[Announce-DAN] local palestine egroup ... / ... Ariel Sharon

[Buckeyedog@email.msn.com]

DAN friends,

The Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace recently formed a working 
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This egroup averages about 1 post per day, much of it important news 
updates you won't find in our local press (or almost any U.S. press).

Below is a recently posted outstanding Robert Fisk article on the
mass-murderer Israel is about to elect as their top leader.


The legacy of Ariel Sharon
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/2001-
02/fisk060201.shtml

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...

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 vouch safed 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.

http://al-awda.org
____________________________________________________
No Return = No Peace March and Rally, New York City, 7 April 2001
____________________________________________________





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