The Forgotten Massacre

Thirty years after 1,700 Palestinians were killed
at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, 
Robert Fisk revisits the killing fields

By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK)
September 15, 2012

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-forgotten-massacre-8139930.html?origin=internalSearch#

The memories remain, of course. The man who lost
his family in an earlier massacre, only to watch the
young men of Chatila lined up after the new killings
and marched off to death. But - like the muck piled
on the garbage tip amid the concrete hovels - the
stench of injustice still pervades the camps where
1,700 Palestinians were butchered 30 years ago next
week. No-one was tried and sentenced for a
slaughter, which even an Israeli writer at the time
compared to the killing of Yugoslavs by Nazi
sympathisers in the Second World War. Sabra and
Chatila are a memorial to criminals who evaded
responsibility, who got away with it.

Khaled Abu Noor was in his teens, a would-be
militiaman who had left the camp for the mountains
before Israel's Phalangist allies entered Sabra and
Chatila. Did this give him a guilty conscience, that
he was not there to fight the rapists and murderers?
"What we all feel today is depression," he said. "We
demanded justice, international trials - but there
was nothing. Not a single person was held
responsible. No-one was put before justice. And so
we had to suffer in the 1986 camps war (at the
hands of Shia Lebanese) and so the Israelis could
slaughter so many Palestinians in the 2008-9 Gaza
war. If there had been trials for what happened here
30 years ago, the Gaza killings would not have
happened."

He has a point, of course. While presidents and
prime ministers have lined up in Manhattan to
mourn the dead of the 2001 international crimes
against humanity at the World Trade Centre, not a
single Western leader has dared to visit the dank
and grubby Sabra and Chatila mass graves, shaded
by a few scruffy trees and faded photographs of the
dead. Nor, let it be said - in 30 years - has a single
Arab leader bothered to visit the last resting place of
at least 600 of the 1,700 victims. Arab potentates
bleed in their hearts for the Palestinians but an
airfare to Beirut might be a bit much these days -
and which of them would want to offend the Israelis
or the Americans?

It is an irony - but an important one, nonetheless -
that the only nation to hold a serious official enquiry
into the massacre, albeit flawed, was Israel. The
Israeli army sent the killers into the camps and then
watched - and did nothing - while the atrocity took
place. A certain Israeli Lieutenant Avi Grabowsky
gave the most telling evidence of this. The Kahan
Commission held the then defence minister Ariel
Sharon personally responsible, since he sent the
ruthless anti-Palestinian Phalangists into the camps
to "flush out terrorists" - "terrorists" who turned out
to be as non-existent as Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction 21 years later.

Sharon lost his job but later became prime minister,
until broken by a stroke which he survived - but
which took from him even the power of speech. Elie
Hobeika, the Lebanese Christian militia leader who
led his murderers into the camp - after Sharon had
told the Phalange that Palestinians had just
assassinated their leader, Bashir Gemayel - was
murdered years later in east Beirut. His enemies
claimed the Syrians killed him, his friends blamed
the Israelis; Hobeika, who had "gone across" to the
Syrians, had just announced he would "tell all"
about the Sabra and Chatila atrocity at a Belgian
court, which wished to try Sharon.

Of course, those of us who entered the camps on the
third and final day of the massacre - 18 September,
1982 - have our own memories. I recall the old man
in pyjamas lying on his back on the main street with
his innocent walking stick beside him, the two
women and a baby shot next to a dead horse, the
private house in which I sheltered from the killers
with my colleague Loren Jenkins of The Washington
Post - only to find a dead young woman lying in the
courtyard beside us. Some of the women had been
raped before their killing. The armies of flies, the
smell of decomposition. These things one
remembers.

Abu Maher is 65 - like Khaled Abu Noor, his family
originally fled their homes in Safad in present-day
Israel - and stayed in the camp throughout the
massacre, at first disbelieving the women and
children who urged him to run from his home. "A
woman neighbour started screaming and I looked
out and saw her shot dead and her daughter tried to
run away and the killers chased her, saying "Kill
her, kill her, don't let her go!" She shouted to me
and I could do nothing. But she escaped."

Repeated trips back to the camp, year after year,
have built up a narrative of astonishing detail.
Investigations by Karsten Tveit of Norwegian radio
and myself proved that many men, seen by Abu
Maher being marched away alive after the initial
massacre, were later handed by the Israelis back to
the Phalangist killers - who held them prisoner for
days in eastern Beirut and then, when they could
not swap them for Christian hostages, executed
them at mass graves.

And the arguments in favour of forgetfulness have
been cruelly deployed. Why remember a few
hundred Palestinians slaughtered when 25,000
have been killed in Syria in 19 months?

Supporters of Israel and critics of the Muslim world
have written to me in the last couple of years,
abusing me for referring repeatedly to the Sabra and
Chatila massacre, as if my own eye-witness account
of this atrocity has - like a war criminal - a statute
of limitations. Given these reports of mine
(compared to my accounts of Turkish oppression)
one reader has written to me that "I would conclude
that, in this case (Sabra and Chatila), you have an
anti-Israeli bias. This is based solely on the
disproportionate number of references you make to
this atrocity."

But can one make too many? Dr Bayan al-Hout,
widow of the PLO's former ambassador to Beirut,
has written the most authoritative and detailed
account of the Sabra and Chatila war crimes - for
that is what they were - and concludes that in the
years that followed, people feared to recall the event.
"Then international groups started talking and
enquiring. We must remember that all of us are
responsible for what happened. And the victims are
still scarred by these events - even those who are
unborn will be scarred - and they need love." In the
conclusion to her book, Dr al-Hout asks some
difficult - indeed, dangerous - questions: "Were the
perpetrators the only ones responsible? Were the
people who committed the crimes the only
criminals? Were even those who issued the orders
solely responsible? Who in truth is responsible?"

In other words, doesn't Lebanon bear responsibility
with the Phalangist Lebanese, Israel with the Israeli
army, the West with its Israeli ally, the Arabs with
their American ally? Dr al-Hout ends her
investigation with a quotation from Rabbi Abraham
Heschel who raged against the Vietnam war. "In a
free society," the Rabbi said, "some are guilty, but all
are responsible."
________________

Timeline: Sabra and Chatila

14 September 1982

Lebanon's Christian President-elect, Bashir
Gemayel, is assassinated by a pro-Syrian militant
but his loyalists blame the Palestinians.

16 September 1982

Lebanese Christian militiamen enter camps at Sabra
and Chatila to carry out revenge attacks on
Palestinian refugees, with occupying Israeli forces
guarding the camps and firing flares to aid the
attacks at night.

18 September 1982

After three days of rape, fighting and brutal
executions, militias finally leave the camps with
1,700 dead.

Rob Hastings

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