Innocent
Victims Caught Up
In A War Of Endless Revenge
By Robert Fisk
24 May 2007
The
Independent
It
is a place of Palestinian fury - and almost as much Palestinian blood.
The bandage-swaddled children whimpering in pain, frowning at the strange,
unfatherly doctors, the middle-aged woman staring at us with one eye,
a set of tubes running into her gashed-open stomach, a series of bleak-faced,
angry, young men, their bodies and legs torn apart.
There was eight-year Youssef
al-Radi who was cut open by shrapnel in the arm and back yesterday morning
and brought to the Palestinian Safad hospital at Badawi, another refugee
camp in Tripoli, his feet bleeding, a tiny figure on a huge stretcher.
He hasn't been told that his mother died beside him. Nor that his father
is still in the Nahr el-Bared camp.
And let us not forget six-year-old
Aiman Hussein, who was hit by up to a hundred pieces of metal from a
Lebanese army shell - in the neck and the spine, the tibia, the foot,
the back, you name it. The doctors had to rush him to Tripoli because
they could not operate. Visit the Safad hospital if you dare. Or climb
gingerly out of your car on the Lebanese army's front line at Nahr el-Bared
and walk past the sweating, tired soldiers who have been told they are
defending Lebanon's sovereignty by doing battle with the gunmen of Fatah
al-Islam - who are still hiding in the smashed, smoking ruins on the
edge of the Palestinian camp.
Some of the buildings look
like Irish lace and a mosque's green minaret has a shell hole just below
the platform where the muezzin's call would be heard five times a day,
as if a giant had punched at it in anger. There is even a field of ripped-up
tents, which must have been what this camp looked like when the grandfathers
of those wounded children arrived here from Palestine in 1948.
The Lebanese armoured personnel
carriers were dug into the rich earth, and the soldiers were sheltering
behind a collection of smashed houses, petrol stations and lock-up garages.
We found two colonels in one garage, who politely offered us coffee,
and a lieutenant who had lived in Montreal and who called a mutual friend
of ours - a Lebanese army colonel in the south of Lebanon - who roared
with laughter down his mobile phone: "Robert, what are you doing
in Nahr el-Bared?" As if he didn't know.
I looked across the camp.
Was it worth all this pain, the grotty, empty streets, the broken apartment
block with dirty grey smoke still drifting from its windows? The Lebanese
soldiers claim they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another
army which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be killed
or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know how many -
not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or Saudi
Arabia? Just behind me was the checkpoint where the gunmen of Chaker
el-Absi (born Jericho 1955, later a MiG pilot in Libya, according to
his brother in Jordan) butchered four soldiers at the weekend, slitting
their throats and leaving their severed heads on the road.
Most of the troops around
me were from the north of Lebanon - so were the murdered soldiers. Had
there been feelings of revenge rather than military discipline when
they first opened fire? There were certainly growls of retaliation in
the Safad hospital - named, with terrible coincidence, after the very
town in pre-Israel Palestine from which many of Nahr el-Bared's refugee
families originally came - and Fatah, the old Arafat PLO Fatah, now
had armed men on the streets to protect the medical personnel and the
new, wounded refugees from the next burst of fury.
All day, the ambulances ran
a ferry service of wounded from the camp, sirens shrieking through the
wards, spilling out the wounded and the sick and the ancient men and
women who could bear no more. They were given small sacks of bread -
like animals newly arrived at market, I couldn't help thinking - and
led away.
They had heard all the political
statements. Nicolas Sarkozy, the new French President, had been on the
phone to the Lebanese Prime Minister, insisting that he should not give
in to "intimidation" - perhaps he thought the Palestinians
were the same kind of "scum" that he called the rioting Arabs
of the Paris suburbs last year - and President Bush gave his his support
to the Lebanese government and army.
And Walid Jumblatt said of
the Syrian President that "the Lebanese Army ought to crush Fatah
al-Islam once and for all to prevent Assad from turning Lebanon into
a second Iraq". That's all the talk now, that another sovereign
Arab nation might become a new Iraq. The Algerians were saying the same
two days ago, that Islamist suicide bombers were trying to turn Algeria
into "a new Iraq".
What, I kept asking myself
yesterday, have we unleashed now? Well, you can ask Suheila Mustafa
who stood yesterday at the bedside of her 45-year-old sister, Samia,
so terribly wounded by army shellfire in the face that she could neither
talk nor focus upon us with her bloated left eye. "We had just
woken up when we heard the first barrage of gunfire," she said.
"My sister was beside me and fell down with her head bleeding.
She haemorraged from 5.50 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. At
last my brother brought us all out in his car. But let me tell you this.
The Palestinian people have heard Walid Jumblatt and we say 'thank you'
to him and let us have more shelling.
"And I would like to
thank Prime Minister Siniora, and say thanks - really thanks - very
much to George Bush and to Condoleezza Rice. I really want to thank
them for these shells and these wounds we are suffering. And if Rice
really wants to send more materiel to the Lebanese Army, she had better
hurry up. There is a woman still in the camp who is very pregnant and
the child in her womb will be born and will grow into a man - and then
we'll see!"
Of course, one wants to remind
Suheila - perhaps not her dreadfully wounded sister - that the Palestinians
are guests in Lebanon, that by allowing Fatah al-Islam to nest on the
edge of their north Lebanon camp, they were inviting their own doom.
But victimhood - and let us not doubt the integrity or the dignity of
that victimhood - has become almost a pit for the Palestinians, into
which they have fallen. The catastrophe of their eviction and flight
from Palestine in 1948, their near-destruction in the Lebanese civil
war, their cruel suffering at the hands of Israeli invaders - the massacre
of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 where 1,700 were slaughtered - and now
this, have sealed these people into a permanent prison of suffering.
I found an old lady in Safad
hospital, whimpering and sobbing. She was 75, she said, and her daughter
had just brought out her own two-month-old child and this was the fifth
time she had been "displaced". She used that word, "displaced".
She had lost her home in Palestine in 1948 and four more times in Lebanon
her home had been destroyed. And on what date did she leave Palestine,
I asked? "I can read and write," she said. "But I no
longer have the memory of being so exact."
No wonder that in all the
Palestinian camps of Lebanon yesterday, they were protesting the "massacre"
at Nahr el-Bared with gunfire and burning tyres.
And so we continued through
the wards. There was Ghassan Ahmed el-Saadi, who had arrived at the
camp's medical centre to distribute bread with his friends Abdul Latif
al-Abdullah and Raad Ali Shams. "A shell came down and my friends
both fell dead at my feet," said Mr Saadi, who is a mass of tubes
and wounds and a bloody foot.
There was Ahmed Sharshara,
just eight years old, with a huge plaster over his chest. A hunk of
shell had entered his back and broken into his spine and partly emerged
from his chest. The X-ray showed a piece of metal like a leaf in his
stomach. His lungs were still being drained.
And there was Nibal Bushra
who went to his balcony on Sunday morning to find out why the camp was
being shelled when a single bullet hit his brother. Then a sniper's
bullet hit him. For two days he lay bleeding in the camp before being
brought out.
"I wish they would take
us to a European country because we are not safe here, and the Arab
nations are beasts, monsters to us," he said. "I won't even
talk to Arab journalists. They are not prepared to tell the truth."
And what has become of his desire to return to the old Safad of Palestine,
I asked. "We will never go home," he said. "But I trust
the Europeans because they seem good and kind people."
And then - a little annex
to this story - there was a small room where I found Ahmed Maisour Sayed,
24, part-paralysed and unable to speak, who was not a victim of the
Lebanese army. He was brought here on 3 May after being shot by two
gunmen from Fatah al-Islam because he was a PLO supporter. "His
family and one of their families had quarreled about ideology,"
his father told me. "So they shot him and killed two other men.
They are a terrorist organisation and we don't know what they want.
There's only about 700 of them. But now my son can never work, We need
help from an international organisation." I dared not tell him
that I come from the land of Lord Balfour.
But I did notice, back at
Nahr el-Bared, a heap of empty Lebanese army machinegun cartridges,
and I picked one up as a souvenir. And when I got home to Beirut, I
put it with a much older cartridge case which I picked up back in the
late Eighties when the same army was besieging the Palestinians in Sidon.
Of course, the two cases were identical in calibre. The tragedy goes
on. And its identical nature has made it normal, routine, typical, easy
to accept. And woe betide if we believe that.
© 2007 Independent News
and Media Limited
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.
Click
here to comment
on this article