Remembering The Sabra And Shatila Massacre
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
18 September, 2010
Countercurrents.org
September 16 marks the 28th anniversary of the massacre of more than 2,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila near the Lebanese capital, Beirut. On this day Israeli-allied Phalangists entered the camps which were entirely surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers. For the next 40-48 members of the Phalangist militia raped, killed, and injured thousands of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and elderly people inside the encircled and sealed camps. More grotesquely, the Israeli army ensured there was no lull in the brutal killings and illuminated the area with flares at night and tightened their cordon around the camps to make sure that no one could escape the terror that had been unleashed.
For two days the Phalangist militia had a field day, using guns, knives and hatchets slitting throats, axing bodies, shooting and raping, while the Israeli Occupation Forces was monitoring all the communication among the killers and making sure the massacre was in full view of members of its forces. The Israeli Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon and his Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, watched from the seven story Kuwaiti embassy as their Phalangist allies massacred the hapless Palestinians imprisoned in the camps.
British journalist, Robert Fisk, among the first few journalists arrived at the horror scene, reported:
“What we found inside the Palestinian Chatila camp at ten o’clock on the morning of 18th September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination … there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into the rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment and empty bottles of whisky … Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.
“The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old … On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead … One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.” (Robert Fisk, Pity The Nation: Lebanon At War, Oxford University Press, 1992).
The UN General Assembly considered this an act of genocide. On December 16, 1982, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide. In 1983 an International Commission of Inquiry headed by Sean MacBride found that Israel was “directly responsible” because the camps were under its jurisdiction as an occupying power. The report concludes: “The commission concludes that the Israeli authorities bear a heavy legal responsibility, as the occupying power, for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. From the evidence disclosed, Israel was involved in the planning and the preparation of the massacres and played a facilitative role in the actual killings” and “8. Israeli authorities or forces were involved, directly or indirectly, in the massacres and other killings reported to have been carried out by Lebanese militiamen in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila (...).”
The massacre received much attention from the world media, predominantly blaming Israelis for allowing the attack on the besieged camps. Tellingly, British-American agenda-driven historian Bernard Lewis voiced displeasure with the media coverage of the massacre and protesting Europeans. Lewis, a keen champion of the clash of civilization theory, argued that journalists and protesters responded overwhelmingly to the massacre because they were glad to have an opportunity to blame Jews.
No one has been punished or even investigated for the Sabra-Shatila massacre.
Nine years after the ghastly tragedy, on June 18, 2001, a case was lodged in a Belgium by 23 survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres charged Ariel Sharon, who at that time became prime minister of Israel, as well as other Israelis and Lebanese with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The central argument of the case hinged upon Ariel Sharon's Command Responsibility as General of the Forces, which was in full control of Beirut when the massacres took place in the contiguous refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Although the killings of unarmed Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were carried out by the Lebanese militia units affiliated directly or indirectly with the Israeli-backed Christian Lebanese Forces (the Phalange), the legal, military, and decision-making responsibility ultimately rested with Ariel Sharon under established and recognized principles of International Law.
The case attempted to realize and implement the principle of Universal Jurisdiction for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, which is enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention and International Customary Law. As such, this case represented just one of many recent attempts to challenge impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Other similar cases have seen war crimes charges brought against Rwandan officials, Chile's ex-president, General Augusto Pinochet; Chad's former president, Hissein Habre; and former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
The Belgian Supreme Court ruled on February 12, 2003, that Sharon (and others involved, such as Israeli General Yaron) could be indicted under this accusation. But under pressure from U.S. and Israeli governments, Belgium changed the universal jurisdiction law. According to Franklin Lamb, Belgium scrapped the case after the then US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, told Belgium: “It is your goddamned Sharon Trail or NATO Headquarter, you choose!” On September 24, 2003, due to changes in Belgian Universal Jurisdiction law that occurred since the initiation of the case, Belgium's Supreme Court dismissed the war crimes case against Ariel Sharon, since none of the plaintiffs had Belgian nationality at the start of the case.
Not surprisingly, all militiamen who took part in the killing received amnesty from the Lebanese government. On March 28, 1991 Lebanon's Parliament retroactively exempted the killers from criminal responsibility.
In 2005 Swiss-French-German-Lebanese co-produced a documentary Massaker showing six former Phalangist militia soldiers, who participated personally in the massacre, saying that there was direct Israeli participation. One of them said that he saw Israeli soldiers driving bulldozers into inhabited houses inside the camp. Another said that Israeli soldiers provided the Phalangist militia soldiers with material to dispose of the corpses lying around in the streets. All militiamen who took part in the killing received amnesty from the Lebanese government.
- The atrocities committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila should be seen in the context of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. Not surprisingly, the 1983 UN commission report found that these atrocities “were not inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political will and cultural identity.” It is important to see this in light of the processes that led to the massacre. It was not an isolated incident, but the horrifying culmination of Israel’s war on the very idea of the Palestinian people. It has a genocidal logic which has been repeatedly expressed in the various massacres in Israel’s wars, whether in Qana or in Gaza, where the Israeli forces seemed to go out of its way to violate every last humanitarian norm – indeed, to prove that it absolutely did not consider the Palestinians worthy of even the most minimal human consideration.
To destroy the basis of Palestinian nationhood, Israel had to crush every manifestation of civil society, political and military development among the Palestinians living in border areas and miserable refugee camps. 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, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the 2002 Jenin massacre, and the most recent, the December 2008 / January 2009 atrocity committed on the people of Gaza. During the Israeli 2008-2009 military operation, code-named “Operation Cast Lead,” more than 1,400 people were killed, including women and more than 340 children, and houses, factories, wells, schools, hospitals, police stations and other public buildings were destroyed.
To borrow Richard Seymour, remembering Sabra and Shatila is not just about paying ritual tribute to the dead, for whom tributes are worthless. It is about knowing what it is that the Palestinians are up against, and understanding the urgent need for solidarity today.
It will not be too much to say that in the spirit of the 9/11 terrorist attack memorial held last week, the Sabra and Shatila victims deserve an equal tribute.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com email: [email protected]
