http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=48136&mador=1
Ha'aretz, June 7, 1999
'Sharon Sent Christians Into Sabra, Shatilla'
By Dov Alfon, Ha'aretz Correspondent
For a man with a price on his head - and the
Syrians, in particular, angry at him - Robert
Hatem, better known to many Israeli security
officers from the early 1980s as "Cobra," spends
a lot of time on his cellular phone.
In an interview at a cafe off the Champs Elysee,
Hatem, who served as chief bodyguard to Eli
Hubeika, a former minister of infrastructure in
Beirut and commander of the Christian militias
during the Lebanon war, spent much of the time
talking on his cell phone, with his back to the
rear wall, keeping an eye on the front door of
the restaurant.
No wonder, considering that ever since he
published a memoir last month about his days as
one of the most feared men in Lebanon, the
Lebanese government has banned the book,
photocopies of it are the hottest reading matter
in Lebanon, and the Syrian government is angry at
Hatem's revelations that Eli Hubeika, a favorite
of the Israeli security establishment in the
early 1980s, may have been a Syrian agent.
Hatem's tales cover Hubeika's activities from the
end of the 1970s through the Lebanon war and are
replete with stories about Hubeika's lovers,
murders, and the extortion of millions of dollars
from Lebanese businessmen.
Hatem confesses in the book that Hubeika ordered
him to murder Hubeika's terminally ill
18-month-old daughter, and kidnap beauty queen
Georgina Rizek and her son. According to Hatem,
those two incidents are the only ones he regrets
out of literally hundreds of murders he committed
on behalf of his boss.
For Israelis, the most interesting part of the
book, called "From Israel to Damascus," concerns
the massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla
Palestinian refugee camps. It has long been
Israel's claim that the IDF knew nothing of the
Christian militia plan to move into the camps and
clear them of Palestinian terrorists.
But in the detailed memoir, based on diaries he
claims he wrote during the events, Hatem reports
that then-defense minister Ariel Sharon met with
Hubeika, then head of the Christian militias, on
Sept. 15, 1982, the day after the assassination
of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel after paying
a condolence call on the Gemayel family.
Hatem calls himself an admirer of Sharon -
indeed, throughout the interview, his nostalgia
for Menachem Begin's government comes through.
But according to his account, Hubeika said after
the session with Sharon and IDF general Amir
Drori that there were 2,000 PLO terrorists hiding
in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps and it
was up to Hubeika to find them.
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