Fra Ola Lars Andresen:
*****************
Trond
Kan du legge denne ut på forumet?
hilsen ola
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This is important and a good start. Israeli war-criminals must begin to
understand they won't stay immune forever. Let's start with Sharon; then
proceed one at a time.
SM
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Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 13:11:46 -0500
Reply-To: Al-Awda@egroups.com
Subject: [AL-AWDA] INDICT SHARON NOW
INDICT AND ARREST ARIEL SHARON NOW!
JOIN US IN THIS WORLDWIDE CAMPAIGN TO DEMAND THAT SHARON BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE!
* Circulate the petition and the background information (see below) to your
friends and colleagues, and to nongovernmental organizations, media, and
government officials in your home country.
* Sign the petition (see below) by sending an email to:
IndictSharonNow@aol.com
We will add your name, or your organization's name, to the list of
signatories. If you are signing as an individual, please -- if you wish --
provide your city/country of residence, profession, and organizational
affiliation so this information can be published along with your name. It is
our goal that this initiative reflect the views of an international
constituency, North and South, that remembers the gravity of Ariel Sharon's
actions and is committed to seeking international justice in his case. We
encourage Israeli citizens and nongovernmental organizations to sign the
petition, join this campaign, and raise inside Israel the issue of Ariel
Sharon's impunity.
* Notify your local newspapers and other media about this campaign, and
submit letters to the editor and opinion pieces about Ariel Sharon and the
importance of ending his impunity for massacres of innocent civilians.
* Once we have collected signatures, we will recommend other specific
activities in your home countries designed to raise the profile of this
campaign. We also will circulate to other signatories any suggestions for
activities that you send to us at: IndictSharonNow@aol.com
TEXT OF THE PETITION:
We, the undersigned, believe that Ariel Sharon should be indicted and
brought to justice. As an Israeli military officer and as minister of
defense, Ariel Sharon was a principal in the first degree to murder, war
crimes, grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and crimes against
humanity, causing the death and injury of thousands of Palestinian and
Lebanese civilians.
As Israel's minister of defense and architect of that country's brutal
invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Ariel Sharon's actions and failure to act
facilitated the massacre of at least seven hundred to eight hundred - and by
some accounts as many as 3,000 -- Palestinian, Lebanese, and other civilians
in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut in September 1982.
Three decades earlier, as a young military officer, Ariel Sharon led an
Israeli elite commando force, Unit 101, which carried out brutal raids
against Palestinians. The massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya, on
October 14, 1953, was perhaps the most notorious. Sharon's unit blew up 45
houses in the village, killing 69 civilians, two-thirds of them women and
children, according to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his recent book The
Iron Wall.
Judicial authorities in the State of Israel have never shouldered their
legal responsibilities and thoroughly investigated and prosecuted Ariel
Sharon for these massacres and other crimes. In our view, the failure of the
Israeli legal system to act obligates the nations that are High Contracting
Parties of the Geneva Conventions to hold Ariel Sharon accountable,
irrespective of whether he is a private citizen of Israel, a cabinet
minister, or the head of government.
Article 146 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian
Persons in Time of War states that each High Contracting Party "shall be
under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to
have ordered to be committed" grave breaches of the Convention, "and shall
bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts.
It may also, if it prefers, and in accordance with the provisions of its own
legislation, hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting
Party concerned, provided such High Contracting Party has made out a prima
facie case."
Article 147 of the Convention states that the grave breaches noted in
Article 146 include willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including
biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury
to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement
of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces
of a hostile Power, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights
of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of
hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not
justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.
Recent developments in the emerging system of international justice --
including the cases of Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, the
perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, and others -- provide compelling
precedents for ending the impunity that Ariel Sharon has thus far enjoyed.
He should be indicted for the crimes for which he has been responsible as
the first step in a process of accountability that will bring justice to his
victims and their families.
SIGNATORIES as of January 11, 2001
(Organizations are listed for identification purposes only unless otherwise
indicated)
Paul Aarts
Department of Political Science/International Relations
Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences
University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Gasser Abdel Razek
Member of the Board of Directors
Egyptian Organization for Human Rights
Cairo, Egypt
Hossam Bahgat
Cairo Times
Staff journalist
Cairo, Egypt
Francis A. Boyle
Professor of Law
University of Illinois College of Law, Champaign, Illinois, USA
Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92)
Abdeen Jabara
Attorney
New York, New York, USA
Walid Keirouz, Ph.D.
Beirut, Lebanon
Laurie King-Irani
Anthropologist/Writer
Annapolis, Maryland, USA
Isam al Khafaji, Iraqi writer
International School for Humanities
University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Rasha Mansour (Jordanian citizen)
Training Specialist
Institute of International Education/ Development
Training II Project
Cairo, Egypt.
Maria Montagna
Canada
Roger Normand
Center for Economic and Social Rights
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Mary Ramadan
Attorney
Bethesda, Maryland, USA
Samar Said
Training Manager
Giza, Egypt
Shifra Stern
Legal Secretary
Bronx, New York, USA
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The 1982 Sabra and Shatilla Massacre:
The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatilla took place
from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on
September 18, 1982, in an area until the control of the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF). The perpetrators were members of the Phalange (Kata'eb, in
Arabic) militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied
with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims
during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including
pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or
disemboweled before or after they were killed. To cite only one
post-massacre eyewitness account, that of U.S. journalist Thomas Friedman of
the New York Times: "Mostly I saw groups of young men in their twenties and
thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet,
and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun fire."
An official Israeli commission of inquiry -- chaired by Yitzhak Kahan,
president of Israel's Supreme Court -- investigated the massacre, and in
February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which
remains secret until now). The Kahan Commission found that Ariel Sharon,
among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission's
report stated in pertinent part:
"It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of
Defence for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed
by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having
failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the
Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to
the Minister of Defence for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing
or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry
into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with
which the Defence Minister was charged."
The Commission also concluded: "[I]n his meeting with the Phalangist
commanders, the Defence Minister made no attempt to point out to them the
gravity of the danger that their men would commit acts of slaughter....Had
it become clear to the Defence Minister that no real supervision could be
exercised over the Phalangist force that entered the camps with the IDF's
assent, his duty would have been to prevent their entry. The usefulness of
the Phalangists' entry into the camps was wholly disproportionate to the
damage their entry could cause if it were uncontrolled." The Commission
further noted: "We shall remark here that it is ostensibly puzzling that the
Defence Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister [Menachem Begin]
privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps."
The 1953 Massacre in Qibya:
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote this about the massacre: "Sharon's order
was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its
inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all
expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was
revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been
reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine
civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon
and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away
and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses. The UN
observer who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion: "One story
was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled
across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by
heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them. The
slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the
president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953
(S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan
to the United States.
On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a
battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan). According to the
diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the village and
systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons,
grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians
had been recovered; several more bodies had been still under the wreckage.
Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed.
Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had
been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal,
Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighbouring villages of
Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.
The U.S. Department of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953,
expressing its "deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their
lives" in the Qibya attack as well as the conviction that those responsible
"should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to
prevent such incidents in the future." (Department of State Bulletin, Oct.
26, 1953, p. 552)
At the Security Council's meeting on 20 October 1953, it decided unanimously
to examine recent violations of the General Armistice Agreements and the
Qibya attack in particular. It was agreed that the council would invite and
hear a report by its representative, Major General Vagn Bennike, chief of
staff of the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization, in order to obtain
accurate information concerning the facts.
Maj. Gen. Bennike reported to the Security Council on 27 October 1953. He
said that, following the receipt of a Jordan complaint that a raid on the
village of Qibya had been carried out by Israeli military forces during the
night of 14-15 October between 9:30 p.m. and 4:30 a.m., a United Nations
investigation team had departed from Jerusalem for Qibya in the early
morning of 15 October. On reaching the village, the Acting Chairman of the
Mixed Armistice Commission had found that between 30 and 40 buildings had
been completely demolished. By the time the Acting Chairman left Qibya,
27bodies had been dug from the rubble.
Witnesses had been uniform in describing their experience as a night of
horror, during which Israeli soldiers had moved about in their village
blowing up buildings, firing into doorways and windows with automaticweapons
and throwing hand grenades. A number of unexploded hand grenades, marked
with Hebrew letters indicating recent Israel manufacture, and three bags of
TNT had been found in and about the village. An emergency meeting of the
Mixed Armistice Commission had been held in the afternoon of 15 October and
a resolution condemning the regular Israel army for its attack on Qibya, as
a breach of article III, paragraph 2,62/ of the Israel-Jordan General
Armistice Agreement, had been adopted by a majority vote. The Chief of Staff
stated that he had discussed with the Acting Chairman of the Mixed Armistice
Commission the reasons why he had supported the resolution condemning the
Israel army for having carried out the attack, and that, after listening to
his explanations, he had asked him to state them in writing; the technical
arguments given by Commander Hutchison in his memorandum appeared to the
Chief of Staff to be convincing.
At the Security Council's meeting on 16 November 1953, the representative of
Jordan requested that the council condemn Israel for the Qibya massacre in
the strongest term, and ask Israel to prosecute and punish all Israel
officials, military or civilians, responsible for the killings. The
representative of Lebanon made a similar request. Security Council
Resolution 101, adopted on 24 November 1953 (with Lebanon and the USSR
abstaining) found the retaliatory action at Qibya by Israeli forces a
violation of the cease-fire provisions of Security Council Resolution 54
(1948) and inconsistent with the parties' obligations under the General
Armistice Agreement between Israel and Jordan and the Charter of the U.N.,
and expressed "the strongest censure of that action." The resolution also
called on the governments of Israel and Jordan to prevent all acts of
violence on either side of the demarcation line, but did not call on Israel
to hold accountable and bring to justice those who carried out the massacre.
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