|
November 28, 2001
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
November 25, 2001
Ralph Nader
The Crisis
in Leadership
Sam Bahour
Israel's
Choice
November 24, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
He Who
Has
the Guns Rules
November 23, 2001
Phyllis
Pollack
Long
Live The Clash
Cockburn/St. Clair
The Press
and
the Patriot Act
November 22, 2001
Oscar
Gonzalez
A
Homeland Thanksgiving
November 21, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Rep. Chambliss
Calls for Arrest of Every Muslim That Enters Georgia
Tom Turnipseed
Broadcasting
and Bombing
David Price
Academia Under
Attack
Molly
Secours
Modern
Day Witch Trials
Tariq Ali
Killing
Mr. Biswas
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
November 28,
2001
Sabra
and Chatila Massacres
After 19 years, The Truth at Last?
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
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.
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 Cite 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."
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."
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.
The evidence centres on the Camille Chamoun
Sports Stadium-- the "Cite 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".
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?
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."
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 Cite 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.)
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".
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.
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 Cite 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?
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 Cite 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
Cite Sportif, as the Israelis told us," she says. "I
never saw my sons or brother again."
The survivors tell distressingly similar
stories. Bahija Zrein says she was ordered by an Israeli patrol
to go to the Cite 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."
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.
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.
Even before the slaughter inside the
camps had ended, Shahira Abu Rudeina says she was taken to the
Cite 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.
Long after the war, the ruins of the
Cite 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.
|