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IUK: Fisk - Arafat will gamble - New Evidence of Sabra N Chatila By Robert Fisk 8/12/2001 2:14 am Sat |
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=108362
Arafat will gamble on Israel's 'war' failing again
By Robert Fisk 05 December 2001 Ariel Sharon provided one bright moment in the darkness for
Osama bin Laden when he declared his "war on terror". George
Bush snr managed to keep Israel out of the 1991 Gulf War and
preserve his Islamic alliance. But George Bush jnr must be cursing
Israel's arrival on the American crusade against "terrorism". Angry
enough when Mr Sharon first compared Israel's losses at the
hands of Palestinian suicide bombers with America's murdered
thousands on September 11th, the US President has no reason to
thank the Israeli Prime Minister for his latest rhetoric.
Yasser Arafat is not Osama bin Laden, however much the Israelis
try to persuade the world otherwise; he is much less efficient,
infinitely more corrupt and very definitely no threat to civilisation.
So will Mr Arafat "crack down on terror" - how easily we use
Israel's words - or are the Palestinians now doomed to lose even
the hope of statehood in Israel's latest retaliation? The fact that the
suicide bombings were the revenge of Hamas for Israel's latest
murder of a Hamas leader - in its turn revenge for other Hamas
bombings which were themselves revenge for Israeli attacks -
makes no difference to "Palestine's" predicaments. Israel is lining
up Mr Arafat and the Palestinian Authority and its various security
mafia as the centre of all evil, of "terrorism", "mindless violence",
etc. Mr Arafat is now under orders to arrest his own people not
only from the Sharon government but from the European Union as
well as the United States. And as usual, we are forgetting recent history. Hamas, the
principal target of the Sharon "war on terror", was originally
sponsored by Israel. Back in the 1980s, when Mr Arafat was the
"super-terrorist" and Hamas was a pleasant little Muslim charity,
albeit venomous in its opposition to Israel, the Israeli government
encouraged its members to build mosques in Gaza. Some genius in
the Israeli Army decided that there was no better way of
undermining the PLO's nationalist ambitions in the occupied
territories than by promoting Islam. Even after the Oslo agreement,
during a row with Mr Arafat, senior Israeli Army Officers publicly
announced that they were chatting to Hamas officials. And when
Israel illegally deported hundreds of Hamas men to Lebanon in
1992, it was one of their leaders, hearing that I was travelling to
Israel, who offered me Shimon Peres' home telephone number from
his contact book. The Israelis are now re-preaching the lesson that Yizhak Rabin
once tried to teach Mr Arafat: that true statesmanship might entail
the risk of civil war; that just as the Israeli government once had to
shoot down the wild men of Irgun, so Mr Arafat may have to
liquidate the men who want to destroy Israel. But this is 2001, not
1948. A Palestinian civil war may be to Israel's advantage - it
could perhaps choose a new Palestinian leader - but it will be no
gain to Mr Arafat and certainly not to the Palestinians. In any case,
if Israel really wanted to sting Mr Arafat into vanquishing his
internal opposition, it would not be bombing and destroying his
police stations and security posts, the very instruments he needs
to "crack down" on Israel's Palestinian enemies.
Mr Arafat knows this all too well. Even when he ran his repulsive
little statelet in Lebanon he killed only those Palestinian militants
who personally threatened him. He is a patient man, a guerrilla
leader who knows that a little more delay will buy time in which his
enemies can make mistakes. How soon before Mr Sharon's latest
"war on terror" bathes Israel's hands in Palestinian blood? How
soon before the Americans realise that their adventure in
Afghanistan may unravel because of Israel's unrequested support
for Washington's "war on terror"? Today's front-page headlines in
Pakistan tell of Israeli missiles on Gaza rather than the fate of
Osama bin Laden. Besides, Mr Arafat knows, even if too many journalists buy the
Israeli line, that Israel's "war on terror" always fails. Mr Sharon
waged a "war on terror" in Lebanon in 1982 which ended in a war
crime - the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila
refugee camps. Since 1970 Israel has used F16s, tanks and
missiles on thousands of occasions to attack the Palestinians in
Lebanon, all for its "war on terror". It's been doing the same for
months in Gaza and the West Bank. It doesn't work. The Arabs
have lost their fear of the Israelis and once fear is lost it can never
be reinjected. Mr Sharon's "war on terror" was thus lost the
moment it began. As the next suicide bombings will prove yet
again. So Mr Arafat will sit it out. He will gamble on a simple equation:
that America's anger with him will eventually be outweighed by
America's embarrassment with Mr Sharon, that the "war on terror"
in Afghanistan will be endangered by Sharon's "war on terror" in
Palestine. Mr Arafat knows that in the end, the Jewish lobby not
withstanding, American lives count for more than Israeli lives; the
only flaw in his argument is the assumption, even if America can
ultimately control its Middle Eastern ally, that Israel can control Mr
Sharon. http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=107173
New evidence indicates Palestinians died
hours after surviving camp massacres
By Robert Fisk Middle East Correspondent
28 November 2001 The testimony - which describes in detail how the victims were
last seen by their families in the hands of Israeli troops and Israel's
militia allies - will be among the material to be considered by a
Belgian judge, who could decide today whether the Israeli Prime
Minister, Ariel Sharon, should be prosecuted for the slaughter.
Mr Sharon was judged "personally responsible" for the massacre
by the Israeli Kahan Commission in 1983. Its report concluded that
hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including women and children,
were all butchered between 16 and 18 September in 1982.
But among the female witnesses cited by lawyers in Belgium, who
are seeking the indictment against Mr Sharon, are at least five who
claim that more than 100 men were detained by the militiamen and
handed over to the Israelis alive. They were never seen again.
Separately from the court action,film taken by a television crew at
the time, which has recently come to light, appears to show Israeli
officers in the presence of Phalangist gunmen - long after the
Israelis knew their Phalangist allies had carried out the massacre,
which caused worldwide outrage and led Mr Sharon, then
Defence Minister, to resign. There has always been a discrepancy between the number of
bodies found in Sabra and Chatila - up to 600 - and the number
of civilians registered as missing - more than 1,800. Until now, it
was assumed that all the victims had been murdered by
Phalangists and that many had been secretly buried.
If accepted by the court, the new evidencecould hold disturbing
implications for both the Israeli army and for Mr Sharon,
particularly if the Israelis continued their collaboration with the
Phalange after the murders in the camps and if they permitted the
Phalange to take away more prisoners.
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=107100
The eyes of the world are on Afghanistan, but today a Belgian appeals
court is due to consider a case with disturbing contemporary parallels.
Robert Fisk reveals shocking new evidence that the full, horrific story of
the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1982 has not yet been told
28 November 2001 Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls
the chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that
overwhelmed her just over 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982.
As one of the survivors prepared to testify against the Israeli prime
minister Ariel Sharon - who was then Israel's defence minister -
she stops to search her memory when she confronts the most
terrible moments of her life. "The Lebanese Forces militia
[Phalangists] had taken us from our homes and marched us up to
the entrance to the camp where a large hole had been dug in the
earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot a
Palestinian. The women and children had climbed over bodies to
reach this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man
killed in front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams
from the women. That's when we heard the Israelis on
loudspeakers shouting, 'Give us the men, give us the men.' We
thought, 'Thank God, they will save us.'" It was to prove a cruelly
false hope. Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her husband Hassan,
30, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed
standing in the crowd of men. "We were told to walk up the road
towards the Kuwaiti embassy, the women and children in front, the
men behind. We had been separated. There were Phalangist
militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see
Hassan and Faraj. It was like a parade. There were several
hundred of us. When we got to the Cité Sportif, the Israelis put us
women in a big concrete room and the men were taken to another
side of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the camp and I
could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went round saying
'Sit, sit.' It was 11am. An hour later, we were told to leave. But we
stood around outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men."
Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for Hassan and
Faraj to emerge. "Some men came out, none of them younger than
40, and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still
inside. Then about 4pm, an Israeli officer came out. He was
wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: 'What are you all waiting
for?' He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone.
There were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We
couldn't see inside. And there were jeeps and tanks and a
bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it got dark and
the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very nervous. But
then when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there
was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I
never saw my husband again." Today, a Belgian appeals court will begin a hearing to decide if
Prime Minister Sharon should be prosecuted for the massacre of
Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in
Beirut in 1982. (Belgian laws allow courts to try foreigners for war
crimes committed on foreign soil.) In working on this case, the
prosecution believes that it has discovered shocking new
evidence of Israel's involvement. The evidence centres on the Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium -
the "Cité Sportif". Only two miles from Beirut airport, the damaged
stadium was a natural holding centre for prisoners. It had been an
ammunition dump for Yasser Arafat's PLO and repeatedly bombed
by Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut so that its giant,
smashed exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The Palestinians
had earlier mined its cavernous interior, but its vast, underground
storage space and athletics changing-rooms remained intact. It
was a familiar landmark to all of us who lived in Beirut. At
mid-morning on 18 September 1982 - about the time Sana
Sersawi says she was brought to the stadium - I saw hundreds of
Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, probably well over 1,000,
sitting in its gloomy, dark interior, squatting in the dust, watched
over by Israeli soldiers and plain-clothes Shin Beth (Israeli secret
service) agents and men who I suspected were Lebanese
collaborators. The men sat in silence, obviously in fear. From time
to time, I noted, a few were taken away. They were put into Israeli
army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles - for further
"interrogation". Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, inside the Sabra
and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps, up to 600 massacre victims
rotted in the sun, the stench of decomposition drifting over the
prisoners and their captors alike. It was suffocatingly hot. Loren
Jenkins of The Washington Post, Paul Eedle of Reuters and I had
only got into the cells because the Israelis assumed - given our
Western appearance - that we must have been members of Shin
Beth. Many of the prisoners had their heads bowed. But Israel's
Phalangist militiamen - still raging at the murder of their leader and
president elect Bashir Gemayel - had been withdrawn from the
camps, their slaughter over, and at least the Israeli army was now
in charge. So what did these men have to fear?
Looking back - and listening to Sana Sersawi today - I shudder
now at our innocence. My notes of the time, subsequently written
into a book about Israel's 1982 invasion and its war with the PLO,
contain some ominous clues. We found a Lebanese employee of
Reuters, Abdullah Mattar, among the prisoners and obtained his
release, Paul leading him away with his arm around the man's
shoulders. "They take us away, one by one, for interrogation," one
of the prisoners muttered to me. "They are Haddad [Christian militia]
men. Usually they bring the people back after interrogation, but not
always. Sometimes the people do not return them." Then an Israeli
officer ordered me to leave. Why couldn't the prisoners talk to me, I
asked? "They can talk if they want," he replied. "But they have
nothing to say." All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps. The
smell of the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist
jeep with the words "Military Police" painted on it - if so exotic an
institution could be associated with this gang of murderers - drove
by. A few television crews had turned up. One filmed the
Lebanese Christian militiamen outside the Cité Sportif. He also
filmed a woman pleading to an Israeli army colonel called "Yahya"
for the release of her husband. (The colonel has now been
positively identified by The Independent. Today, he is a general in
the Israeli army.) Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a line of Israeli
Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking, watching
the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos, some being set
free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men
in drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had happened
inside the camps. One of the members of the tank crews, Lt Avi
Grabovsky - he was later to testify to the Israeli Kahan commission
- had even witnessed the murder of several civilians the previous
day and had been told not to "interfere".
And in the days that followed, strange reports reached us. A girl
had been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen
and taken away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier.
Then the cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a
US television chain complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested
her husband. He was never seen again. There were other vague
rumours of "disappeared" people. I wrote in my notes at the time that "even after Chatila, Israel's
'terrorist' enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut". But I had
not directly associated this dark conviction with the Cité Sportif. I
had not even reflected on the fearful precedents of a sports
stadium in time of war. Hadn't there been a sports stadium in
Santiago a few years before, packed with prisoners after
Pinochet's coup d'etat, a stadium from which many prisoners never
returned? Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to indict Ariel
Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday, 17
September 1982, she said, while the massacre was still (unknown
to her) underway inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in her home
with her family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps. "Neighbours
came and said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so we
went downstairs and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese Forces
[Phalangists] on the road. The men were separated from the
women." This separation - with its awful shadow of similar
separations at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war - were a
common feature of these mass arrests. "We were told to go to the
Cité Sportif. The men stayed put." Among the men were Wadha's
two sons, 19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and her
brother Mohamed. "We went to the Cité Sportif, as the Israelis told
us," she says. "I never saw my sons or brother again."
The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija Zrein says
she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cité Sportif and
the men with her, including her 22-year-old brother, were taken
away. Some militiamen - watched by the Israelis - loaded him into
a car, blindfolded, she claims. "That's how he disappeared," she
says in her official testimony, "and I have never seen him again
since." It was only a few days afterwards that we journalists began to
notice a discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600
bodies had been found inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians
had been reported as "missing". We assumed - how easy
assumptions are in war - that they had been killed in the three
days between 16 September 1982 and the withdrawal of the
Phalangist killers on the 18th, that their corpses had been secretly
buried outside the camp. Beneath the golf course, we suspected.
The idea that many of these young people had been murdered
outside the camps or after the 18th, that the killings were still going
on while we walked through the camps, never occurred to us.
Why did we not think of this at the time? The following year, the
Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning Sharon
but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on 18 September, with
just a one-line hint - unexplained - that several hundred people
may have "disappeared" at about the same time. The commission
interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was allowed to become
the narrative of history. The idea that the Israelis went on handing
over prisoners to their bloodthirsty militia allies never occurred to
us. The Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence
that this is exactly what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser
Alameh, believes his brother Ali was handed to the Phalange on
the morning of the 18th. A Palestinian Christian woman called
Milaneh Boutros has recorded how, in a truck-load of women and
children, she was taken from the camps to the Christian town of
Bikfaya, the home of the newly assassinated Christian
president-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a grief-stricken Christian
woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in the truck.
He was shot. The truck must have passed at least four Israeli
checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I realise
now that I had even met the woman who ordered the boy's
execution. Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended, Shahira
Abu Rudeina says she was taken to the Cité Sportif where, in one
of the underground "holding centres", she saw a retarded man,
watched by Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her evidence
might be rejected were it not for the fact that she also expressed
her gratitude for an Israeli soldier - inside the Chatila camp,
against all the evidence given by the Israelis - who prevented the
murder of her daughters by the Phalange.
Long after the war, the ruins of the Cité Sportif were torn down and
a brand new marble stadium was built in its place, partly by the
British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony of what may lie
beneath its foundations - and its frightful implications - might give
Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment.
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