The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  When the French army reached Beirut in 1918, the Lebanese martyrs were exhumed from their common grave, but the very faiths which they had placed second to their patriotism now prevented their joint re-interment. The Christians would not allow the Muslim martyrs of Beirut to be buried in their cemeteries. Nor would the Muslim authorities permit the executed Christians to lie in their holy ground. In the end, the Lebanese Druze, whose mystical Shia beliefs permit a more liberal view of life and death, offered the martyrs a small quarter-acre of Lebanon in which these courageous men of different religions who died together could remain alongside one another into eternity. Unknown to most Lebanese, their remains lie today beside the Druze parliament in the Hamra district of Beirut.

  Yet perhaps even their common role as martyrs was an illusion. Both Christians and Muslims opposed Turkish tyranny in Syria, but the Christian Maronites of Lebanon were hoping for French tutelage after the war—and were to give their loyalty to the French Mandate for more than two decades. The Muslims were Arab nationalists who wished to establish an independent Arab nation, one in which the Christians would obviously constitute a small minority. Close examination of the martyrs’ last words on the scaffold shows that even in death, their aims were not in unison. A Maronite priest, Joseph Hayek, was among the first to be executed and his last words were: “Vive le Liban! Vive la France!” These were not the sentiments of those who, in their last breath, addressed themselves to their “fellow Arabs.”

  But their deaths were probably the final catalyst of the Arab Revolt. Emir Feisal—the future “king” of Syria who would become Britain’s first king of Iraq— was staying outside Damascus in the spring of 1916 and had repeatedly begged Jemal Pasha to spare the second group of condemned men, who belonged to some of the most illustrious families in Syria and Lebanon. The scholar and historian George Antonius records how the emir and his hosts, the Bakri family, were breakfasting in the garden when a runner brought them a special edition of the pro-Turkish Al-Sharq newspaper which carried a full report of the hangings. One of the Bakris read out the names of the hanged men, which “lingered like the notes of a dirge on the still air of that spring morning in the orchards of Damascus.” Someone recited the opening verse of the Koran. Then Feisal leapt to his feet, tore his kuffiah from his head and trampled it beneath his feet. The Arab Revolt had begun. “Arabs!” he cried. “Death now will be a pleasure for us.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Why?

  Out of a fired ship, which, by no way

  But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,

  Some men leap’d forth, and ever as they came

  Near the foes’ ships, did by their shot decay;

  So all were lost, which in the ship were found,

  They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown’d.

  —John Donne, “A Burnt Ship”

  I HAD FORGOTTEN to turn off my mobile phone. I felt its vibration in my pocket only seconds after I had sat down on the Sabena transatlantic flight and my first thought—though we had not yet finished boarding—was that I had broken the rules. We believe in laws instinctively, without question, secular rules that govern our lives rather than religious dictates. So I left my seat and returned to the air-bridge on which passengers were still waiting to board the Airbus.

  “Robert?” It was the features editor. “Look, I think you should know that after all this, we’re probably going to have to hold your Sabra and Chatila piece again. A light aircraft has just flown into the World Trade Center in New York and the building’s on fire.” Damn. Damn! DAMN! This was the third time. Does it really matter that much? I asked. A light aircraft? “Well, it seems quite serious and I think it would look rather odd having a big story like this in New York and us carrying a nineteen-year-old story on the front of the features section.” I gave up. It was as if our new investigation of the Israeli role in the Beirut Palestinian massacres of 1982 would never be published. All through the first week of September 2001, I had been pushing for space. Then on Thursday, 6 September, Simon Kelner decided it could run on Monday, 10 September. Then Kelner went on holiday and Ian Birrell, the deputy editor, took over Simon’s seat and postponed my report until the morning of the 12th. That meant the final proofs would go away on the afternoon of 11 September. From Brussels airport that morning—tired after my overnight flight from Beirut—I called The Independent. Leonard Doyle, my foreign editor, talked about the suicide assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan Northern Alliance militia leader who had fought with such bravery against the Russians but showed only contempt for Osama bin Laden. Two Arabs posing as journalists had killed him with a bomb in their camera. Did I think bin Laden was behind it? I didn’t know. In our first edition, Leonard had called Massoud by his powerful Afghan title, “the Lion of Panjshir.” Some idiot on the back-bench had changed it in the night, paring Massoud down to that darling of sub-editors, a “guerrilla leader.” Overnight, American cruise missiles had hit Kabul.

  When I had first spoken to the features editors from the Brussels departure lounge, they confirmed that my Sabra and Chatila report would run at last. It was to be on the cover of that night’s review section—there was a news story for the front—and the design showed blood across the photographs of the dead Palestinians. I didn’t plan to call the office again. I would be out of touch for the six-and-a-half-hour flight over the Atlantic. I pulled out the copy of the text for a last check.

  Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls the chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that overwhelmed her almost exactly 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 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 30-year-old husband Hassan, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing in the crowd of men. “We were all 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 Sportive, 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 11 o’clock. 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 4 in the afternoon, 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.”

  The smashed Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium—the “Cité Sportive”—was a natu
ral “holding centre” for prisoners. Only two miles from Beirut airport, it had been an ammunition dump for Yassir 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—around the time Sana Sersawi says she was brought to the stadium—I saw hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, perhaps well over 1,000 in all, sitting in its gloomy, cavernous interior, squatting in the dust, watched over by Israeli soldiers and plain-clothes Shin Beth agents and a group of men who I suspected, correctly, 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, up to 600 massacre victims of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps 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. Arab prisoners usually adopted this pose of humiliation. But Israel’s Phalangist militiamen 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 . . . 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 militiamen. Usually they bring the people back after interrogation, but not always. Sometimes the people do not return.” 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 Sportive. 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 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 U.S. 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 Sportive. 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’état, 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, September 17th, 1982, she said, while the massacre was still—unknown to her— under way 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 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—was a common feature of these mass arrests. “We were told to go to the Cité Sportive. 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 Sportive, 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 Sportive 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 says. “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 September 16th, 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 journalists at the time not think of this? The following year, the Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning Sharon but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on September 18th, with just a one-line hint—unexplained—that several hundred people may have “disappeared around 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 blood-thirsty 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 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 Sportive 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 Sportive 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—will give Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment.
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  I had been in the Sabra and Chatila camps when these crimes took place. I had returned to the camps, year after year, to try to discover what happened to the missing thousand men. Karsten Tveit of Norwegian television had been with me in 1982 and he had returned to Beirut many times with the same purpose. Lawyers weren’t the only people investigating these crimes against humanity. In 2001, Tveit arrived in Lebanon with the original 1982 tapes of those women pleading for their menfolk at the gates of the Cité Sportive. He visited the poky little video shops in the present-day camp and showed and reshowed the tapes until local Palestinians identified them; then Tveit set off to find the women—nineteen years older now—who were on the tape, who had asked for their sons and brothers and fathers and husbands outside the Cité Sportive. He traced them all. None had ever seen their loved ones again.179

  In the months to come, I would reflect on the personal irony of those last minutes at Brussels airport. I was reading through the minutiae of a crime against humanity which had been committed almost exactly nineteen years earlier—while on the other side of the Atlantic at that very moment, an international crime against humanity was on the point of being committed. At Sabra and Chatila and in the mass murders afterwards, we estimated that at least 1,700 Palestinian men, women and children were slaughtered. In New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, more than twice that number of human lives were about to be extinguished.