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1982
was a year of recuperation - of sorts. The blanket
protest had ended the previous October and while the
bulk of republican prisoners were still refusing to
cooperate with the prison system, the intense heat
of death-inducing battle had tempered off. While the
camp leadership under Seanna Walsh and Tom McFeeley
was strategising about how to secure segregation many
of us in the wings had taken time out. We were still
trying to come to terms with the loss of ten republican
volunteers on hunger strike and seeking to make sense
of it all. Not the sense behind their action but a
logic for the British behaving as they did. The situation
could so easily have been avoided along with its horrendous
consequences both inside the prison and on the streets.
For
those of us regaining our physical strength, after
years of physiologically debilitating cellular confinement,
in the prison yard or satisfying our intellectual
curiosity through reading there was a sense of guilt
that we were actually enjoying things that others
had given their lives to achieve; people who would
never again enjoy anything. That was all of twenty
years ago. It was a year of serious events; locally
the RUC were beginning a systematic shoot to kill
policy in and around County Armagh while the IRA was
bringing to an end the barbarous career, and nihilistic
life, of Shankill war criminal Lennie Murphy. Across
the ‘shuck’ in England the organisation
was exploding bombs amidst British military cavalry
and their horses. Politically, Sinn Fein was polling
well beyond the expectations of its critics in the
party’s first major outing under its own steam
in the electoral world and much to the chagrin of
the SDLP who had earlier relished with ‘gleeful
anticipation’ the prospects of taking on the
republicans; Internationally, the British were gung
ho in their eagerness to resurrect the glory days
of the empire and murdered a few helpless sailors
on the General Belgrano to prove their point. Not
that the Argentine navy had much to recommend it in
terms of respecting human rights. Navy death squads
and torturers abounded during the country’s dirty
war against the Left and anybody else that happened
to dissent from the right wing military dictatorship
that plagued the country from 1976 to 1983. Great
at bullying their own largely unarmed population,
the Argentine armed forces floundered when they came
face to face with a larger bully carrying a bigger
stick. Argentina's soccer players aided by Diego Maradona
fared little better than its army in that years World
Cup which saw Italy beat Germany in the final after
the most exciting Brazilian team of the past quarter
of a century went out in the quarters.
There
was no shortage of gory or memorable events to pick
from in 1982 but one seemed to stand out over and
above the rest for its sheer savagery, and for the
manner in which it made us reflect on the organised
slaughter practised against civilian populations by
Nazi Germany. The American military in My Lai had
already reminded us that butchering innocents was
not a passing primitive fad indulged in by Hitler
and Himmler; and Pinochet was never too far away just
in case there was a tendency to forget. When the Lebanese
militia waded through the refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatila massacring in its path a large section of
the Palestinian population a war crime that would
equal most other post world war two atrocities came
into being.
On
September 14th, 1982, the Lebanese Maronite president
of barely three weeks, Bachir Gemayel, was assassinated
by a bomb planted at the Phalangist Party headquarters.
During the country’s earlier civil war Israel
had begun viewing the right-wing Christian Phalange
militia as a natural ally and its June 'Operation
Peace for Galilee' invasion of Lebanon enabled it
to influence the outcome of the presidential election
in August which saw their favoured candidate, Gemayel,
take power. On the day after his death the Israeli
Army occupied West Beirut. One day later the same
military met with Phalangist militia commanders and
gave them clearance to enter the camps of Sabra and
Shatila on the pretext of finding Palestinian 'terrorists'.
It was agreed that Elie Hobeika would be in charge
of the operation. He was a leader of the Christian
Maronite Lebanese Forces and had effectively functioned
as Israel's liaison chief during its occupation of
the Lebanon. Many of Hobeika's family along with his
fiancée had earlier been assassinated by armed
Palestinians at Damur in 1976, an event which had
heavily shaped his intensely hostile attitude towards
Palestinians. Despite the potential for brutal revenge
that clearly existed, the then Israeli Chief of Staff
Lt.-Gen. Rafael Eitan told his own country’s
Kahan Commission that the decision to permit the Phalangists
into the refugee camps was taken by himself and Ariel
Sharon, the Israeli Defence Minister.
That
night the genocide began. Although the following day
Israel's General Drori directed the Phalangists to
halt their orgy of murder, this was rescinded and
the death squads were given a further day to complete
their work. According to a report in the Irish
Times ‘the Phalangists rampaged until Saturday
morning, killing and raping indiscriminately. Robert
Hatem, a bodyguard to Hobeika, described how he 'was
doing what I was told, throwing people out of upper-storey
windows, shooting others in the swimming pool."
He also described the Phalangist leader as a 'war
criminal'. By the time his 38 hours war crime spree
of slaughter, rape and mutiliation was completed,
according to the writer Ghada Khouri 'some 2,000 civilians
lay dead - some so badly mangled that they were unrecognisable'.
In
February 1983 the Kahan Commission found that the
massacre leader Elie Hobeika was asked by a Phalangist
subordinate over the radio what should be done with
50 Palestinian women and children prisoners. The reply
was curt: 'This is the last time you are going to
ask me a question like that. You know exactly what
to do.'
In
March this year I went along to a meeting in Belfast
City centre to listen to Fatima El Hilou, a survivor
of the massacres. It was not a pleasant experience.
Reading of these matters is distasteful enough but
to listen to someone who escaped with her life added
a poignancy to the account. Ten years of age at the
time, she lived with her family in the centre of Shatila.
Before they realised their fate the refugees housed
there thought that the incursion into the camps was
the beginning of a search operation to seize all the
men of fighting age. But the Palestinian fighters
were elsewhere. Then, when the true horror set in,
pandemonium erupted. Fatima spoke of seeing a Falangist
militiaman wielding a knife dripping with blood; of
entire families being butchered in the alleyways that
ran through the camp; a woman wandering through the
carnage carrying nothing but her own entrails in her
hands; her nine months pregnant cousin having her
stomach slit open and a baby boy pulled out to hear
the only words he would ever hear in this world, ‘you
will be a Palestinian fighter’ before his murderer
took his seconds old life. Fatima then spoke of the
frantic search to find her brothers after the Falangists
pulled out; of the friends and neighbours who lay
dead on the streets. She holds Ariel Sharon responsible.
In that she is not alone.
In
a bid to bring the carnage to a halt, Morris Draper,
a US envoy informed Sharon:
You
must stop the massacres. They are obscene. I have
an officer in the camp counting the bodies. You
ought to be ashamed. The situation is rotten and
terrible. They are killing children. You are in
absolute control of the area, and therefore responsible
for the area.
The
Khan Commission found Ariel Sharon, Defence Minister
at the time, as one who 'bears personal responsibility.'
for the slaughter.
A
separate International Commission of Inquiry reported
that
the
extent to which Israeli participation in prior massacres
against the Palestinian people creates a most disturbing
pattern of a political struggle carried on by means
of mass terror directed at civilians, including
women, children and the aged.
This
has led to the US writer Peggy Thomson, in Counterpunch,
claiming that:
One
theory is that the massacre took place, not because
the Christian Phalangists wished to avenge their
leader, but rather because the Israelis wished to
frighten the Palestinians into fleeing, possibly
to Jordan. The theory behind such an idea was that
the Palestinians from Lebanon would then be joined,
voluntarily or otherwise, by those living in the
West Bank, thus effecting a wholesale Jordanian
"transfer," an option for solving the
Palestinian "problem" still favoured today
by many Israeli right-wingers.
Elie
Hobeika is now dead, victim of a bomb attack at his
Beirut home in January of this year. Few committed
to justice for the victims of Sabra and Shatila will
mourn his passing. But his death came just as he had
agreed to give evidence in a Belgian court against
Ariel Sharon. The cover up, it seems, is set to continue.
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