Fra Hans Olav Brendberg. Han ba meg legge ut dette.
Se artikler nedenfor av Robert Fisk, The Independent.
Trond Andresen
*************************************
Etterlysing: Jobb å gjera!
Etter drapet på Elie Hobeika har rettssaka i Belgia mot Sharon mista eit av
sine viktigaste vitne. Hobeika var leiar for dei falangistane som
gjennomførte massakrane i Sabra og Chatilla. To dagar før han vart blåst i
lufta gjorde han avtale med belgiske utsendingar om å vitna. Bilbomba som
drap han eksploderte i ein del av Beirut der Hizbollah og andre muslimske
militsar vil ha store vanskar med å gjennomføra ein slik operasjon. I Beirut
reknar dei fleste med at Israel står bak.
Kva er det rettsaka i Belgia kan få fram som me ikkje visste frå før? Ei
rekke vitne kan fortelja om hundrevis av palestinarar som vart førte bort
frå leirane av israelske tryggjingsstyrkar medan massakrane foregikk. Robert
Fisk var inne på Citè Sportif - ein fotballbane - nokre dagar etter, og såg
hundrevis av fangar. Ein og to om gongen vart førte bort for "avhøyr". I
tida etterpå vart eit par av dei forsvunne palestinarane funne i veggrøfter
langs hovudvegen sørover frå Beirut.
Kva kan ha skjedd? Eg trur ikkje det er umogleg at den kjende delen av
soga - massakrane - i grunnen var ein nokså blodig dekkoperasjon for å
kamuflera det verkelege brotsverket: "Avhøyra" av hundrevis av folk med god
kjennskap til PLO. Desse folka forsvann etter avhøyra. Massakrane skjedde
dagar etter at Arafat hadde flykta frå Beirut - etter ein avtale der USA
garanterte for tryggleiken til dei palestinske flyktningane i byen.
I tilfelle fortel denne historia viktige ting om det me kan venta ved ein
"reokkupasjon" av dei palestinske sjølvstyrområda. Difor er det viktig å
grava no - medan liket til Hobeika er ferskt. Eg har lite tid - kan andre
kasta seg over dette?
Hans Olav Brendberg
_______________________
>New evidence indicates Palestinians died hours after surviving camp massacres
>
>By Robert Fisk
>Middle East Correspondent 28 November 2001
>
>
>Chilling new evidence suggests that more than 1,000 Palestinian survivors of
>the Sabra and Chatila camp massacres in Beirut were "disappeared" within 24
>hours of the slaughter, often in areas under direct Israeli military control.
>
>The testimony which describes in detail how the victims were last seen by
>their families in the hands of Israeli troops and Israel's militia allies
>will be among the material to be considered by a Belgian judge, who could
>decide today whether the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, should be
>prosecuted for the slaughter.
>
>Mr Sharon was judged "personally responsible" for the massacre by the
>Israeli Kahan Commission in 1983. Its report concluded that hundreds of
>Palestinian civilians, including women and children, were all butchered
>between 16 and 18 September in 1982. But among the female witnesses cited by
>lawyers in Belgium, who are seeking the indictment against Mr Sharon, are at
>least five who claim that more than 100 men were detained by the militiamen
>and handed over to the Israelis alive. They were never seen again.
>
>Separately from the court action,film taken by a television crew at the
>time, which has recently come to light, appears to show Israeli officers in
>the presence of Phalangist gunmen long after the Israelis knew their
>Phalangist allies had carried out the massacre, which caused worldwide
>outrage and led Mr Sharon, then Defence Minister, to resign. There has
>always been a discrepancy between the number of bodies found in Sabra and
>Chatila up to 600 and the number of civilians registered as missing more
>than 1,800. Until now, it was assumed that all the victims had been murdered
>by Phalangists and that many had been secretly buried.
>
>If accepted by the court, the new evidencecould hold disturbing implications
>for both the Israeli army and for Mr Sharon, particularly if the Israelis
>continued their collaboration with the Phalange after the murders in the
>camps and if they permitted the Phalange to take away more prisoners.
_______________________________
>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.
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