Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: L'altro Milosevic

From: 
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=10710
 
Another war on terror. Another proxy army. Another mysterious
massacre. And now, after 19 years, perhaps the truth at last...  The
eyes of the world are on Afghanistan, but today a Belgian appeals
court is due to consider a case with disturbing contemporary
parallels. Robert Fisk reveals shocking new evidence that the full,
horrific story of the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1982 has not yet
been told.
28 November 2001
Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls the
chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that overwhelmed her
just over 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982. As one of the survivors
prepared to testify against the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon
 who was then Israel's defence minister  she stops to
search her memory when she confronts the most terrible moments of her
life. "The Lebanese Forces militia [Phalangists] had taken us from our
homes and marched us up to the entrance to the camp where a large hole
had been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the
militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children had climbed over
bodies to reach this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this
man killed in front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams
from the women. That's when we heard the Israelis on loudspeakers
shouting, 'Give us the men, give us the men.' We thought, 'Thank God,
they will save us.'" It was to prove a cruelly false hope.
 
Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her husband Hassan, 30, and
her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing in the crowd
of men. "We were told to walk up the road towards the Kuwaiti embassy,
the women and children in front, the men behind. We had been
separated. There were Phalangist militiamen and Israeli soldiers
walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan and Faraj. It was like
a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got to the Cité
Sportif, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room and the men
were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a lot of men
from the camp and I could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went
round saying 'Sit, sit.' It was 11am. An hour later, we were told to
leave. But we stood around outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting
for our men."
 
Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for Hassan and Faraj
to emerge. "Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they
told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then
about 4pm, an Israeli officer came out. He was wearing dark glasses
and said in Arabic: 'What are you all waiting for?' He said there was
nobody left, that everyone had gone. There were Israeli trucks moving
out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn't see inside. And there were
jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there
as it got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were
very nervous. But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went
inside. And there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three
years married. I never saw my husband again."
 
Today, a Belgian appeals court will begin a hearing to decide if Prime
Minister Sharon should be prosecuted for the massacre of Palestinian
civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982.
(Belgian laws allow courts to try foreigners for war crimes committed
on foreign soil.) In working on this case, the prosecution believes
that it has discovered shocking new evidence of Israel's involvement.
 
The evidence centres on the Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium  the
"Cité Sportif". Only two miles from Beirut airport, the damaged
stadium was a natural holding centre for prisoners. It had been an
ammunition dump for Yasser Arafat's PLO and repeatedly bombed by
Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut so that its giant,
smashed exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The Palestinians had
earlier mined its cavernous interior, but its vast, underground
storage space and athletics changing-rooms remained intact. It was a
familiar landmark to all of us who lived in Beirut. At mid-morning on
18 September 1982  about the time Sana Sersawi says she was
brought to the stadium  I saw hundreds of Palestinian and
Lebanese prisoners, probably well over 1,000, sitting in its gloomy,
dark interior, squatting in the dust, watched over by Israeli soldiers
and plain-clothes Shin Beth (Israeli secret service) agents and men
who I suspected were Lebanese collaborators. The men sat in silence,
obviously in fear. From time to time, I noted, a few were taken away.
They were put into Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles
 for further "interrogation".
 
Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, inside the Sabra and
Chatila Palestinian refugee camps, up to 600 massacre victims rotted
in the sun, the stench of decomposition drifting over the prisoners
and their captors alike. It was suffocatingly hot. Loren Jenkins of
The Washington Post, Paul Eedle of Reuters and I had only got into the
cells because the Israelis assumed  given our Western
appearance  that we must have been members of Shin Beth. Many
of the prisoners had their heads bowed. But Israel's Phalangist
militiamen  still raging at the murder of their leader and
president elect Bashir Gemayel  had been withdrawn from the
camps, their slaughter over, and at least the Israeli army was now in
charge. So what did these men have to fear?
 
Looking back  and listening to Sana Sersawi today  I
shudder now at our innocence. My notes of the time, subsequently
written into a book about Israel's 1982 invasion and its war with the
PLO, contain some ominous clues. We found a Lebanese employee of
Reuters, Abdullah Mattar, among the prisoners and obtained his
release, Paul leading him away with his arm around the man's
shoulders. "They take us away, one by one, for interrogation," one of
the prisoners muttered to me. "They are Haddad [Christian militia]
men. Usually they bring the people back after interrogation, but not
always. Sometimes the people do not return them." Then an Israeli
officer ordered me to leave. Why couldn't the prisoners talk to me, I
asked? "They can talk if they want," he replied. "But they have
nothing to say."
 
All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps. The smell of
the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist jeep with the
words "Military Police" painted on it  if so exotic an
institution could be associated with this gang of murderers 
drove by. A few television crews had turned up. One filmed the
Lebanese Christian militiamen outside the Cité Sportif. He also filmed
a woman pleading to an Israeli army colonel called "Yahya" for the
release of her husband. (The colonel has now been positively
identified by The Independent. Today, he is a general in the Israeli
army.)
 
Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a line of Israeli
Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking, watching
the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos, some being set
free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men in
drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had happened inside
the camps. One of the members of the tank crews, Lt Avi Grabovsky
 he was later to testify to the Israeli Kahan commission
 had even witnessed the murder of several civilians the
previous day and had been told not to "interfere".
 
And in the days that followed, strange reports reached us. A girl had
been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen and taken
away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier. Then the
cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a US television chain
complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested her husband. He was
never seen again. There were other vague rumours of "disappeared"
people.
 
I wrote in my notes at the time that "even after Chatila, Israel's
'terrorist' enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut". But I had
not directly associated this dark conviction with the Cité Sportif. I
had not even reflected on the fearful precedents of a sports stadium
in time of war. Hadn't there been a sports stadium in Santiago a few
years before, packed with prisoners after Pinochet's coup d'etat, a
stadium from which many prisoners never returned?
 
Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to indict Ariel
Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday, 17
September 1982, she said, while the massacre was still (unknown to
her) underway inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in her home with her
family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps. "Neighbours came and
said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so we went downstairs
and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese Forces [Phalangists] on the
road. The men were separated from the women." This separation 
with its awful shadow of similar separations at Srebrenica during the
Bosnian war  were a common feature of these mass arrests. "We
were told to go to the Cité Sportif. The men stayed put." Among the
men were Wadha's two sons, 19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and
her brother Mohamed. "We went to the Cité Sportif, as the Israelis
told us," she says. "I never saw my sons or brother again."
 
The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija Zrein says
she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cité Sportif and the
men with her, including her 22-year-old brother, were taken away. Some
militiamen  watched by the Israelis  loaded him into a
car, blindfolded, she claims. "That's how he disappeared," she says in
her official testimony, "and I have never seen him again since."
 
It was only a few days afterwards that we journalists began to notice
a discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600 bodies had been
found inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians had been reported as
"missing". We assumed  how easy assumptions are in war 
that they had been killed in the three days between 16 September 1982
and the withdrawal of the Phalangist killers on the 18th, that their
corpses had been secretly buried outside the camp. Beneath the golf
course, we suspected. The idea that many of these young people had
been murdered outside the camps or after the 18th, that the killings
were still going on while we walked through the camps, never occurred
to us.
 
Why did we not think of this at the time? The following year, the
Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning Sharon but
ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on 18 September, with just a
one-line hint  unexplained  that several hundred people
may have "disappeared" at about the same time. The commission
interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was allowed to become the
narrative of history. The idea that the Israelis went on handing over
prisoners to their bloodthirsty militia allies never occurred to us.
The Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence that
this is exactly what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh, believes
his brother Ali was handed to the Phalange on the morning of the 18th.
A Palestinian Christian woman called Milaneh Boutros has recorded how,
in a truck-load of women and children, she was taken from the camps to
the Christian town of Bikfaya, the home of the newly assassinated
Christian president-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a grief-stricken
Christian woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in the
truck. He was shot. The truck must have passed at least four Israeli
checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I realise now
that I had even met the woman who ordered the boy's execution.
 
Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended, Shahira Abu
Rudeina says she was taken to the Cité Sportif where, in one of the
underground "holding centres", she saw a retarded man, watched by
Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her evidence might be
rejected were it not for the fact that she also expressed her
gratitude for an Israeli soldier  inside the Chatila camp,
against all the evidence given by the Israelis  who prevented
the murder of her daughters by the Phalange.
 
Long after the war, the ruins of the Cité Sportif were torn down and a
brand new marble stadium was built in its place, partly by the
British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony of what may lie
beneath its foundations  and its frightful implications 
might give Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment.

 sono contrario).
 
:Anch'io sono contrario alla pena di morte.  Le punizioni formali mi
:interessano poco.  Voglio che sia permanentemente tolta ad Al Qaeda
la
:possibilita` di fare piu' questi scherzi.
Ecco, bravo, e come lo fai?
I tizi che hanno fatto gli scherzi di NY in Afghanistan, per quanto
ne sappiamo, non ci sono mai stati.
Ne' i famosi campi di addestramento dei Taliban sono minimamente
necessari
a chi intende dirottare un aereo e far esplodere una bomba nel bel
mezzo
degli USA.  Non sono neanche necessari Al Qaeda o Bin Laden, visto che
il
terrorismo, Islamico o otherwise, non lo hanno certo inventato loro.
Israele si e' dannato per anni a far cessare le bombe suicide a suon
di
assassinii, bombardamenti, assedii, punizioni collettive
e altre pratiche, che, detto fra noi, lo pongono
su un piano morale che non si differenzia molto da Hamas.
E, come si e' visto per l'ennesima volta l'altro ieri, ha fallito
miseramente.
Proprio perche' l'ingrediente principale di questo tipo di terrorismo,
la
presenza di una parte della popolazione abbastanza disparata, fanatica
o nichilista da approvarlo, non e' una cosa che puo' essere combattuta
con bombe
e fucili.       
Certamente, combattere tribu' che sono al livello dell'eta' della
pietra
e' un pochino piu' facile e soddisfacente che combattere contro una
rete finanziaria e sociale pro-fondamentalista che noi stessi abbiamo
contribuito
a creare e a mantenere per motivi di realpolitik (lotta al comunismo e
al
movimento anticolonialista).     
O, magari, a rivedere un'attimo quelle nostre politiche che
contribuiscono
a creare la frustrazione e disperazione nel medio oriente sulla
quale i fondamentalisti campano.
GT

 oriente sulla quale i fondamentalisti campano.
In altre parole -- l'abbandono totale dell'Israele, vero?  Permettere
che i paesi arabi spingano nel mare gli ebrei?  Non vedo altri cambimenti
che possano soddisfare i terroristi.
Forse sara` anche indicato, non lo so.  Ma parliamoci chiaro in proposito.

 Non vedo altri cambimenti che possano soddisfare i terroristi.
Veramente il terrorista di cui stiamo parlando lo e' diventato perche'
voleva l'abbandono totale dell'Arabia Saudita.    Il paese, non
scordiamocelo, piu' fondamentalista dell'intero medio oriente che ha
anche finanziato le Madrasseh
che oggi indottrinano l'itera gioventu' del Pakistan.
Poi ci sarebbe l'embargo contro l'Irak, e le morti di centinaia di
migliaia
di persone da esso derivate.
Anche migliori rapporti con lo stato piu' democratico del medio
oriente,
che guarda caso e' il prodotto di una rivoluzione Musulmana (parlo,
ovviamente,
dell'Iran) farebbero molto per risolvere l'enmita' fra l'"occidente" e
i Musulmani.
Tutte cose che, a lungo termine, renderebbo la vita assai piu'
difficile per
i terroristi che la distruzione di un paio di "basi".
GT