and their captors alike. It was suffocatingly hot. Loren Jenkins of The
Washington Post, Paul Eedle of Reuters and I had only got into the cells
because the Israelis assumed - given our Western appearance - that we must
have been members of Shin Beth. Many of the prisoners had their heads
bowed.
But Israel's Phalangist militiamen - still raging at the murder of their
leader and president elect Bashir Gemayel - had been withdrawn from the
camps, their slaughter over, and at least the Israeli army was now in
charge.
So what did these men have to fear?
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- Looking back - and listening to Sana Sersawi today -
I shudder now at our innocence. My notes of the time, subsequently written
into a book about Israel's 1982 invasion and its war with the PLO, contain
some ominous clues. We found a Lebanese employee of Reuters, Abdullah
Mattar,
among the prisoners and obtained his release, Paul leading him away with
his arm around the man's shoulders. "They take us away, one by one,
for interrogation," one of the prisoners muttered to me. "They
are Haddad [Christian militia] men. Usually they bring the people back
after interrogation, but not always. Sometimes the people do not return
them." Then an Israeli officer ordered me to leave. Why couldn't the
prisoners talk to me, I asked? "They can talk if they want,"
he replied. "But they have nothing to say."
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- All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps.
The smell of the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist jeep
with the words "Military Police" painted on it - if so exotic
an institution could be associated with this gang of murderers - drove
by. A few television crews had turned up. One filmed the Lebanese Christian
militiamen outside the Cité Sportif. He also filmed a woman pleading
to an Israeli army colonel called "Yahya" for the release of
her husband. (The colonel has now been positively identified by The
Independent.
Today, he is a general in the Israeli army.)
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- Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a
line of Israeli Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking,
watching the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos, some being
set free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men in
drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had happened inside the
camps. One of the members of the tank crews, Lt Avi Grabovsky - he was
later to testify to the Israeli Kahan commission - had even witnessed the
murder of several civilians the previous day and had been told not to
"interfere".
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- And in the days that followed, strange reports reached
us. A girl had been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen
and taken away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier. Then the
cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a US television chain
complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested her husband. He was never
seen again. There were other vague rumours of "disappeared"
people.
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- I wrote in my notes at the time that "even after
Chatila, Israel's 'terrorist' enemies were being liquidated in West
Beirut".
But I had not directly associated this dark conviction with the Cité
Sportif. I had not even reflected on the fearful precedents of a sports
stadium in time of war. Hadn't there been a sports stadium in Santiago
a few years before, packed with prisoners after Pinochet's coup d'etat,
a stadium from which many prisoners never returned?
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- Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to
indict Ariel Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday,
17 September 1982, she said, while the massacre was still (unknown to her)
underway inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in her home with her family
in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps. "Neighbours came and said
the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so we went downstairs and we
saw both Israelis and Lebanese Forces [Phalangists] on the road. The men
were separated from the women." This separation - with its awful
shadow
of similar separations at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war - were a common
feature of these mass arrests. "We were told to go to the Cité
Sportif. The men stayed put." Among the men were Wadha's two sons,
19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and her brother Mohamed. "We
went to the Cité Sportif, as the Israelis told us," she says.
"I never saw my sons or brother again."
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- The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija
Zrein says she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cité
Sportif and the men with her, including her 22-year-old brother, were taken
away. Some militiamen - watched by the Israelis - loaded him into a car,
blindfolded, she claims. "That's how he disappeared," she says
in her official testimony, "and I have never seen him again
since."
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- It was only a few days afterwards that we journalists
began to notice a discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600
bodies
had been found inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians had been reported
as "missing". We assumed - how easy assumptions are in war -
that they had been killed in the three days between 16 September 1982 and
the withdrawal of the Phalangist killers on the 18th, that their corpses
had been secretly buried outside the camp. Beneath the golf course, we
suspected. The idea that many of these young people had been murdered
outside
the camps or after the 18th, that the killings were still going on while
we walked through the camps, never occurred to us.
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- Why did we not think of this at the time? The following
year, the Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning Sharon
but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on 18 September, with just a
one-line hint - unexplained - that several hundred people may have
"disappeared"
at about the same time. The commission interviewed no Palestinian survivors
but it was allowed to become the narrative of history. The idea that the
Israelis went on handing over prisoners to their bloodthirsty militia
allies
never occurred to us. The Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila are now giving
evidence that this is exactly what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh,
believes his brother Ali was handed to the Phalange on the morning of the
18th. A Palestinian Christian woman called Milaneh Boutros has recorded
how, in a truck-load of women and children, she was taken from the camps
to the Christian town of Bikfaya, the home of the newly assassinated
Christian
president-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a grief-stricken Christian woman
ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in the truck. He was shot. The
truck must have passed at least four Israeli checkpoints on its way to
Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I realise now that I had even met the woman
who ordered the boy's execution.
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- Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended,
Shahira Abu Rudeina says she was taken to the Cité Sportif where,
in one of the underground "holding centres", she saw a retarded
man, watched by Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her evidence
might be rejected were it not for the fact that she also expressed her
gratitude for an Israeli soldier - inside the Chatila camp, against all
the evidence given by the Israelis - who prevented the murder of her
daughters
by the Phalange.
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- Long after the war, the ruins of the Cité Sportif
were torn down and a brand new marble stadium was built in its place,
partly
by the British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony of what may
lie beneath its foundations - and its frightful implications - might give
Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment.
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