The Sabra and Chatila Massacres
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.
This article has been extracted from the book "Pity The Nation" by Robert
Fisk.
