Sabra And Shatila
By Thomas C. Mountain
First composed on Sept 19, 1982
Countercurrents.org
I woke up that morning
Where far across the earth
In Beirut, in Sabra and Chatila camps Zionist butchers were hard at work
That day was to have been special
It marked the anniversary of my birth
Instead came the news of the massacres
Sending shock waves around the earth
We had watched Israel invade Lebanon
The summer of 1982
The seige and bombing of Beirut
Until the PLO withdrew
The PLO left the city
With the salute of the people in their eyes
Trusting the word of the Americans
It would be their wives and children who would die
The Israelis surrounded Sabra and Chatila camps
Trapping the old men, women and children within
Then their trucks brought the Phalange through their lines
And they ordered the massacre to begin
They killed all day until night fall
But the mercy of darkness brought no relief
For Israeli flares soon lit up the sky
So the rest from bloodshed would be brief
The killers went house to house
Even killing the dogs it was said
Planting booby traps beneath the bodies
To kill those who had come to bury their dead
So why?
Why?
Why must I ask why?
That these killers and their masters
Have not been arrested, tried and sentenced to die?
Thomas C. Mountain was a founding member in the summer of 1982 of the
Hawaii Alliance for Peace and Justice in the Middle East and in 1985
helped present for the first time in the USA Ryuichi Hirokawa who was
the first photojournalist inside Sabra and Chatila camp on Sept. 18,
1982. and won the International Organization of Journalists and
Yomiuri Shimbun Grand Prix for Photojournalism for his photos of the
massacre. He can be reached at thomascmountain at yahoo dot com.
Comments are moderated
