Sabra and Chatila
Mundoarabe.org
The Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk is still probably the most outstanding
journalist working in the Middle East. He was one of the first journalists to be
present at the scene of the horrific murders in Lebanon, 1982. He has published
a number of different books and writes columns for The Independant newspaper. He
has received a number of prestigious awards for reporting and has produced a
number of documentaries including the excellent "Beirut to Bosnia"
What we found inside the Palestinian camp at ten o'clock on the morning of
September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been
easier to re-tell in in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been
medical examinations before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never
overlooked by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of
battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people,
hundreds of them had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an
incident - how easily we used the word "incident" in Lebanon - that
was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other
circumstances called a terrorist activity. It was a war crime.
Jenkins and Tveit were so overwhelmed by what we found in Chatila that at
first we were unable to register our own shock. Bill Foley of AP had come with
us. All he could say as he walked round was "Jesus Christ" over and
over again. We might have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of
bodies, killed in the heat of combat. Bur there were women lying in houses with
their skirts torn 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 babies because they
had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were
already in a state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heaps alongside
discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of
whiskey.
Where were the murderers? Or to use the Israelis' vocabulary, where were the
"terrorists"? When we drove down to Chatila, we had seen the Israelis
on the top of the apartments in the Avenue Camille Chamoun but they made no
attempt to stop us. In fact, we had first been driven to the Bourj al-Barajneh
camp because someone told us that there was a massacre there. All we saw was a
Lebanese soldier chasing a car theif down a street. It was only when we were
driving back past the entrance to Chatila that Jenkins decided to stop the car.
"I don't like this", he said. "Where is everyone? What the f**k
is that smell?"
Just inside the the southern entrance to the camp, there used to be a number
of single-story, concrete walled houses. I had conducted many interviews in
these hovels in the late 1970's. When we walked across the muddy entrance to
Chatila, we found that these buildings had been dynamited to the ground. There
were cartridge cases across the main road. I saw several Israeli flare
canisters, still attached to their tiny parachutes. Clouds of flies moved across
the rubble, raiding parties with a nose for victory.
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 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. They were dressed in jeans and coloured shirts, the material absurdly
tight over their flesh now that their bodies had begun to bloat in the heat.
They had not been robbed. On one blackened wrist a Swiss watch recorded the
correct time, the second hand still ticking round uselessly, expending the last
energies of its dead owner.
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 giirl 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.
Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress
stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The
back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of
the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed into her
breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach,
cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill ker unborn child. Her
eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.
"...As we stood there, we heard a shout in Arabic from across the ruins.
"They are coming back," a man was screaming, So we ran in fear towards
the road. I think, in retrospect, that it was probably anger that stopped us
from leaving, for we now waited near the entrance to the camp to glimpse the
faces of the men who were responsible for all of this. They must have been sent
in here with Israeli permission. They must have been armed by the Israelis.
Their handiwork had clearly been watched - closely observed - by the Israelis
who were still watching us through their field-glasses.
When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a
massacre? Or, put another way, how many killings make a massacre? Thirty? A
hundred? Three hundred? When is a massacre not a massacre? When the figures are
too low? Or when the massacre is carried out by Israels friends rather than
Israel's enemies?
That, I suspected, was what this argument was about. If Syrian troops had
crossed into Israel, surrounded a Kibbutz and allowed their Palestnian allies to
slaughter the Jewish inhabitants, no Western news agency would waste its time
afterwards arguing about whether or not it should be called a massacre.
But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians. The guilty were certainly
Christian militiamen - from which particular unit we were still unsure - but the
Israelis were also guilty. If the Israelis had not taken part in the killings,
they had certainly sent militia into the camp. They had trained them, given them
uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they
had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance
- the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were
murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila - and they had established
military liason with the murderers in the camps.
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This article has been extracted from the book "Pity The Nation" by
Robert Fisk.
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