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AMP Report - September 16, 2007
25th commemoration of Sabra and Shatila massacre
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
September 16, 2007 marks the 25th anniversary of one of the bloodiest and most brutal massacres in recent history, the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. Twenty five years ago, on this day, right wing Phalangist militia forces, under the watchful eyes of the Israeli military occupiers, slaughtered more than 3,000 Palestinian residents of two refugee camps. The overwhelming majority of those murdered were women, children and elderly men.
Thousands of people, who marched on September 15 in Washington DC to demand the immediate end of the war in Iraq, also joined the people throughout the world to remember and salute the victims of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. There were also vigils in many U.S. cities to pay homage to the victims of a terrible crime and express solidarity with the struggling people of Palestine.
On Sept. 16, 1982, shortly after the Israeli army seized control of West Beirut, right-wing Phalangist militia forces, under the direction of Israeli forces, made their way into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila located on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital. Once in the camps the militias massacred hundreds of defenseless men, women and children.
Israeli troops, who were in control of the area, allowed the militias into the camps, prevented the refugees from fleeing for their lives, and lit the night sky with a continuous series of flares as the killing raged for two days. The US had pulled its troops out of Beirut just days prior to the massacres, and had given a guarantee of protection to the residents of the refugee camps.
To this day, there has been no direct accountability for the killings.
Following massive outrage and protest from the international community as well as from Israeli citizens, the Israeli government formed The Kahan Commision of Inquiry. The Commission found that Israel was responsible for participating in the massacre and recommended the dismissal of the Army Chief of Staff. Rafual Eitan. Then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was also forced to resign after the Commission concluded that he bore personal responsibility for the massacre, and should never hold public office again. However, in 2001, Sharon became the Prime Minister of Israel, a position he held until he suffered a massive stroke which rendered him incapable of carrying out his duties as Prime Minister.
Interestingly, Elie Hobeika, the Phalangist commander at the time massacre, was never tried for the horrific crime that was condemned by the UN General Assembly. He later became a minister in the Lebanese government.
The 25th commemoration of the massacre is a reminder to the tragedy of exile of Palestinian refugees who have been expelled from their homeland for more than half a century and their vulnerability as a stateless people. It underlines the necessity for a just settlement to the Palestinian problem including the refugee issue based on the Right of Return, which is enshrined for all refugees in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and was specifically applied to the Palestinian refugees in UN Resolution 194.
Many Palestinians lived in refugee camps in Lebanon, having been forced from their homes and lands in Palestine in the Israeli invasion and occupation of 1948. Today, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live in Lebanon as refugees, continue to be denied civil and human rights in Lebanon, and continue to be prevented from returning to their homes in Palestine. They are prevented from returning home because they are Palestinian, and because Israel that has occupied their land since 1948 is determined to erase Palestinian existence, identity and self-determination from the land of Palestine.
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 1983 Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during its invasion of Lebanon - popularly known as MacBride report - found that these atrocities "were not inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political will and cultural identity." 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.
The attacks on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon did not end with Sabra and Shatila. Recently, the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp came under attack by the Lebanese Army ostensibly in pursuit of a small, non-Palestinian armed group, yet the Palestinians of the camps fell as civilian casualties and saw their homes and much of the camp utterly destroyed in a manner difficult to imagine anywhere other than a refugee camp.
The aim of the 1982 massacre was to break the spirit of the Palestinian people and crush their resistance by means of an extraordinarily horrific terrorist act. It failed to achieve that objective.
Today, the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination, including the fundamental right of those living in exile to return to their homeland, continues.
Eye witness account of the massacre
British journalist, Robert Fisk, was one of the first journalists to be present at the scene of the horrific murders in Lebanon, September 17th, 1982. He details the aftermath of the horrific massacre in his book, "Pity the Nation." Here is an except from the book:
What we found inside the Palestinian camp at ten o'clock on the morning of September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been medical examinations before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never overlooked by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident - how easily we used the word "incident" in Lebanon - that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist activity. It was a war crime.
Jenkins and Tveit were so overwhelmed by what we found in Chatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. Bill Foley of AP had come with us. All he could say as he walked round was "Jesus Christ" over and over again. We might have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of bodies, killed in the heat of combat. Bur there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.
Where were the murderers? Or to use the Israelis' vocabulary, where were the "terrorists"? When we drove down to Chatila, we had seen the Israelis on the top of the apartments in the Avenue Camille Chamoun but they made no attempt to stop us. In fact, we had first been driven to the Bourj al-Barajneh camp because someone told us that there was a massacre there. All we saw was a Lebanese soldier chasing a car theif down a street. It was only when we were driving back past the entrance to Chatila that Jenkins decided to stop the car. "I don't like this", he said. "Where is everyone? What the f**k is that smell?"
Just inside the the southern entrance to the camp, there used to be a number of single-story, concrete walled houses. I had conducted many interviews in these hovels in the late 1970's. When we walked across the muddy entrance to Chatila, we found that these buildings had been dynamited to the ground. There were cartridge cases across the main road. I saw several Israeli flare canisters, still attached to their tiny parachutes. Clouds of flies moved across the rubble, raiding parties with a nose for victory.
Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.
The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old. They were dressed in jeans and coloured shirts, the material absurdly tight over their flesh now that their bodies had begun to bloat in the heat. They had not been robbed. On one blackened wrist a Swiss watch recorded the correct time, the second hand still ticking round uselessly, expending the last energies of its dead owner.
On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.
Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed into her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.
"...As we stood there, we heard a shout in Arabic from across the ruins. "They are coming back," a man was screaming, So we ran in fear towards the road. I think, in retrospect, that it was probably anger that stopped us from leaving, for we now waited near the entrance to the camp to glimpse the faces of the men who were responsible for all of this. They must have been sent in here with Israeli permission. They must have been armed by the Israelis. Their handiwork had clearly been watched - closely observed - by the Israelis who were still watching us through their field-glasses.
When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a massacre? Or, put another way, how many killings make a massacre? Thirty? A hundred? Three hundred? When is a massacre not a massacre? When the figures are too low? Or when the massacre is carried out by Israel’s friends rather than Israel's enemies?
That, I suspected, was what this argument was about. If Syrian troops had crossed into Israel, surrounded a Kibbutz and allowed their Palestinian allies to slaughter the Jewish inhabitants, no Western news agency would waste its time afterwards arguing about whether or not it should be called a massacre.
But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians. The guilty were certainly Christian militiamen - from which particular unit we were still unsure - but the Israelis were also guilty. If the Israelis had not taken part in the killings, they had certainly sent militia into the camp. They had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance - the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila - and they had established military liason with the murderers in the camps.
http://www.care2.com/news/member/726835551/480929
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