Programme on Sabra and Chatila massacres tonight

bugler

BBC One, 10.15 pm, Panorama.If you want to know how current Israeli prime minister Areil Sharon earned the moniker 'The Butcher of Beirut', then you should watch this.


Extract from 'The Independent' from late last year.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">They are bulldozing the garbage from the small plot of land behind the plane trees of Sabra and Chatila. Cheap concrete blocks are being laid to form a makeshift dais for speakers. A black flag has been draped by the wall to remind the Palestinians - as if they could forget - that here lies the mass grave of hundreds of their relatives. Up to 400 corpses lie beneath the soft red earth. Up to 2,000 died. But only now, 18 years after the majzara, the massacre, has the atrocity been commemorated.Of course, if it had happened in a land to the south of here - a land called Israel, which the Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila still call Palestine - the world's press would gather each year at this time to honour the dead. Mercifully, Israel has never suffered such a slaughter. But if it had, the American president would surely make an annual pilgrimage to the site. Certainly, every US presidential hopeful would turn up. Relatives of the dead would be treated with reverence and generosity.The facts of what happened between 16 and 18 September 1982 are not in doubt - save for the guilty and the insane. On 16 September, the Israeli army surrounded the adjoining Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila and sent their Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia allies into them to hunt for "terrorists". There were none. Just civilians, whom the Phalangists murdered and raped in homes and backyards and streets, slaughtering up to 2,000 civilians, in some cases watched by Israelis from rooftops. Only on the 18th did Israel order its allies out of the camp. When I entered Sabra and Chatila early on the 18th - before the murderers had left - it was already a charnel house.The Lebanese president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, had just been murdered. The Phalangists were in vengeful mood. Yet Menachem Begin, then Israel's Prime Minister, was to claim he never imagined there would be a bloodbath. The Israeli Kahan commission report - which bleakly confirmed that Israeli troops saw the massacre taking place and did nothing - condemned Ariel Sharon, then Defence Minister, for indirect responsibility. So this little patch of rotten earth, these few square miles of fetid huts and lanes, should attract at least a little attention at this time of year. The survivors are still here, many of them, still mourning their dead, still sweltering in their bullet-holed concrete slums. Mahmoud Ayoub is 73 now but remembers the day of the massacre as if it happened only a few hours ago.

"We knew the Israelis were circling the camp and I saw several men in Phalangist uniform wearing masks. Neighbours told me they were killing, but I didn't believe it because I heard no shooting. Then they said that the Phalangists were using knives and I believed them. My son Sobhi and I collected all the extended members of our family we could find - 65 in all - and we led them to the far side of the camp from their homes at night. We saved them all."Mr Ayoub married twice but his second wife, Hayat - 60 now, but only 42 at the time - lost at least 10 of her family in 1982. "My nephew, Mustapha Habrat, was hiding with the women and children in one of the air-raid bunkers we had built here," she says. "The Phalangists came and took all the men out to execute them. Before he was taken away, Mustapha took off his ring and gave it to his wife, Amal, saying, 'You will be able to sell this and get money for you and the children for a couple of days'. Then he was taken away and they shot all the men. But Mustapha, though he was hit many times, lay covered in blood and pretended to be dead."

The story - like all the stories in Sabra and Chatila - gets worse. "While he lay there, gypsies came to loot the bodies, to take the rings and the watches from the dead. When they tried to rob Mustapha, they found he was alive and managed to get him to the hospital."

Saved by those who would pillage his dead body, Mustapha searched in vain for his wife and three children. They had disappeared, were never seen again. Like many of the dead of Sabra and Chatila, they may lie under the golf course near Beirut airport, a mass grave that has never been - and never will be - opened.Mrs Ayoub remains locked on to the moment of the massacre. "I was one of the first to come back and I found the streets heaped with bodies. I took pills to steady my nerves and went into each house. In some, the women were lying dead with their legs far apart. There was much rape. The men were lying on the floor in their blood. It was very hot. The bodies were rotting."

I don't tell Hayat Ayoub that I saw all this myself, the dead and the mutilated and the raped. They had even shot the horses in the camp.

And the lesson of all this? Mahmoud Ayoub does not believe there will ever be an independent sovereign state of Palestine. He doesn't trust Yasser Arafat and he doesn't believe he will ever return to live in his home. He blames the Americans and the Europeans and he is angered at the number of countries who refuse Palestinians the right to visit Europe.

"The Palestinians are like germs," he says. "No one wants us - because we don't have a country".</font>

Belisarius

Pardon the term , but this should be must see TV for all , get a proper perspective on Whos running Isreali nation "who wants peace" ,

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Shrewgar!

Magwitch

Regretably I did not see the program but am well aware of the subject matter and details. I think it shows how much has changed with the decline of European dependance upon American that the Palistinians now enjoy a fair airing of their views and history.

A historical program such as this puts in perspective anger and acts of terrorism that in the past were completely condemned by both government and popular media who chose to ignore completely these atrocities (and hence maybe made "terrorism" the only recourse).

bugler

Well well, looks likes Israel is spitting it's dummy out again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,508987,00.html

'The Israeli government is threatening legal action against the BBC over a Panorama suggestion that the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, should be indicted for war crimes'.

I'm sorry to say it, but no country has ever generated this much disgust in me by its continued disgraceful conduct.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Magwitch:
I think it shows how much has changed with the decline of European dependance upon American that the Palistinians now enjoy a fair airing of their views and history.
</font>

While it's true that the European Press presents a far fairer view of matters in the region compared to the US(not hard by any means) I still believe there is a Pro-Israeli bias.Quite a bit of thius has to do with powerful individuals, men like Conrad Black, who owns a host of papers including the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph in the UK amongst others, who have a fierce Pro-Zionist attitude.I came across this article a while ago while browsing the Independent's archives : http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=61498

Check out what his own writers who don't follow the line come in for.

ConUladh

I think he's an idiot, an &sshole and the cause (obvious this bit) of the current problems. I think War Crimninal might be pushing it a bit though.

I do think it's debatable though

I suppose what it comes down to is whether or not he expected it to happen. That Temple Mount excursion was an act of stupidity as well. If he's that p1sspoor at reading a situation then I don't understand how he's running any country. We can only hope that he leaves peacetalks to people who have a clue and doesn't get in their way if they make progress

[This message has been edited by ConUladh (edited 18-06-2001).]

bugler

Was Hitler a war criminal? Or was it those nasty SS prison guards who were the only criminals? Sharon knew there wasn't 2,000 'terrorists' in those refugee camps (they had been evacuated) and yet under him the Phalangists were sent in to 'liquidate' these fictional characters.Plus the Israeli army stood by and watched on (as in many of these types of cases it wasn't really the average soldier who was to blame, several officers and soldiers protested when they saw what was happening but were told they had orders not to intervene, balancing orders and morality is another topic) and they were at the disposal of Ariel Sharon, the then Defence Minister.In my mind there is no doubt he should be held accountable for this.The push into Lebanon was his doing also, how the Israeli people elected this man who has cost so many Israeli and arab lives I cannot understand.

Magwitch

Despite the best of intentions I do not believe that Shoron or an Isreali will ever stand trial (though they should). They did maintain a discrete and credibly deniable distence from the events in Lebennon with regard to human rights, enough to hold up any investigation until the perpertrators have all died of natural causes.

The best things that can come of this outing is that the Palistinians will get more repest as human beings, which throughout the 70's to the 90's has been lacking.