The Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Mohamad Hamzeh
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.
Nishee
in a high position of the present Lebanese Governemnt which is basically
composed of criminal heads of the militias of the war.
Instead of putting him and all the other criminal heads of the militias of the
war the present government has given them all key positions.
Elie Hobeika's responsability for Sabra and Chatila and his involvement with
Israel is forgotten and overlooked because he has aligned himself with Syrian
and Arabist politics.
Nishee
alum...@hotmail.com
>The person behind the massacres of Sabra and Chatila is Elie Hobeika who is now
And you are innocent! Why are you then on the run? Why do you not go
back to Lebanon to prove your innocense in the Lebanese courts?
Maan M. Hamze
alum...@hotmail.com wrote in message <35aaa4a5...@nntp.best.com>...
>On 13 Jul 1998 16:44:53 GMT, nis...@aol.com (Nishee) wrote:
>
>>The person behind the massacres of Sabra and Chatila is Elie Hobeika who
is now
>
>And you are innocent! Why are you then on the run? Why do you not go
>back to Lebanon to prove your innocense in the Lebanese courts?
>
Maan
Maurice
family. When my Our families were massacred we refused to accept
condolences until we Revenged them. We finally did accept condolences in
82.
Ask the Zgharta and Bcharri People, "Mayiton ma bi mout!!!" Their dead do
not die, event he burial is done only when the dead is Avenged, then they
ware Black.
But you arabs are too dumb to know this, that is why Geagea is kept Alive,
because we wait 60 years to avenge our dead.
Maan M. Hamze wrote in message ...
alum...@hotmail.com
>I can tell this much, I sleep better at night now that I have revenged my
>family. When my Our families were massacred we refused to accept
Tell us more about your crimes!
Nishee
>
>alum...@hotmail.com wrote in message <35aaa4a5...@nntp.best.com>...
>>On 13 Jul 1998 16:44:53 GMT, nis...@aol.com (Nishee) wrote:
>>
>>>The person behind the massacres of Sabra and Chatila is Elie Hobeika who
>is now
>>
>>And you are innocent! Why are you then on the run? Why do you not go
>>back to Lebanon to prove your innocense in the Lebanese courts?
>>
>If that is the case we'll be more than interested in knowing the facts.
>Maan
>
>
It gets no better Maan and Alumrock two Palestinian Arabists and Islamists are
attempting to bring Lebanese to justice on SCL. LOL
Now when the world hears Palestinian Islamist it thinks terrorists wihtout
question add to that Arabist and you have a riot going on but on top of this
these two Palestinian Arabists and Islamist live and express their anti-Western
politics in the USA itself. And they ask for justice too. LOL Guys don't ask
for too much justice you just might it.
Nishee
alum...@hotmail.com
>>
>>
>>alum...@hotmail.com wrote in message <35aaa4a5...@nntp.best.com>...
>>>On 13 Jul 1998 16:44:53 GMT, nis...@aol.com (Nishee) wrote:
>>>
>>>>The person behind the massacres of Sabra and Chatila is Elie Hobeika who
>>is now
>>>
>>>And you are innocent! Why are you then on the run? Why do you not go
>>>back to Lebanon to prove your innocense in the Lebanese courts?
>>>
>>If that is the case we'll be more than interested in knowing the facts.
I do not think that we will hear the facts from him. What we have
here is a person who is on the run from justice. Outlaws will tell
the truth!
Alain Chammas
nis...@aol.com (Nishee) wrote:
> >
> >
> >alum...@hotmail.com wrote in message <35aaa4a5...@nntp.best.com>...
> >>On 13 Jul 1998 16:44:53 GMT, nis...@aol.com (Nishee) wrote:
> >>
> >>>The person behind the massacres of Sabra and Chatila is Elie Hobeika who
> >is now
> >>
> >>And you are innocent! Why are you then on the run? Why do you not go
> >>back to Lebanon to prove your innocense in the Lebanese courts?
> >>
> >If that is the case we'll be more than interested in knowing the facts.
> >Maan
> >
> >
>
> It gets no better Maan and Alumrock two Palestinian Arabists and Islamists are
> attempting to bring Lebanese to justice on SCL. LOL
>
> Now when the world hears Palestinian Islamist it thinks terrorists wihtout
> question add to that Arabist and you have a riot going on but on top of this
> these two Palestinian Arabists and Islamist live and express their
anti-Western
> politics in the USA itself. And they ask for justice too. LOL Guys don't ask
> for too much justice you just might it.
>
> Nishee
Nishee (and Maan, and Alumrock,...)
No matter how right one's struggle is, no matter how justified the overall
goal is, every once in a while, someone (or everyone) in an organization
screws up big time.
A primary reaction is to try and deny any wrongdoing, and when that fails,
to try and justify the unjustifiable.
Nothing justifies killing civilians on purpose in cold blood. Not the war,
nor the death of family and comrades. By acting like the LF did in Sabra
and Chatila, or like the Palestinians did in Damour, or like ... we are
appealing to our own darkest and basest instincts. We are denying
everything that humankind has acquired in terms of decency and morality.
And, to those of us who claim perpetrating such despicable acts in the name
of religion, they really are lost souls since not one of the religions
prevalent in our land condones such acts of barbarism. We should all
condemn any such acts, and distance ourselves from anyone or everyone who
justifies them.
The presence of some bad apples in our midst, however, doesn't make all of
us pariahs. As Mohamad stated the other day (I am paraphrasing here), the
Christians he knows are decent and helpful people, not hooligans like some
people on scl. Likewise, this statement could apply to most Muslims and
Druze (and Jews, for that matter) that I know. In a nutshell, it is not the
religious affiliation, it is not his visits to a house of prayer, not his 5
daily prayers or baptism or any other "technical" issues that make a decent
man. Rather, it is his ability of living his life in harmony with his
environment (social and natural), his ability to help and support others,
his morality, his tolerance, his commitment to peace.
To all of you, stop putting each other down as a matter of principle.
Currently, mad@ous @ala ra'betna kellna, regardless of origin, religion, or
gender. We have to build a nation together, whether we like it or not. If
we do not succeed in building bridges, we are doomed to forever submit to
the will of strangers, whether they be south or east of our borders or @al
marrikh,
Cordially,
--
Alain Chammas
TahaK
Thank you for remaining the sound of calm and reason on SCL. I totally agree
with you.
I remind all SCLers that as much as we are disturbed by the unthinkable acts
committed by the insane few, we must keep in mind that it could not be possibly
condoned by the many.
I believe that man is basically good. I extend my hand out to any man and
woman on the presumption that man is basically good. There are a few
exceptions; these are the insane ones among us; these are the ones that
massacre in the name of Jesus or Mohamed. The same guy would do it regardless
of which side is born in.
Join me in the fight against ignorance, intolerance and irrational thinking.
Taha