16 September 2012: This is the 30th Anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre wherein up to 3500 defenceless refugees were murdered in cold blood. The actual massacre took three days to complete, executed by right-wing Lebanese Phalangists with the assistance of the SLA and Zionist invading forces in the form of the IDF who made certain that the camps remained sealed, allowing no one to escape to safety.
The forces who led the massacre were under the direct leadership of Elie Hobeika, intelligence chief of the Lebanese Forces. While the Israelis fired illuminating flares over the camps, the slaughter began and did not conclude until 18 September.
The Kahan Commission, later set up in 1983 by the Zionists themselves in response to widespread international pressure, concluded that Ariel Sharon, aka Butcher Sharon was PERSONALLY responsible, among others, for the massacre. Elie Hobeika later became a long-serving Member of the Lebanese Parliament as well as serving in many minsterial roles. Despite the findings of the Kahan Commission, Ariel Sharon held many influential ministerial roles in the Zionist government, serving in fact as Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006. Thus were the engineers of one of the bloodiest and most appalling massacres in contemporary history rewarded.
The people who actually were inside the camps at the time of the massacre were NOT fighters for the most part, but old men and women and children.
Some of the details of the massacres are as follows:
During the Lebanese Civil War, the Lebanese were split into warring factions. One of these factions was the right-wing Christian Phalange ('Fingers'), who on 15 September called for revenge for the assassination of Bashir Gemayel. They did not propose to fight against armed opponents but rather to target the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila where no one would be in a position to resist effectively.
By noon of 15 September, the IDF had surrounded the camps, controlling all means of entrance and exit with the Phalangist militia members. The IDF had occupied the seven story Kuwaiti Embassy as well as a number of other multi-story buidings, giving them an 'unobstructed and panoramic view' of the camps.
The IDF then began to shell the camps. Pursuant to an invitation by Ariel Sharon and IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, the Phalangist militia were given a 'green light' to enter the camps. 1500 members of the Phalangist militia under the leadership of Elie Hobeika arrived at the camps in jeeps supplied by the IDF, with detailed plans supplied as well by the Israeli forces. Three days of slaughter ensued.
A fortnight prior to the massacre, a member of the Phalangist militia, in conversation with an Israeli official remarked that: 'The question we are putting to ourselves is: how to begin, by raping or by killing?'
Israeli General Amos Yaron's statement to the effect that the IDF knew that the Phalangists intended to destroy the camps was on record as well prior to the massacre.
The slaughter began at 6.00 p.m. on 16 September. First, the few young men who remained in the camps were executed. Unimpeded slaughter of old people, women and children then began. Throughout the three-day massacre, detailed reports were sent to the Isreali government and seen by more than 20 senior Israeli officials. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Israelis were fully as responsible as the Phalangist units and some members of Saad Haddad's so-called 'Free Lebanon Forces'.
On Friday, 17 September, the IDF declared that the Phalange should 'continue mopping up', despite some internation concern that a terrible massacre was taking place. He further declared that he had 'no feeling that something irregular had occurred' in the camps. The Phalangists were told to complete their 'mopping up' and to exit the camps at dawn on Saturday morning but they did not do so until they had completed their grisly work.
When foreign journalists finally were allowed into the camps on 18 September, they found ghastly scenes of carnage. It went far beyond mere death and heaps of corpses. Many of the bodies had been severely mutilated, boys having been castrated and scalped, women raped and carvings of crosses incised into the bodies of some of the victims.
An American journalist, Janet Lee Stevens, reported: 'I saw dead women in their houses with their skirts up to their waists and their legs spread apart; dozens of young men shot after being lined up against an alley wall; children with their throats slit, a pregnant woman with her stomach chopped open, her eyes still wide open, her blackened face silently screaming in horror; countless babies and toddlers who had been stabbed or ripped apart and who had been thrown into garbage piles.'
Prior to the massacres, the PLO had been forced to leave Beirut, their departure supervised by international forces from Italy, France and the U.S. Yasir Arafat begged those same forces to return to protect the helpless inhabitants of the camps against the Israeli forces who had invaded Lebanon.
In a report of a news conference before the massacres: Yasir Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, demanded today that the United States, France and Italy send their troops back to Beirut to protect its inhabitants against Israel...The dignity of three armies and the honour of their countries is involved... I ask Italy, France and the United States: What of your promise to protect the inhabitants of Beirut?'
There was no response from the nations that had forced the PLO out of Beirut and no protection whatsoever given to the refugee camps even though they were well aware of the escalating violence of the Phalangists and the Zionist invading forces.
The Palestinian Red Crescent gave the total of dead as 'over 3000' and the Israeli journalist Ammoon Kapeliouk of Le Monde Diplomatique in his book about the massacre wrote of approximately 2000 bodies from official and Red Cross sources, estimating 1000 to 1500 additional victims disposed of by the Phalangists themselves for a total of 3000 to 3500 victims of the worst sort of atrocities known to humanity.
Whatever the total, there is no doubt whatsoever that the massacres of Sabra and Shatila represent the cold-blooded calculation of the Israeli government to further its Zionist aims of the eradication of the Palestinian presence in pursuit of 'a wholly Jewish State' created under the false banner of 'a land without a people for a people without a land'.
Zionist maps in the late 19th and early 20th century, long before the events of the Second World War on which they base their justification of continuing genocide and ethnic cleansing, showed the land of 'Eretz Yisrael' as encompassing not only Palestine but parts of Syria, Jordan and Southern Lebanon.
The Phalangists had their own agenda and indeed, there were many groups in Lebanon during the Civil War that welcomed the Israeli invasion and sought either to drive the Palestinian refugees from the country or simply extinguish their lives.
The victims of the Phalange were not only Palestinian either. There were many Shi'a Lebanese who were massacred by the militia and the invading IDF.
Although Palestinians for centuries have included both Christians and Muslims, there was and still is a fallacious belief among some right-wing Christian groups that Palestinians are solely Muslim and moreover Muslims that seek to create an Islamist State throughout the Arab Nation. Although there are Palestinians who embrace this goal, the aim of creating one single, democratic secular State is enshrined in the original principles that governed the PLO. In fact, the PLO never comprised a single group or political party but was an umbrella organisation with many different Palestinian political groups under its aegis. The PLO in that sense always has been far more an example of true democracy than the rigid two-party system of representational government in the U.S.
It would be wrong to declare Christianity to be in any way responsible for the massacres executed by the fanatics of the Phalange as it would be to declare Islam responsible for any excessive zeal shown by Muslim groups or nations. Religion as always is simply a smokescreen to disguise the true motivations for wars and atrocities, which tend to be economic and social in nature.
It is indisputable, however, that any group or organisation that supported and continues to support the Israeli dream of Zionism must be held accountable for the blood of the victims of Sabra and Shatila. They must be held accountable for the original demolition of approximately 500 villages in Palestine and the continuing demolition of Palestinian homes and expulsions of the Palestinian people from the Homeland. The massacre of Qana during the 'Grapes of Wrath' military adventure of the Israelis in 1996 as well as the continuing deaths of Palestinians at the hands of the IDF and Jewish settlers, the continuing bombings and the state of siege in Gaza demonstrate that the atrocities committed in Sabra and Shatila were not an isolated incident.
When the world remembers Sabra and Shatila, it must vow to stop the continuing programme of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people and to acknowledge the unequivocal Right of Return to the Homeland. Only then will we be able to declare that the deaths of the innocents during that terrible three-day massacre was not in vain.
The massacres have been enshrined in the work of many artists, among them Dia Azzazi. His work will be exhibited at the Tate Modern in London. Here is an article about it:
LONDON.- Dia Azzawi’s epic work Sabra Shatila will be displayed at the Tate Modern (level 3) this July. The Tate Modern collection comprises international modern and contemporary art dating from 1900 until today. The permanent collection is displayed on levels 3 and 5, level 4 displays temporary exhibition, and level 2 holds the work of contemporary artists. Sabra Shatila Described by Azzawi as ‘a manifesto of dismay and anger’, Sabra Shatila was created by the artist in response to the 1982 massacre of civilians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps during the Lebanese civil war.
The motivation behind the brutal murder of innocents, at the hands of the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia, was presented as a reprisal for the assassination of president Bachir Gemayel, leader of the Kataeb Party.
The day after the news of the massacre Azzawi was compelled to construct a work based on the killing: ‘I had at that time a roll of paper and, without any preparatory sketches, the idea for the work came to me. I tried to visualize my previous experience of walking through this camp, with its small rooms separated by a narrow road, in the early 1970s.’ Sabra Shatila displays the massacre through a series of fragmented scenes joined together to create a narrative which invokes the merciless cruelty and brutality of war and human suffering. Silent screams and hands outstretched in desperation pervade the composition; the careful use of blood red and the fragmented bodies of humans and animals reinforce the horror of the slaughter. Indeed Azzawi, who has often used textual referents in the construction of works, was deeply moved by the French writer Jean Genet’s 1983 account of the massacre which also aptly describes the scene presented in Sabra Shatila: A photograph doesn’t show the flies nor the thick white smell of death. Neither does it show you how you must jump over bodies as you walk along from one corpse to the next.
If you look closely at the corpse, an odd phenomenon occurs: the absence of life in this body corresponds to the total absence of the body, or rather to its continuous backing away. You feel that even by coming closer you can never touch it. That happens when you look at it carefully. But it should you make a move in its direction, get down next to it, move an arm or a finger, suddenly it is very much there and almost friendly. As one of the more politically inclined artists of his generation, Azzawi has since the 1970s created works which address the issue of human suffering as a result of political instability.
Previous works which explore the Palestinian plight include Witness From Our Time (1972), based on Black September and the series of works about the Tell al-Za’tar massacre of 1976. His more recent works Wounded Soul, Fountain of Pain (2010) and Elegy to My Trapped City (2011) relate to the post-2003 destruction of Iraq. Azzawi’s politically motivated works (his oeuvre demonstrates an interest in a range of subjects including archaeology, Arabic literature and poetry, and nineteenth-century European painting) are often likened to Picasso’s seminal painting Guernica (1937).
Dia Azzawi Dia Azzawi (b. 1939, Baghdad), is internationally recognised as one of the pioneers of modern Arab art. Defined by its powerful visual impact and brilliant colour, Azzawi’s art covers a range of subjects executed in a variety of media—including painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, and book art. He lives and works in London but continues to derive inspiration from his homeland, Iraq. (Article published by Art Daily)
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