The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  In the college gardens, Raafat stands next to her American-educated Palestinian father Bassam. “Here we are,” he says when he spots the video camera, and Raafat dutifully kisses her father on the cheek. Her mother watches proudly through sunglasses while a six-year-old girl—Raafat’s younger sister, Kinda— primps in front of the camera. As Raafat leaves the college hall with its American and British flags, the same high-pitched piano plays Thomas Arne’s “Trumpet Voluntary.” On this English summer afternoon, Raafat al-Ghossain has less than a year to live. The men who will kill her are American, flying—with special permission of Margaret Thatcher—from RAF Lakenheath, scarcely 75 miles from Marymount International College in Kingston.

  Palestine, Britain, Libya, America. It is as if the Western conflict in the Middle East hovered over Raafat al-Ghossain all her short life. Bassam always wanted her to have an English education—Kinda was born in London and holds a British passport—and still feels that Britain represents something intrinsically good in the world. His father, Fawzi, was a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, a lawyer in the British Mandate government in Jerusalem, an adviser to Sir Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner to Palestine. A slightly blurred photograph shows Fawzi al-Ghossain and Samuel, who was Jewish, walking through a tree-lined avenue in Jerusalem together, deep in conversation. Even after the family was forced to flee Palestine in 1946 to settle for several years in Cairo, the al-Ghossains never lost their faith in the West. Bassam was given a scholarship to study in America by a Quaker couple who noticed his fascination with model aircraft. He graduated in chemical engineering from the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia and started work as a petroleum engineer for the national oil company in British-administered Kuwait in 1957. “My family always admired the British,” Bassam says. Rarely was a family to be so cruelly betrayed by the society and culture in which they had put their trust.

  Bassam met his future wife, Saniya, half-Lebanese, half-Turkish—a daughter of the Beirut city treasurer—in 1963, but they left Kuwait during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War and moved to Algiers, where Bassam took a job in the country’s oil production company. A French doctor delivered Raafat, weighing 3.8 kilos, at an Algiers hospital; when she was only five months old the family moved to Libya, where Bassam took a job with ESSO, and later with American Occidental. Colonel Ghadafi’s revolution was only fifteen months away.

  “We would take Raafat out to picnics with us, visiting the [Roman] cities of Leptis Magna and Sabratha,” Bassam remembers. “There were parties every week and swimming. When Raafat was four, we enrolled her at the Lycée Français in Tripoli. She was a very pretty little girl. She loved doll’s houses, she liked putting all the members of a family in one house. Always she wanted our family to live together . . .” Raafat—“Fafo” was her nickname in the family—spoke French fluently but transferred to the American school in Tripoli when she was twelve. “She was there for two years but I thought the educational standards were not good enough. So we sent her to Marymount in Kingston-on-Thames.” And Bassam pulls from his file a thick bunch of school reports.

  Raafat’s sister Kinda had been born three years earlier, on 1 January 1979. At fifteen, Raafat now found herself alone at boarding school, with neither her parents nor her baby sister to comfort her. Racked by home-sickness, and schoolwork which she initially found too advanced, she begged to return to Libya, to the family villa not far from the sea, to the house in which all the al-Ghossains could live together. “A pleasant character,” a philosophy teacher noted coldly, “but quite ill-disciplined—will not work.” At maths, there were complaints of Raafat “misusing her ability” while a singing teacher reported that Raafat “would be an excellent choral member if she were not so chatty and giggly.” But in art, she excelled. Mr. McFarland, her art teacher, wrote to her parents in 1984 that “Raafat has worked really well this quarter & I am very pleased with her progress.”

  The anguish that lay behind Raafat’s unhappiness at school comes through painfully in a letter she wrote to herself in English on lined notepaper on 17 November 1981, addressed to “God” and headed with three words in capital letters: “PLEASE—PLEASE—PLEASE”:

  Dear God, I love you very much. God, I have a few things I would like to ask you about and asking [sic] if you could help me. First, of course, is that you give us a long life for about 200 years (you know what I mean), I and my whole FAMILY and friends . . . Second, keep your blessings on us and help us through life . . . Third, please let my parents leave [Libya] on Friday 27th . . . or even Tuesday or Wednesday but please after this weekend . . . Fifth, please please a thousand times let it be my last year at Marymount or even if it is possible—half year . . . Don’t separate our small family [in] Libya. Let the conditions in Libya push them to leave on [ sic] January and make ME leave Marymount although it is a nice school but I get homesick too much. Let me go to a day-student school this year. PLEASE. Or make my parents come here and live . . .

  Raafat’s reference to “conditions” in Libya was not without reason. A self-declared enemy of Israel and America, Libya was already being accused of “international terrorism” by the United States and Britain. The British condemned Colonel Ghadafi’s support for the IRA—he sent at least one shipload of weapons to Ireland—and in 1984 a British policewoman was shot dead by a Libyan “diplomat” outside the country’s London embassy. Ghadafi had sent hit men to eliminate his domestic opponents abroad. The West was already treating Libya as a pariah state, although Raafat al-Ghossain—conscious of her father’s birthplace and of her grandfather Fawzi’s stories of life in Jerusalem—thought of a country that no longer existed, nearly 1,300 miles to the east of Tripoli.

  “Return our holy land PALESTINE, soon and let my whole family enjoy it and live there for a long time—if it is possible, next year,” Raafat wrote in her letter to “God.” In 1982, enraged by the Sabra and Chatila massacre, she joined a peaceful protest march on the streets of London. A poorly focused photograph of Raafat shows her in a raincoat in Knightsbridge, a green, red, black and white Palestinian flag curling above her head. “She went on several demonstrations,” Bassam recalls. “They were all peaceful and she would come back from all of them drenched in rain.” In her last note in the Marymount school magazine in 1985, Raafat was to write that “I would like to say a final sentence and that is May Peace and Hope come from Palestine, my homeland.”

  Bassam admits that Raafat found life very difficult. “She did not want to be away from us. She cried a lot. But she had no chance of education in Libya. In London, she had stomach upsets. It was psychological. She suffered a lot from hay fever.” But Raafat was to overcome her homesickness after four long years, winning a gold medal for her painting and for drama. The 1985 video of her graduation shows her pride in triumphing over loneliness, aware that she was to follow a career in painting at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. Her parents came to London in December of the same year, the last Christmas of Raafat’s life. “We went that night to San Lorenzo’s in Beauchamp Place but Kinda was too young to go out so Raafat asked to stay home with her sister,” their mother, Saniya, remembers. “It was as if that Christmas was very special to her.” Just over a month later, on 8 February 1986, Raafat wrote in her diary: “My life is changing. I’m slowly, at last, finding myself. It feels great to at last meet my real self. Freedom!!”

  Bassam al-Ghossain played no part in politics but his collection of newspaper clippings shows the growing crisis over Libya. Ghadafi was accused of organising the bombing of a TWA passenger jet over Greece. President Reagan’s administration announced that it had unequivocal proof that the Libyan embassy had arranged the bombing of a Berlin discothèque on 5 April 1986, in which an American serviceman and a Turkish woman were killed. The Berlin police were later to dispute the nature of this evidence—some Western journalists suggested Syria rather than Libya might have been behind the bombing—but by then Reagan was in the Gulf, calling Ghadafi “the Mad Dog of the Middle Eas
t” and promising unspecified retaliation.

  “We thought about what all this meant, that there might be an attack, but we thought the Americans would only hit military targets,” Bassam says now. “It just didn’t occur to us that they would hit civilians. The patio of our home was wall-to-wall with the French embassy.” Raafat was due home for the Easter holiday from her new art college and wrote an excited postcard, full of humour and maturity and affection—it was illustrated with a French painting of a black ladies’ hat—from London. It was to be her last written message to her parents:

  Dearest Mummy and Daddy,

  I’m sending this card ’cause it has a touch of class just like you! I miss you so much! I can’t wait, soon I’m going to be with you! How is my baby sister, send her all my love and kisses. How are my grandparents, send them also all my love and tell them that I miss them a lot. Well, I’ll have to love you and leave you. Till the 23rd March—god willing—take care! Lots of love [from] your daughter that love [sic] you the most . . .

  Raafat’s Lebanese passport shows that she cleared Gatwick Airport immigration on the 23rd, exactly twenty-two days before the American crew of the F-111 that was to kill her took off from Lakenheath. She arrived in Tripoli with an attack of spring hay fever. Raafat was to return to London in the third week of April and was nearing the end of her holidays when, on 13 April, she spent the night at the home of the Ghandour family, Lebanese friends of long standing. There were already reports of a possible American bombing raid against Ghadafi’s headquarters in Tripoli and against the offices of Libyan intelligence. Western journalists— myself among them—had gathered at the largest hotel in the city and noticed the hurried departure of a Soviet destroyer from the waterfront on the morning of 14 April. “Raafat was in her dressing gown at breakfast in the morning and all we talked about was the possible raid and what would be the targets and if the Americans would hit civilians,” Moutassim Ghandour remembers. “She kept roaming around this point. She felt that someone close would be killed. She was fully convinced that there was going to be a raid. I tried to talk politics with her. But she kept going round and round, talking about the planes that might come. She went on about this for three hours. I think that somehow she knew she was going to be killed that day.”

  On the evening of the 14th, Raafat was so overcome with hay fever that Saniya called in the doctor. “He told her to sleep well and gave her antihistamine and nose drops,” her mother recalls. “She immediately said she felt better. We talked about the art college. And she said she was happy because she had kept herself for the man she would one day marry. She looked very beautiful, like a girl standing on the stage. Bassam and Kinda came in and we had a light meal—of cheese and tomatoes and a plate of sweets from the Syrian ambassador’s wife. We let Raafat sleep in the TV room because there was a machine there that controls pollen. I went to bed in the girls’ room and Kinda slept beside her father in our bed.” At almost the same moment the al-Ghossain family went to bed, twenty-four American F-111s from the U.S. 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath, were taking off for Libya. One of the aircraft was crewed by Captain Fernando Ribas-Dominicci of Puerto Rico and Captain Paul Lorence of San Francisco.

  It was just after two in the morning that Saniya awoke with a start. “There was a tremendous roaring noise and I got out of bed and shouted: ‘Wake up, Bassam, the Americans are here!’ I looked into the TV room and saw Raafat sleeping peacefully there and I thought I’d better not wake her up. I went back to bed.” Bassam woke again moments later. “I heard anti-aircraft fire and the next thing I knew my feet were buried in rubble. I couldn’t move. Kinda was in the bed next to me. She was screaming. Her body was covered by a door. I held her hand to quieten her down. The door had protected her when the ceiling came down.”

  Saniya reawoke to hear Bassam’s voice shouting “as if from another planet—it was a voice I had never heard before. He was shouting ‘My God! My God!’ and calling our names. I was choking on the smoke and dust. I stood up and it was all darkness. I couldn’t see anything. I was walking on glass on my bare feet. I put my hand on the bedroom wall and found there was no door there. I asked Bassam what happened to Kinda. He said: ‘I am touching her. She is alive.’ I went to Raafat’s room and the side wall was down. I shouted her name many times. She didn’t answer. A feeling came over me that Raafat had died. I shouted: ‘Bassam—Raafat has gone.’ Then I walked out of the house to get help, on my bare feet. Tripoli was like a haunted city. I saw all the water of the city coming out of the pipes. I looked back at the wreckage of our home and there was nobody to be seen, it was as if it had been like this for a hundred years. Eventually, I found a young man who went to what was left of our home to help.” To Saniya’s amazement—it registers on her face when she recalls the fact years later—the rescuer was a Palestinian who had survived the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre, the atrocity which had so horrified the homesick Raafat in London.

  Badly cut and bruised, Bassam and Kinda were taken to hospital. Neither can remember the following hours. Saniya was taken to a friend’s house. A 2,000-pound bomb had destroyed the home of the al-Ghossains’ Libyan neighbours, killing all five of them. The blast had blown down the wall of the TV room onto Raafat. Moutassim Ghandour, the family’s Lebanese friend, found a team of Libyan civil defence workers with a bulldozer at the neighbours’ ruined house and pleaded with them to find Raafat. It was already mid-morning on 15 April. He later wrote a legal testimony of what he saw:

  The bulldozer tried to lift the roof slab which was on top of the couch where “Fafo” had been lying and it was then that her face appeared for the first time, she was lying on her back with the head turned on the right cheek, she was intact, her hair undisturbed and a small streak of blood coming from the top side of her head, flowing down her left cheek. When she appeared, the bulldozer stopped and rescue workers got close to her to find out if she was still alive. I was led away about 10 metres, and then somebody screamed “Every soul will have the taste of death . . .” together with other verses relevant to death and martyrdom from the Holy Koran. At this stage I realised that “Fafo” was dead.

  Kinda scarcely recalls the bombing and was too young to understand what Raafat’s death meant. “I remember a door on top of me and a rock near my head and shouting ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!’ My father had lots of blood on him. I couldn’t move my legs.” Bassam was distraught. In the hours to come, he would hear journalists claim that his home had been hit not by an American bomb but by Libyan anti-aircraft missiles. The United States dismissed the death of at least thirty civilians in the raid on Tripoli as “collateral damage,” adding—in the Pentagon’s words—that “only 1 or 2 per cent of the bombs impacted in civilian areas.” America’s targets—including Ghadafi’s headquarters and intelligence offices—had been hit, they claimed. A security office not far from the al-Ghossains” home had been touched, but the French embassy had suffered far worse damage and the al-Ghossain home was virtually destroyed. Not a word of regret came from Washington.

  A U.S. official admitted that Ghadafi had been one of the targets of “Operation El Dorado Canyon”—this was the raid in which Ghadafi’s adopted daughter had been killed—and a Pentagon report later stated that “in terms of equipment performance, the strike was a success.” A Pentagon official told The Washington Post that the air force F-111s from Britain had been included in the raid because their pilots wanted “a piece of the action.” This may have been true. “It was the greatest thrill of my life to have been involved,” one of the pilots later told the Chicago Tribune . “It is what we are trained for.” Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger later agreed that the Americans had killed the civilians and that an F-111 lost in the raid might have dropped the bombs that killed Raafat al-Ghossain and her neighbours when it was shot down. Captain Fernando Ribas-Dominicci and Captain Paul Lorence were flying the doomed plane. Over Tripoli, the former was heard shouting: “I’m hit!” and another, anonymous pilot was recorded reply
ing: “Sorry about that.” The body of Ribas-Dominicci was later recovered from the Mediterranean by the Libyans and returned to the United States.

  Bassam still carries a file of newspaper articles on the American raid. The New York Times wrote that “even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on Libya . . . the United States has prosecuted [Ghadafi] carefully, proportionately—and justly.” Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres claimed that the Americans had been taking their revenge for the slaughter of 241 U.S. servicemen in the Beirut truck-bombing three years earlier. But Ghadafi had no more to do with that mass killing than Saddam Hussein was to have with the mass slaughter of 11 September 2001. Bassam al-Ghossain’s file also includes a headline from The Times of London—“Raid destroyed terrorist nerve-centre.” Underneath, the by-line says: “From Robert Fisk, Tripoli.” My report did not mention “terrorists”—that had been a sub-editor’s work in the headline, and it was only a little over two years later that The Times would censor my report on the Iranian Airbus slaughter—but Bassam al-Ghossain was unforgiving. “It gives the impression we are terrorists, it says that Raafat was a terrorist.”

  At the mass funeral three days later, I noticed Raafat’s coffin because—living in Lebanon—I had straight away caught sight of the Lebanese flag and the Palestinian flag lying on her casket. It had been Saniya’s idea. I knew nothing of the family but had found Raafat’s shocked and badly wounded mother. “We are Muslims but we have one God,” she had told me then. “We are one people. I hope Mr. Reagan understands that.” A stone was placed upon Raafat’s grave which quoted the Koran: “Thou causest the night to pass into the day, and thou causest the day to pass into the night. And thou bringest forth the living from the dead, and thou bringest forth the dead from the living . . .”