From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: "STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN!" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 15:59:35 -0500
Don't stop with Sharon...how about the entire Israeli apparatus?
On 13 Jan 01, at 13:48, Boyle, Francis wrote:
>
> 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]>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Boyle, Francis
> Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2001 12:53 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: INDICT SHARON NOW!
>
>
> 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]
>
>
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