http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/2001-02/fisk060201.shtml
The legacy of Ariel
SharonThis is a place of filth and blood which will forever be
associated with Ariel Sharon. In Israel today, he may well be
elected prime minister. Then he will be master of the most
powerful nation in the Middle East; he will travel to America, he
will visit the White House and shake hands with President George W
Bush. But for everyone who stood in the Sabra and Chatila refugee
camps in Beirut on 18 September 1982, his name is synonymous with
butchery; with bloated corpses and disembowelled women and dead
babies, with rape and pillage and murder...
By Robert Fisk, 6 February 2001
Even when I walk these fetid streets today, more than 18 years
after what was - by Israel's own definition of that much-misused
phrase - the worst single act of terrorism in modern Middle East
history, the ghosts haunt me still. Over there, on the side of the
road leading to the Sabra mosque, lay Mr Nouri, 90 years old,
grey-bearded, in pyjamas with a small woollen hat still on his
head and a stick by his side. I found him on a pile of garbage, on
his back, fly-encrusted eyes staring at the blazing sun. Just up
the lane, I came across two women sitting upright with their
brains blown out, next to a cooking pot and a dead horse. One of
the women appeared to have had her stomach slit open. A few metres
away, I discovered the first babies, already black with
decomposition, scattered across the road like rubbish.
Yes, those of us who got into Sabra and Chatila before the
murderers left have our memories. The flies racing between the
reeking bodies and our faces, between dried blood and reporter's
notebook, the hands of watches still ticking on dead wrists. I
clambered up a rampart of earth - an abandoned bulldozer stood
guiltily nearby - only to find, once I was atop the mound, that it
swayed beneath me. And I looked down to find faces, elbows,
mouths, a woman's legs protruding through the soil. I had to hold
on to these body parts to climb down the other side. Then there
was the pretty girl, her head surrounded by a halo of clothes
pegs, her blood still running from a hole in her back. We had
burst into the yard of her home, desperate to avoid the
Israeli-uniformed militiamen who still roamed the camp; coming in
by back door, we had found her body as the murderers left by the
front door.
And as I walked through the carnage on 18 September - the last
day of the three-day massacre - with Loren Jenkins of The
Washington Post, a fierce, tough, Colorado reporter, I remember
how he stopped in shock and disgust. And then, with as much energy
as his lungs could summon in the sweet, foul air, he shouted,
"SHARON!" so loudly that the name echoed off the crumpled walls
above the bodies. "He's responsible for this fucking mess,"
Jenkins roared. And that, just over four months later - in more
diplomatic words and in a report in which the murderers were
called "soldiers" - was what the Israeli commission of enquiry
decided. Sharon, who was minister of defence, bore "personal
responsibility", the Kahan commission stated, and recommended his
removal from office. Sharon resigned.
And so today, in this fetid, awful place, where Lebanese Muslim
militiamen were - three years later - to kill hundreds more
Palestinians in a war which produced no official inquiries, where
scarcely 20 per cent of the survivors still live, where brown mud
and rubbish now covers the mass grave of 600 of the 1982 victims,
the Palestinians wait to see if their tormentor will hold the
highest office in the state of Israel.
"Ariel Sharon was responsible," a well-dressed young man
shouted at us from an apartment balcony yesterday morning. And who
could disagree? Israel had invaded Lebanon on 6 June 1982 with a
plan - known to Sharon but not vouchsafed to his Likud prime
minister, Menachem Begin - to advance all the way to Beirut and
surround Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation
guerrillas in the Lebanese capital. Officially named "Operation
Peace for Galilee" (the real Israeli military codename was
"Snowball"), the invasion was supposedly a response to PLO rocket
attacks across the Israeli border.
But the rocket attacks had followed a series of Israeli
air-raids on Lebanon which had ended a UN-brokered ceasefire and
which were supposedly in "retaliation" for the attempted murder of
the Israeli ambassador to London - though his would-be killers
came from the Abu Nidal group which had nothing to do with the PLO
and hated Arafat. But Sharon had anyway received an earlier
American "green light" for his operation from Alexander Haig in
the spring of 1982. After two months and almost 17,000 deaths,
most of them civilians - the majority killed by Israeli gunfire
and air attack - the PLO withdrew from Beirut under international
protection, leaving their unarmed families behind. At which point
Sharon announced that 2,000 "terrorists" remained in the Sabra and
Chatila camps. These mythical "terrorists" prompted a small
advance by Israeli tanks - contrary to an agreement with
Washington - towards the Palestinian camps. A French UN officer
who tried to photograph the advance was shot dead by an "unknown"
sniper. Sharon repeated his extraordinary claim that "terrorists"
remained in the camps. And it was then that the Christian Lebanese
president-elect, Bashir Gemayel - the leader of the Phalange
militia which had already murdered thousands of surrendering
Palestinians in the Tel el-Zaatar camp in 1976 - was
assassinated.
Sharon paid his condolences to Gemayel's father, Pierre. He
must have known the old man's history. Pierre Gemayel had founded
his party after being inspired by the Olympics in Nazi Germany in
1936 ("I liked their idea of order," he once confided to me). Not
for nothing did Israel's militia allies use the fascist "Phalange"
as their name. As the Christians prepared to bury their hero,
Sharon - again contrary to assurances he had given the Americans -
ordered the Israeli army into west Beirut to "restore order". The
Israelis then asked the Christian Phalange - armed and uniformed
by Israel and allied to Israel since 1976 - to enter the
Israeli-surrounded camps to "liquidate" the "terrorists". Which is
why, on Thursday 16 September, guided by signposts which the
Israelis had laid across a Beirut airport runway, the Christian
gunmen walked through the southern entrance of Chatila, some of
them drunk, a number on drugs - all under the eyes of the Israelis
- and embarked on a war crime.
Today, much scarred by later wars, the lanes of Chatila still
follow the same paths I walked down 18 years ago. There are always
survivors who have never told their stories to us before.
Yesterday I wandered up an alleyway - rippling with water pipes
and running with rain and sewage - to find a middle-aged woman
buying tomatoes from a stall. I was 30 metres from the road where
I discovered Mr Nouri's body almost two decades ago. She took me
to her family home and introduced me to her daughter, Nadia
Salameh. Nadia was only 12 when Ariel Sharon's soldiers watched
the Phalangist militia slaughter their way through the camps.
"At the end of this alleyway outside our home, we were all
shocked by what we saw," she told me, her voice slowly rising with
the memory of horror. "I saw corpses there, seven deep, some
decapitated, others with their throats slit. One of our neighbours
was lying there, Um Ahmed Saad, and her body had grown big with
the heat. Her hands had been chopped off at the wrists. She used
to wear a lot of bracelets, a lot of gold. The Phalange obviously
wanted the gold."
Each house I enter contains the faded photographs of young men
killed in the war, some by Israel's allies, others by Shia Muslim
gunmen in the later 1985 camps war. But their memories have not
faded. Old Abdullah - he is 78 and pleaded with us not to use his
family name - talks without looking at me, eyes staring at the
wall. The ghosts are returning again. "The Phalange were led by
Elie Hobeika," he said, "but who sent them into the camps? The
Israelis. And who was the defence minister? Sharon. They put their
tanks round the camp. I was part of a delegation that tried to
negotiate with them. We carried a white flag. When we got near,
there was a man's voice on a loudspeaker telling us to have our
identity cards ready. But I didn't have my ID. So I went back
home. And it turned out the loudspeaker was being used by a
Phalangist. And they murdered all the men in the delegation. I was
the only one to survive."
There was no doubt that the Israelis could see what the
Lebanese Christian Phalange were doing. The Kahan commission was
later to quote Lieutenant Avi Grabovski, deputy commander of an
Israeli tank unit that was helping to encircle the camp: he
watched the murder of five women and children and wanted to
protest, but his battalion commander had replied to another
soldier who complained that "we know, it's not to our liking, and
don't interfere". Up to 2,000 Palestinians were murdered - two
mass graves remain unexhumed in Beirut - and Sharon's reputation,
already besmirched by the much earlier slaughter of more than 50
Palestinian civilians by his Commando Unit 101, seemed as buried
as the Palestinian victims.
But like the garbage that has collected over the only known
mass grave, the historical narrative - save for that of the
survivors - has become overgrown. History moves on. Arafat
recognised Israel and found himself trapped by an agreement that
would give him neither a real "Palestine" nor secure the return of
the refugees - including those in Sabra and Chatila - to what is
now Israel. And the new leader of Israel is, within hours, likely
to be the man who allowed the killers into the Beirut camps more
than 18 years ago.
With power, of course, comes respect. CNN now calls Sharon "a
barrel- framed veteran general who has built a reputation for
flattening obstacles and reshaping Israel's landscape", while the
BBC World Service on Sunday managed to avoid the fateful words
Sabra and Chatila by referring only to his "chequered military
career". As for Nadia Salameh, "Sharon's role here shows what he
is capable of. If Sharon is elected, the whole peace process falls
by the wayside because he doesn't want peace." It's a relief to
recall that up to a million Israelis demonstrated their moral
integrity in 1982 by protesting in Tel Aviv against the massacre.
And equally chilling to reflect that some of those one million -
if the polls are accurate - may well be voting for Mr Sharon
today.
