- The Massacre
-
- It happened twenty-five years ago 16 September
1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget
it. The photos are gruesome reminders charred, decapitated, indecently
violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who
remember it as when they were recoiling from it all those years ago. For
the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without
mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to
this day, the killers have gone unpunished.
-
- Sabra and Shatila two Palestinian refugee camps
in Lebanon were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former
is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of
man's inhumanity to men, women and children - more specifically, Israel's
inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel's bidding and
the world's inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There
were international witnesses - doctors, nurses, journalists - who saw
the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.
-
- Each act was barbarous enough on its own to warrant fear
and loathing. It was human savagery at its worst and Dr Ang Swee Chai
was an eye witness as she worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society
on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead. What she saw was so unimaginable
that the atrocities committed need to be separated from each other to even
begin comprehending the viciousness of the crimes. [1]
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- People tortured. Blackened bodies smelling of roasted
flesh from the power shocks that had convulsed their bodies before their
hearts gave out, the electric wires still tied around their lifeless limbs
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- People with gouged out eye sockets. Faces unrecognisable
with the gaping holes that had plunged them into darkness before their
lives were thankfully ended.
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- Women raped. Not once - but two, three, four times
horribly violated, their legs shamelessly ripped apart with not even the
cover of clothing to preserve their dignity at the moment of death.
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- Children dynamited alive. So many body parts ripped from
their tiny torsos, so hard to know to whom they belonged - just mounds
of bloodied limbs amongst the tousled heads of children in pools of blood.
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- Families executed. Blood, blood and more blood sprayed
on the walls of homes where whole families had been axed to death in a
frenzy or lined up for a more orderly execution.
-
- There were also journalists who were there in the aftermath
and who had equally gruesome stories to tell, none of which made the sort
of screaming front page headlines that should have caused lawmakers to
demand immediate answers. What they saw led them to write shell-shocked
accounts that have vanished now into the archives, but are no less disturbing
now. These accounts too need to be individually absorbed, lest they be
lumped together as just the collective dead rather than the systematic
torture and killing of individual, innocent human beings.
-
- Women gunned down while cooking in their kitchens. [2]
The headless body of a baby in diapers lying next to two dead women.
[3] An infant, its tiny legs streaked with blood, shot in the back by
a single bullet. [4] Slaughtered babies, their bodies blackened as they
decomposed, tossed into rubbish heaps together with Israeli army equipment
and empty bottles of whiskey. [5] An old man castrated, with flies thick
upon his torn intestines. [6] Children with their throats slashed. [7]
Mounds of rotting corpses bloated in the heat - young boys all shot at
point-blank range. [8]
-
- And most numbing of all are the recollections of the
survivors whose experiences were so shockingly traumatic that to recall
them must have been painful beyond all imaginings. One survivor, Nohad
Srour, 35 said:
-
- "I was carrying my one year-old baby sister and
she was yelling "Mama! Mama!" then suddenly nothing. I looked
at her and her brain had fallen out of her head and down my arm. I looked
at the man who shot us. I'll never forget his face. Then I felt two bullets
pierce my shoulder and finger. I fell. I didn't lose consciousness,
but I pretended to be dead."[9]
-
- The statistics of those killed vary, but even according
to the Israeli military, the official count was 700 people killed while
Israeli journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk put the figure at 3,500. [10] The
Palestinian Red Crescent Society put the number killed at over 2,000.[11]
Regardless of the numbers, they would not and could not mitigate what
are clear crimes against humanity.
-
- Fifteen years later, Robert Fisk, the journalist who
had been one of the first on the scene, said:
-
- "Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years
ago, would anyone doubt that the world's press and television would be
remembering so terrible a deed this morning? Yet this week, not a single
newspaper in the United States or Britain for that matter
has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila."[12]
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- Twenty-five years later it is no different.
-
-
- The political developments
-
- What happened must be set against the background of a
Lebanon that had been invaded by the Israeli army only months earlier,
supposedly in 'retaliation' for the attempted assassination of the Israeli
Ambassador in London on 4 June 1982. Israel attributed the attempt to
Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) then resident in Beirut.
In reality, it was a rival militant group headed by Abu Nidal. Israel
wanted to oust the PLO from Lebanon altogether and on 6 June 1982, Israel
began its devastating assault on the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian
population in the southern part of Lebanon. Lebanese government casualty
figures numbered the dead at around 19,000 with some 30,000 wounded, but
these numbers are hardly accurate because of the mass graves and other
bodies lost in the rubble. [13]
-
- By 1 September, a cease-fire had been mediated by United
States envoy Philip Habib, and Arafat and his men surrendered their weapons
and were evacuated from Beirut with guarantees by the US that the civilians
left behind in the camps would be protected by a multinational peacekeeping
force. That guarantee was not kept and the vacuum then created, paved
the way for the atrocities that followed.
-
- As soon as the peacekeeping force was withdrawn, the
then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon moved to root out some "2,000
terrorists" he claimed were still hiding in the refugee camps of
Sabra and Shatila. After totally surrounding the refugee camps with tanks
and soldiers, Sharon ordered the shelling of the camps and the bombardment
continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening of 15 September
leaving the "mopping-up" of the camps to the Lebanese right-wing
Christian militia, known as the Phalangists. The next day, the Phalangists
- armed and trained by the Israeli army - entered the camps and proceeded
to massacre the unarmed civilians while Sharon and his men watched the
entire operations. More grotesquely, the Israeli army ensured there was
no lull in the 36 hours of killings and illuminated the area with flares
at night and tightened their cordon around the camps to make sure that
no civilian could escape the terror that had been unleashed.
-
- Inquiries, charges and off scot-free
-
- Although Israel's Kahan Commission of Inquiry did not
find any Israeli directly responsible, it did find that Sharon bore "personal
responsibility" for "not ordering appropriate measures for preventing
or reducing the danger of massacre" before sending the Phalangists
into the camps. It, therefore, lamely recommended that the Israeli prime
minister consider removing him from office. [14] Sharon resigned but remained
as Minister without portfolio and joined two parliamentary commissions
on defence and Lebanese affairs. There is no doubt, as Chomsky points
out "that the inquiry was not intended for people who have a prejudice
in favour of truth and honesty", but it certainly gained support
for Israel in the US Congress and among the public. [15] It took an International
Commission of Inquiry headed by Sean MacBride to find that Israel was
"directly responsible" because the camps were under its jurisdiction
as an occupying power. [16] Yet, despite the UN describing the heinous
operation as a "criminal massacre" and declaring it an act of
genocide [17], no one was prosecuted.
-
- It was not until 2001 that a law suit was filed in Belgium
by the survivors of the massacre and relatives of the victims against
Sharon alleging his personal responsibility. However, the court did not
allow for "universal jurisdiction" - a principle which was intended
to remove safe havens for war criminals and allow their prosecution across
states. The case was won on appeal and the trial allowed to proceed, but
without Sharon who by then was prime minister of Israel and had immunity.
US interference led to the Belgian Parliament gutting the universal jurisdiction
law and by the time the International Criminal Court was established in
The Hague the following year, the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila
massacre could no longer be tried because its terms of reference did not
allow it to hear cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide
pre-dating 1 July 2002. Neither Sharon nor those who carried out the massacres
have ever been punished for their horrendous crimes.
-
- The bigger picture
-
- The length of time since these acts were carried out
should be no impediment to exposing the truth. More than 60 years after
the Nazi atrocities against the Jews in Europe, the world still mourns
and remembers and erects monuments and museums to that violent holocaust.
How they are done, to whom they are done and to how many does not make
the crimes any more or less heinous. They can never be justified even
on the strength of one state's rationale that another people ought to
be punished, or worse still, are simply inferior or worthless beings.
It should lead all of us to question on whose judgment are such decisions
made and how can we possibly justify such crimes at all?
-
- The atrocities committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila
should be put in the context of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian
people. The MacBride report found that these atrocities "were not
inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political
will and cultural identity." [17] Since Deir Yassin and the other
massacres of 1948, those who survived have joined hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians fleeing a litany of massacres committed in 1953, 1967
and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the killing is still going on today.
Thus were the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre
gathered up in the perpetual nakba of the slaughtered, the dispossessed,
the displaced and the discarded - a pattern of ethnic cleansing perpetrated
under the Zionist plan to finally and forever extinguish Palestinian society
and its people.
-
- This is why we must remember Sabra and Shatila, twenty-five
years on.
-
-
-
- Footnotes:
-
- [1] Dr Ang Swee Chai, "From Beirut to Jerusalem",
Grafton Books, London, 1989
-
- [2] James MacManus, Guardian, 20 September 1982
-
- [3] Loren Jenkins, Washington Post, 20 September 1982
-
- [4] Elaine Carey, Daily Mail, 20 September 1982
-
- [5] Robert Fisk, "Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War",
London: Oxford University Press, 1990
-
- [6] Robert Fisk, ibid.
-
- [7] Robert Fisk, ibid.
-
- [8] Robert Fisk, ibid.
-
- [9] Lebanese Daily Star, 16 September 1998
-
- [10] Amnon Kapeliouk, "Sabra & Chatila
Inquiry into a Massacre", November 1982
-
- [11] Schiff and Ya'ari,, Israel's Lebanon War, New York,
Simon and Schuster, 1984,
-
- [12] Robert Fisk, Fifteen Years After the Bloodbath,
The World turns its Back, shaml.org, 1997
-
- [13] Noam Chomsky, "The Fatal Triangle" South
End Press,
- Cambridge MA, p.221
-
- [14] The Complete Kahan Commission Report, Princeton,
Karz Cohl, 1983, p. 125 (Hereafter, the Kahan Commission Report).
-
- [15] Chomsky, ibid. p.406
-
- [16] The Report of the International Commission to Enquire
into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion
of the Lebanon, Sean MacBride, 1983 (referred to as the International
Commission of Inquiry or MacBride report)
-
- [17] United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 16
December 1982
-
- [18] MacBride report, ibid. p.179
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