BEIRUT — Forty years after Christian
militiamen massacred
Palestinian refugees and Lebanese nationals in the
country’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, the horrors of the tragedy remain
seared into survivors’ memories.
اضافة اعلان
Najib Al-Khatib, whose father and 10 other family
members were killed in the massacre, still remembers the stench of corpses.
It “lingered for more than five or six months. A
horrible smell,” the 52-year-old Lebanese survivor said.
“They would spray chemicals every day, but the smell
stayed,” he told AFP from the Sabra camp for Palestinian refugees, where he
lives with his family.
From September 16 to 18, 1982, Christian militiamen
allied with Israel massacred between 800 and 2,000 Palestinians in the Sabra
and Shatila camps on Beirut’s outskirts. They also murdered at least 100
Lebanese and some Syrians.
Israeli forces, who had invaded in June that year as
Lebanon’s civil war raged, sealed off the camp while the militiamen went on
their killing spree, targeting unarmed civilians.
Camp residents have been readying to mark the
massacre’s 40th anniversary on Friday.
“Until today, the smell is still in our heads — the
smell of the dead,” Khatib said.
‘Horses and corpses’
Khatib walked down an
alleyway in the impoverished Sabra camp where he witnessed the atrocities four
decades earlier.
“This is my grandmother’s house. During the
massacre, it was full” of dead bodies, he recalled. “They were piled up here.
Horses and corpses, all on top of each other.”
“This area was full of people they killed,” he said.
One of Khatib’s most harrowing memories was finding
his father’s body at the door of his house.
“He was shot in his legs,” he said. “They had hit
him in the head with a hatchet.”
Despite global
outcry, no one has ever been arrested or put on trial for the massacre.
It came just days after the assassination of
Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel — seen as a hero by many Lebanese
Christians but hated by many in Lebanon for his cooperation with Israel.
In Israel, an inquiry found a number of officials,
including then defense minister
Ariel Sharon, were indirectly responsible.
It laid blame on Elie Hobeika, intelligence chief of
the Lebanese Forces (LF) — a right-wing Christian militia — for the killings.
The LF, then allied to Israel, has maintained
silence, never responding to the accusations.
A group of survivors tried to launch a lawsuit in
Belgium against Sharon, but the court threw out the case in September 2003.
‘Unimaginable’
Umm Abbas, a Lebanese
resident of Sabra who witnessed the massacre, recalled the “unimaginable
scenes” that have gone unpunished.
“What did I see? A pregnant woman who had her baby
ripped out of her stomach, they cut her in two,” the 75-year-old said.
Another woman, “she was also pregnant, they ripped
the baby from her stomach too”, she said.
Sitting in an alley, Umm Abbas recalled bulldozers
scooping up dead bodies and dumping them on top of each other.
“They put them all in a deep hole, I saw them,” she
said.
Survivors mark the massacre every year, some
visiting the graveyard in Sabra where many of the victims were buried.
A simple stone memorial pays tribute to the
“martyrs” of the massacre.
Palestinian Amer Okkar prayed at the site, where the
makeshift graves still bear no tombstones.
“We found everyone slaughtered on the ground, in all
the alleyways and along this street,” the 59-year-old former militant
remembered.
“We found pills and machetes and hashish and drugs
on the ground — no one could kill like that unless they were on drugs,” he
said.
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