Lest we forget

Those guilty of Sabra and Shatila may never be punished. But history shouldn't be repeated


September 16 passed without any furore. There was no remembrance. No candle light vigilance. Nothing. It was on this date 25 years ago, September 16, 1982, that Sabra and Shatila happened.

The two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon witnessed one of the most horrific slaughters mankind has ever witnessed. Horrific not because of the number of people killed (Total death count is still unclear with figures running between 800 to 2,000) but because of the way men, women and infants were slaughtered by rightwing Israel-assisted Lebanese Phalangist militiamen.

Gruesome accounts by eyewitnesses and journalists testify to the macabre scene at the two camps which witnessed a staged slaughter: bodies were charred, decapitated and indecently violated.

People done to death with the electric wires still tied around their bodies; corpses with eyes gouged out; women raped repeatedly; infants dynamited alive, families shot...The eyewitness account of one survivar would be suffice to sum up the horrendous crimes committed at the scene. "I was carrying my one year-old baby sister and she was yelling "Mama! Mama!" then suddenly nothing. I looked at her and her brain had fallen out of her head and down my arm. I looked at the man who shot us. I’ll never forget his face. Then I felt two bullets pierce my shoulder and finger. I fell. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I pretended to be dead."

"There were women lying in houses with their skirts torn torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall," Robert Fisk, who had been one of the first on the scene, said.

The slaughter lasted 43 hours, from 6 pm on September 16 to 18.

Dr Ang Swee Chai, an eye witness who worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead, later wrote in her book, From Beirut To Jerusalem: "The slaughter of unarmed children, women, the aged and the infirm was shocking. For me, I was doubly outraged that I had to discover the truth about a brave and generous people only through their deaths. Until then, I never knew Palestinian refugees existed. As a fundamentalist Christian, I had been a supporter of Israel, hated Arabs and saw the Palestinian Liberation Organisation as terrorists to be loathed and feared."

Years later, Robert Fisk said: "Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years ago, would anyone doubt that the world’s press and television would be remembering so terrible a deed this morning? Yet this week, not a single newspaper in the United States – or Britain for that matter – has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila."

Twenty seven years on, the guilty remain unpunished. Nobody gives a damn because the western media isn't talking about it. Nobody gives a damn because the western media has to do the Israel's bidding. So the world accepts that Phalangist militiamen were on a benign mission to save the world from "2000 terrorists" holed up in Sabra and Shatila. Damn Palestine people, their very fight for survival and their efforts to win back a scrap of their self-respect.