-Caveat Lector- Victims of Palmyra slaughter return to haunt Syria's new leader By Robert Fisk in Beirut 09 July 2001 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=82451 After Ariel Sharon and the war crimes charges that victims of the 1982 Sabra-Chatila refugee camps massacre want to bring against him, it looks as if it is Syria's turn to answer questions about mass graves. Nizar Nayyouf a Damascus journalist who was recently released from jail, where he was being held as a political prisoner, and is now living in Paris is threatening to reveal the location of a mass grave in Syria. Everyone knows he is talking about a place called Tadmor. And now a Maronite Christian group is demanding to open up what they claim is a mass grave at Yarzeh in Lebanon, not far from the ministry of defence in Beirut. And everyone knows that this is referring to the Lebanese soldiers killed by Syrian troops at the end of the civil war in 1990. Mr Nayyouf, who is also threatening to reveal corruption within the Syrian security services, says he was "kidnapped" by Syrian agents in Damascus before President Bashar Assad's state visit to France last month, then beaten because they believed wrongly that he was about to ask for political asylum at the French embassy. He says he was on his way to the doctor. In any event, President Assad or Dr Bashar, as the opthamologist son of the late president Hafez Assad is known in his country announced in Paris that Mr Nayyouf was free to leave Syria. Within hours, he was told he could collect his passport. In the Middle East, everyone is aware of the particular mass grave Mr Nayyouf wants to reveal: the pit outside the Syrian town of Tadmor known in the West as the ancient Roman city of Palmyra in which about 500 prisoners from the local state security jail were buried after their massacre on 27 June 1980, by the so-called "Defence Brigades" of Colonel Rifaat Assad, the now disgraced uncle of Dr Bashar and brother of Hafez Assad. The slaughter of these men, most of them members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, followed an assassination attempt against President Hafez Assad. In his magisterial biography of Assad, the journalist Patrick Seale revealed how Rifaat's 120 gunmen arrived outside Tadmor prison in a fleet of 10 helicopters early in the morning and were "let loose" on the prison dormitories with orders to kill everyone inside. Many of the prisoners died screaming "God is great". Their bodies were later secretly buried beside a low hill outside the desert town. Many Syrians believe hundreds of other political prisoners who either died of mistreatment or were secretly executed also lie buried in graves near the hill. "When Syria allows us," a civilian resident of Tadmor told me many years ago, "we will go to the hill and throw rose petals on all the graves." But there are no rose petals yet. At Yarzeh, a similarly distressing story could unfold. It goes back to 1990 when Michel Aoun, the rebel Lebanese general who thought he was the president, was fighting the Syrian army for the "liberation" of Lebanon. After the Syrians bombed Aoun's palace from the air with American permission, since Washington was seeking President Hafez Assad's support for the Gulf coalition against Saddam Hussein Aoun fled to the French embassy in Beirut and called upon his own soldiers to hold their fire. But on a Beirut suburban hillside called Dahr al-Wahash which ominously translates from Arabic as "the Monster's Back" Lebanese troops did not receive Aoun's last order. So they opened fire on Syrian troops who were advancing through a minefield. At least 150 Syrian soldiers believing the Lebanese had surrendered were cut to pieces by mortar and machine-gun fire amid the mines. When they reached the Lebanese positions, they began executing the Aounists as franc-tireurs irregular partisans who had disobeyed the rules of war. No-one is certain how many Lebanese soldiers were killed. A day later, I found several of them in an unrefrigerated morgue at Baabda, shot through the head, hands tied behind their back, most of them stripped before being killed. Albert Mansour, who was Lebanon's Defence Minister, told me later that there had been "a double massacre" of both Syrians and Lebanese. So why are the Christians so keen to open a grave at Yarzeh? Presumably to embarrass the Syrians and to make life difficult for President Assad, who was 24 at the time and had nothing to do with the killings. At the time of the Tadmor slaughter, he was only 14 years old. After all, if the Christian group was so keen to learn the truth of Lebanon's bloodbath, they could demand the opening of a grave in Sidon which contains the bodies of several Lebanese Muslim prisoners murdered by Israeli guards near the Safa fruit factory in 1982; I investigated these killings at the time. Or of the rebel Maronites who were murdered by their fellow Christians when they tried to overwhelm the Christian Phalange militia towards the end of the civil war. But they are silent on those graves. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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