Sabra & Chatilla; commemorating a massacre

Yesterday I went to the 31st anniversary commemoration of the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Chatilla refugee camp.

31 years! To me it still seems like recent history. For the children who paraded in their school uniforms yesterday it must be no more than a distant event in a long series of such tragedies. Being a Palestinian child in Lebanon is to share a history of massacres, betrayals, defeats and discrimination. Since 1982 an unending series of disasters has befallen the community.

For those who recall barely or not at all, the massacres at Sabra and Chatilla occurred during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, at a point where Israeli forces had seized control of the majority of Beirut itself.

Over two days, between the 16th and the 18th of September, right-wing Phalangist militias entered the camps and slaughtered somewhere between 1000 and 4000 people. When the light failed at sunset, they continued the killing under brights lights and flares.

The bodies were left lying where they fell or else bulldozed into shallow mass graves.

Starting the day after, aid workers and journalists began to recount what they discovered upon entering Sabra and Chatilla, and the controversy was immediate. The Phalangists were in open alliance with Israel. Was Israel to blame? What did the Israeli forces know? What did Defense Minister Ariel Sharon know? Was there in fact Israeli collusion in the massacre?


The Israelis, of course, denied any knowledge or involvement.

I was not one of the journalists to visit Sabra and Chatilla in the days following the massacre. I arrived in Beirut and visited Sabra and Chatilla a few weeks later, when the controversy was at its height, commissions of inquiry were being formed, and newspapers all over the world were headlining the issue.

Almost serendipitously, during that trip I was to settle the question of Israeli collusion to my own satisfaction once and for all and to at least help clarify it for my Pacifica audience.

To return for a moment to yesterday's commemoration, I climbed out of the service around 10:30 in the morning to find a parade forming in the main street outside the camp. In a way, it was eerily reminiscent of my kids elementary school days: troops of children in school uniforms holding various musical instruments being herded into formation by teachers, all accompanied by the cacophonous sounds of instruments being tooted, banged and honked in preparation. Flags and banners flew in the sun, kids ran about poking each other and laughing...as I say, it was momentarily and disarmingly like something out of my own children's childhoods.

A few moments later the drums and the bagpipes got going and the parade began to move. The kids headed down the avenue and turned left into Chatilla camp. Everything was quite changed from my recollections, yet I knew from major landmarks that this was the same entrance I'd used in 1982. However, I recalled a large, garbage-strewn expanse at the entrance where most of the bodies had been hastily buried just a couple of weeks before. That expanse was nowhere to be seen.

Another 50 meters or so and the parade took a sharp right turn through an arched gate, and I found my expanse - now walled off and preserved as a commemorative precinct. At the far end, a low marble table surrounded by banners and explanatory posters.

Back in 1982 the low shanties of Chatilla camp surrounded the empty field on three sides. From there, the tiny alleyways common to all Palestinian camps (due to draconian building restrictions imposed by the Lebanese government) wound outwards into the camp proper. To the north, the camp was more or less bounded by the then-ruined stadium and parts of Sabra. To the south lay the avenue the children had just paraded down - although much, much less built-up than today. To the east: Sabra and Horsch. To the west Chatilla was bounded by another large avenue, which appears on current maps with the surreal name Hafiz el Asad Avenue, and which will become important in a moment.

In 1982 I spent about an hour walking the alleyways of Chatilla. Most traces of the killing were gone, of course. Except for the thousands of bullet holes, often concentrated along walls where people had been lined up and shot at close range. What was left was the general destruction of the buildings, the remains of the looting, the missing doors and broken windows. A few survivors remained as well, and even a few children. Meanwhile, on the ground beneath their feet were the broken toys and torn clothing of children who hadn't survived.

Now, 31 years later, children dressed in neat school uniforms paraded and played marching music as we filed into the cemetery. Around them lay a refugee camp rebuilt, but just as stiffling, just as crippling to the spirit, as the camp that had been essentially destroyed by the maurading Phalangists back in '82.

And, next to the marble bier there is another banner commemorating the hundreds of deaths that took place during the 2006 fighting in South Lebanon between Hezb Allah and invading Israeli troops.

It was in this sad place that we came to a halt before the marble bier and the crowd filled in behind us. The music sputtered out and several large wreaths were brought forward and laid on the marble. And then came the most understated, and most affecting part of the ceremony. So understated, in fact, that many people, thinking everything was over, walked off.

I was almost among them. Then I noticed some older people moving forward through the crowd with photos in their arms. They approached the bier and simply placed their photos on it, holding them vertically so they could be seen. And they stood there, silently, stoically, quietly, while those of us with cameras snapped away or took our video footage. 31 years, and the look on their faces was as if it had happened yesterday.

Back in '82, even weeks after the event, being in Chatilla was too much for me. I remember how I stumbled out of the camp feeling short of breath. It wasn't until I got back to the main avenue that I even looked up again. At that moment I noticed a couple of tall buildings just west of the camp, across the large avenue. Looking at them I realized that they essentially overlooked the camp. As I said earlier, the Israelis were at that point denying any knowledge of the killings, while detractors were claiming that they had occupied positions nearby which would have given them the ability to oversee Chatilla. The Israeli response was that their positions were too far away to provide any clear view of the events.

With all this in mind I started walking up the hill towards the avenue and those buildings. At the intersection I ran into an Italian soldier, a member of the peace-keeping force that had been sent in just a little too late, after the massacres had already taken place. Using my non-existent Italian we began chatting, and I explained in gestures that I was planning to visit the nearest of the two tall buildings across the street. For whatever reason, he decided to accompany me and  together we crossed the avenue and entered the empty, trashed apartment building. Up we went, checking out the apartments, all of whose doors had been broken down. Almost immediately we ran into the detritus of war, all of it Israeli. Papers of various kinds, nearly all in Hebrew, were everywhere (a few things weren't in Hebrew - they were in English). Shells littered the floors. More papers. An apartment that had apparently been reserved as a toilet for the troops - and I don't mean that they used the bathroom for this purpose. Finally, we made it to the roof. Again, endless amounts of litter, trash, paperwork. I even ran into several large, bound manuals in Hebrew...one of which I kept as a keepsake.

Then we approached the eastern edge of the roof. As I expected, just on the other side of the avenue, there was a low wall. And on the other side of the wall...the alleys of Chatilla camp. I raised my camera, equipped with the longest lens I had with me - a mere 200mm - to my eye. From where I stood I could easily follow the winding alleys I'd just walked in Chatilla, and, at one point, even watch the children I'd just stood beside a few moments earlier, playing in the rubble.

Here is a panorama showing the buildings, the avenue, and the wall behind which lies Chatilla camp

This photo in Chatilla looks due west. Behind
the last buildings is the low wall and the avenue.

So much for that argument. And, of course, it later transpired that Israeli forces had provided night lighting for the Phalangist executioners and the bulldozers used to destroy the camps, that the IDF troops had been seen by multiple observers at various places directly outside the camps, and that the testimony of camp survivors placed Israeli forces inside the camps with their Phalangist allies. And yet, despite all that and despite a spate of condemnatory international investigations, Israel was largely successful in its effort to whitewash its complicity in the massacres and Ariel Sharon went on to become head of the Likud party and then Prime Minister of Israel.

And it was probably about a year later, at a press conference in Los Angeles, that Sharon said - in response to a question by my co-producer, Sarah Mardell - "I bomb Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan so that I don't have to bomb them in Bethlehem and Ramallah." Which, of course, Israel then went on to do - and has continued to do ever since.

Here's a video recap of yesterday's commemoration: