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SABRA AND SHATILA
Today our Lebanese hosts, who are the local point people for solidarity events such as the Global March To Jerusalem, took us internationals to the Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camp.
The international contingent which has so far arrived in Beirut for the global events of March 30, 2012, consists of about 25 of us from Canada, the USA, Ireland, Japan, Germany, Holland, and Italy. The remainder of the Asian caravan are due to arrive later today by boat from Turkey. They left from Jakarta, Indonesia, on March 7 and travelled by bus through India, Pakistan, and Iran. The Iraqi government would not give them passage, so they travelled up to Turkey and sailed from Turkey to Beirut. However, the Turkish government would not admit the Iranians and Afghanis, among others, so those nationals flew ahead to Damascus, Syria, where they are reportedly being treated like royalty by the Syrian government.
For the record, other international delegates are also flying into Cairo and Amman for the GMJ mobilizations in those "border" countries.
Our large blue touring van drove right down the Green Line to the camp. The Green Line is neither green nor a line. It is a main street in Beirut that divided the mainly Shia West Beirut from the Maronite Christian East Beirut during the civil war that began in 1975 and lasted for more than fifteen years. The initiator of the carnage was the fascist Phalange Party based in the Christian community, which party was the catspaw of the State of the Israel and the western powers in trying to destabilize Lebanon and drive the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its armed followers out of Lebanon.
Most of the buildings along the Green Line have been repaired nicely or replaced, just as in what I have seen so far of the rest of Beirut. To me, West Beirut (at least) appears to me to be just as charming today as it was when I was last here forty years ago, during the era when it was known as the "Paris of the Middle East." But, here and there, there are some stark reminders of the devastation that took place: naked, bullet-ridden skeletons of tall concrete structures, complete gutted, dripping reinforced steel bars from amputated floors and walls.
The narrow, canyon-like entrance to the Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camp is a market with dozens of merchants hawking their wares from row upon row of little stalls. The buildings lining the street are five and six storeys tall, a far cry from the box-like, cinder-block huts with corrugated tin rooves that existed in the Palestinian refugee camps I visited four decades ago in Lebanon. There are also undergound sewers now, where open drains ran down the middle of the streets forty years ago. These "improvements" only mean that the exile from Palestine, with its poverty, humiliation, discrimination, and underemployment, has become institutionalized, rather than solved. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been living here in Beirut for 63 years since the Nakba ("Catastophe") arising from the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, when they were ethnically cleansed by the Israeli army from their homes and farms. A full three generations have passed their lives in exile here.
Our guides lead us off the main street into a grassy area where there are two large billboards and a big stone memorial. This was the mass burial pit, where the Phalangists sought to hide their dirty work.
Between September 16 and 18, 1982, after PLO fighters withdrew from Lebanon, and as the invading Israeli army advanced on the Palestinian refugee camps around Beirut, the Phalangist fascists entered the camp, with the full backing of Ariel Sharon, then Israeli minister of defence, and proceeded from house to house in the refugee camp slaughtering unarmed men, women and children and dragging the bodies to what is now the grassy area for mass burial. The Israeli army facilitated the killing by firing illuminating flares over the camp so that the fascists could continue their murders after dark. A number of the houses were also destroyed with their occupants inside. A total of about 3000 unarmed and defenceless refugees were murdered in what is considered to be one of the worst crimes against humanity of the late twentieth century.
The independent international (McBride) commission concluded that Israel was resposnible for the massacre. Even an Israeli commission (Kahan) determined that the Israeli army knew a massacre was in progress and did nothing to stop it. It also laid personal blame on Ariel Sharon, who nevertheless was later elected prime minister of israel but who suffered a stoke and has spent the last six years as a vegetable on life support.
The grassy area was used by neighbourhood children as a soccer pitch for a while until the locals discovered what horror lay under the turf. Then, the stone monument was placed and the billboards were erected. One billboard shows huge graphic photographs of the carnage in the camp after the fascist attack. The other shows the names of atrocities at other camps.
The interntional delegates pose quietly for some group photos behind the stone monument and then take individual shots in front of the billboards. A TV crew from Palestine Today interviews a number of us, including me, about why we are here today in Beirut and how we feel about being at this site. Ali Mallah, a well-known trade union activist from Toronto, and the other member of the International Central Committee of the GMJ from Canada, tells me I did well.
Then, our hosts ask us to line up in front of the graphic billboard for another group shot. The TV crew is filming. I suggest to Ali that, for the benefit of TV viewers, we should get a chant going among the internationals: "Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!" Ali is originally from Beirut. He has 11 brothers and 8 sisters, all but one of which still live in Lebanon. So, it seems he is related to, or knows everybody in this small country and also many of the internationals. The internationals begin repeating the chant lustily for the benefit of the camera crew.
Our guides lead us out of the grassy area back into the main street and then into one of the side streets. If the main street was a canyon, the side street is like a fissure in the rock. Floor upon floor have been added upon the structures lining the narrow passageways, without much regard for building codes. The floors above jutt out irregularly and at odd angles, and the space above the passageway is an nightmarish tangle of electrical, cable, and telephone wires forming a Gordian knot of epic proportions. I would hate to be an electrician in Sabra and Shatila!
The walls at ground level are plastered with colourful posters and slogans, including some for the Global March to Jerusalem. Above are streamers of tattered banners and Palestinian flags, strung from one side of the street to the other, fluttering in the wind. Along the way, we have to dodge scooters and the occasional cars and small trucks, which barely can fit through the passageway.
After some time, we reach the centre of the camp where there is a small ground-floor storefront serving as a memorial to some of the martyrs of the Palestinian resistance. The main figure commemorated here, with a big, coloured portrait surrounded by flowers, is Abu Jihad, the second-in-command to PLO founder, Yaser Arafat. Abu Jihad is credited with being the successful organizer of the exodus of the Palestinian fighters from Beirut to Tunis, capital of Tunisia, where he was assassinated by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
After meandering through the narrow streets for a while longer, the delegation reaches the exit from the camp, where there is an abandonned bullet-ridden building and a garbage dump in which four little boys are playing.
It was an act of solidarity to visit Sabra and Shatila but it was a gesture of traditional Arabic hospitality for our hosts to take us to a community centre in Borg Al Barageneh, another nearby Palestinian camp, for felafel sandwiches, Turkish coffee, and soft drinks. This community centre was used as the planning centre for the events relating to the Global March to Jerusalem in Beirut. Armed security guards in urban camouflage, carrying Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles are on duty, in accordance with a protocol brokered decades ago with the Lebanese government that the Palestinian refugee camps are self-governed and policed by the Palestinian groups which are based in the camps. And there are many such groups, a fact that means any solidarity action like the GMJ requires delicate and prolonged negotition among the various parties and then with Lebanese government. This particular community centre is run by the Democrtic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPFLP), whose leader's portrait is prominently displayed on a billboard on the front of the building.
When we arrive back at the Relax Hotel, just off the Hamra, the main drag of the trendy section of downtown West Beirut, Ann Patterson, a peace activist from Ireland, remarks that she has been to refugee camps all over the world and never seen one where the refugees are allowed to live in dignity. It doesn't take billions of dollars to do right by the displaced persons forced out of their homes by the machinations of the great powers and their local henchmen. The funds necessary to pay for one drone aircraft, mnufactured by the Israeli or US governments, would probably pay for the necessary upgrades to Sabra and Shatila's wiring, plumbing, and sanitation systems to make it fit for human habitation.
Amir Maasoumi from Montreal, who is my room-mate, relates that he was deeply disturbed by the tour. At first, he felt awkward that he was undertaking the equivalent of visiting the zoo: it was obvious to him, by any standards, including religious, human rights and even animal rights, that the Palestinian inhabitants of the refugee camp weren't being treated much better than animals. How could the world tolerate such a crime against humanity for so long? Perhaps, in their "awakening", the 400 million Arabs, shackled so long by absolute monarchs and puppet dictators propped up by the US empire, would at last exert their collective efforts on behalf of the Palestinian people. But, after touring the camps, how, he asks, could one relate the experience of the misery of the Palestinian exile to people without just talking to one's habitual circle of friends and acquaintances? In other words, without preaching to the converted.
"That's the challenge," I replied. "Perhaps the Global March to Jersualem will be a step towards the solution."
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