The Legacy of Ariel Sharon
by Robert Fisk
The Independent, February 6, 2001
This 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...
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.
Robert
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