_________________________________________________ From: "Boyle, Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: "STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN!" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 13:48:35 -0600 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: FW: INDICT SHARON NOW! [STOPNATO.ORG.UK] Francis A. Boyle Law Building 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Champaign, IL 61820 USA 217-333-7954(voice) 217-244-1478(fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> INDICT AND ARREST ARIEL SHARON NOW! JOIN US IN THIS WORLDWIDE CAMPAIGN TO DEMAND THAT SHARON BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE! * Circulate the petition and the background information (see below) to your friends and colleagues, and to nongovernmental organizations, media, and government officials in your home country. * Sign the petition (see below) by sending an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] We will add your name, or your organization's name, to the list of signatories. If you are signing as an individual, please -- if you wish -- provide your city/country of residence, profession, and organizational affiliation so this information can be published along with your name. It is our goal that this initiative reflect the views of an international constituency, North and South, that remembers the gravity of Ariel Sharon's actions and is committed to seeking international justice in his case. We encourage Israeli citizens and nongovernmental organizations to sign the petition, join this campaign, and raise inside Israel the issue of Ariel Sharon's impunity. * Notify your local newspapers and other media about this campaign, and submit letters to the editor and opinion pieces about Ariel Sharon and the importance of ending his impunity for massacres of innocent civilians. * Once we have collected signatures, we will recommend other specific activities in your home countries designed to raise the profile of this campaign. We also will circulate to other signatories any suggestions for activities that you send to us at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TEXT OF THE PETITION: We, the undersigned, believe that Ariel Sharon should be indicted and brought to justice. As an Israeli military officer and as minister of defense, Ariel Sharon was a principal in the first degree to murder, war crimes, grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and crimes against humanity, causing the death and injury of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. As Israel's minister of defense and architect of that country's brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Ariel Sharon's actions and failure to act facilitated the massacre of at least seven hundred to eight hundred - and by some accounts as many as 3,000 -- Palestinian, Lebanese, and other civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut in September 1982. Three decades earlier, as a young military officer, Ariel Sharon led an Israeli elite commando force, Unit 101, which carried out brutal raids against Palestinians. The massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya, on October 14, 1953, was perhaps the most notorious. Sharon's unit blew up 45 houses in the village, killing 69 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, according to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his recent book The Iron Wall. Judicial authorities in the State of Israel have never shouldered their legal responsibilities and thoroughly investigated and prosecuted Ariel Sharon for these massacres and other crimes. In our view, the failure of the Israeli legal system to act obligates the nations that are High Contracting Parties of the Geneva Conventions to hold Ariel Sharon accountable, irrespective of whether he is a private citizen of Israel, a cabinet minister, or the head of government. Article 146 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War states that each High Contracting Party "shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed" grave breaches of the Convention, "and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts. It may also, if it prefers, and in accordance with the provisions of its own legislation, hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party concerned, provided such High Contracting Party has made out a prima facie case." Article 147 of the Convention states that the grave breaches noted in Article 146 include willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Recent developments in the emerging system of international justice -- including the cases of Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, and others -- provide compelling precedents for ending the impunity that Ariel Sharon has thus far enjoyed. He should be indicted for the crimes for which he has been responsible as the first step in a process of accountability that will bring justice to his victims and their families. SIGNATORIES as of January 11, 2001 (Organizations are listed for identification purposes only unless otherwise indicated) Paul Aarts Department of Political Science/International Relations Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences University of Amsterdam The Netherlands Gasser Abdel Razek Member of the Board of Directors Egyptian Organization for Human Rights Cairo, Egypt Hossam Bahgat Cairo Times Staff journalist Cairo, Egypt Francis A. Boyle Professor of Law University of Illinois College of Law, Champaign, Illinois, USA Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92) Abdeen Jabara Attorney New York, New York, USA Walid Keirouz, Ph.D. Beirut, Lebanon Laurie King-Irani Anthropologist/Writer Annapolis, Maryland, USA Isam al Khafaji, Iraqi writer International School for Humanities University of Amsterdam The Netherlands Rasha Mansour (Jordanian citizen) Training Specialist Institute of International Education/ Development Training II Project Cairo, Egypt. Maria Montagna Canada Roger Normand Center for Economic and Social Rights Brooklyn, New York, USA Mary Ramadan Attorney Bethesda, Maryland, USA Samar Said Training Manager Giza, Egypt Shifra Stern Legal Secretary Bronx, New York, USA BACKGROUND INFORMATION The 1982 Sabra and Shatilla Massacre: The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatilla took place from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on September 18, 1982, in an area until the control of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The perpetrators were members of the Phalange (Kata'eb, in Arabic) militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed. To cite only one post-massacre eyewitness account, that of U.S. journalist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: "Mostly I saw groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun fire." An official Israeli commission of inquiry -- chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court -- investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret until now). The Kahan Commission found that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report stated in pertinent part: "It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defence for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defence for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defence Minister was charged." The Commission also concluded: "[I]n his meeting with the Phalangist commanders, the Defence Minister made no attempt to point out to them the gravity of the danger that their men would commit acts of slaughter....Had it become clear to the Defence Minister that no real supervision could be exercised over the Phalangist force that entered the camps with the IDF's assent, his duty would have been to prevent their entry. The usefulness of the Phalangists' entry into the camps was wholly disproportionate to the damage their entry could cause if it were uncontrolled." The Commission further noted: "We shall remark here that it is ostensibly puzzling that the Defence Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister [Menachem Begin] privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps." The 1953 Massacre in Qibya: Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote this about the massacre: "Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses. The UN observer who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion: "One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them. The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan). According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies had been still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighbouring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel. The U.S. Department of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953, expressing its "deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives" in the Qibya attack as well as the conviction that those responsible "should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in the future." (Department of State Bulletin, Oct. 26, 1953, p. 552) At the Security Council's meeting on 20 October 1953, it decided unanimously to examine recent violations of the General Armistice Agreements and the Qibya attack in particular. It was agreed that the council would invite and hear a report by its representative, Major General Vagn Bennike, chief of staff of the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization, in order to obtain accurate information concerning the facts. Maj. Gen. Bennike reported to the Security Council on 27 October 1953. He said that, following the receipt of a Jordan complaint that a raid on the village of Qibya had been carried out by Israeli military forces during the night of 14-15 October between 9:30 p.m. and 4:30 a.m., a United Nations investigation team had departed from Jerusalem for Qibya in the early morning of 15 October. On reaching the village, the Acting Chairman of the Mixed Armistice Commission had found that between 30 and 40 buildings had been completely demolished. By the time the Acting Chairman left Qibya, 27bodies had been dug from the rubble. Witnesses had been uniform in describing their experience as a night of horror, during which Israeli soldiers had moved about in their village blowing up buildings, firing into doorways and windows with automaticweapons and throwing hand grenades. A number of unexploded hand grenades, marked with Hebrew letters indicating recent Israel manufacture, and three bags of TNT had been found in and about the village. An emergency meeting of the Mixed Armistice Commission had been held in the afternoon of 15 October and a resolution condemning the regular Israel army for its attack on Qibya, as a breach of article III, paragraph 2,62/ of the Israel-Jordan General Armistice Agreement, had been adopted by a majority vote. The Chief of Staff stated that he had discussed with the Acting Chairman of the Mixed Armistice Commission the reasons why he had supported the resolution condemning the Israel army for having carried out the attack, and that, after listening to his explanations, he had asked him to state them in writing; the technical arguments given by Commander Hutchison in his memorandum appeared to the Chief of Staff to be convincing. At the Security Council's meeting on 16 November 1953, the representative of Jordan requested that the council condemn Israel for the Qibya massacre in the strongest term, and ask Israel to prosecute and punish all Israel officials, military or civilians, responsible for the killings. The representative of Lebanon made a similar request. Security Council Resolution 101, adopted on 24 November 1953 (with Lebanon and the USSR abstaining) found the retaliatory action at Qibya by Israeli forces a violation of the cease-fire provisions of Security Council Resolution 54 (1948) and inconsistent with the parties' obligations under the General Armistice Agreement between Israel and Jordan and the Charter of the U.N., and expressed "the strongest censure of that action." The resolution also called on the governments of Israel and Jordan to prevent all acts of violence on either side of the demarcation line, but did not call on Israel to hold accountable and bring to justice those who carried out the massacre. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ FreePalestine (397 members) is an independent Palestinian Voice in the Global Wilderness. FP affords Palestinians & friends an uncensored forum to share information & views. FP is not the forum to disparage any particular or promote religion. 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