http://www.rense.com/general78/atroc.htm

Sabra And Shatila - On Massacres, Atrocities And Holocausts

By Sonja Karkar
WOMEN FOR PALESTINE
MELBOURNE - AUSTRALIA
9-15-2007


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] 

 
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 

 
People with gouged out eye sockets. Faces unrecognisable with the gaping holes 
that had plunged them into darkness before their lives were thankfully ended. 

 
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. 

 
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. 

 
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] 

 
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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