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LEBANON NOTEBOOK
Shadows of the
past
By Paul Belden
BEIRUT -
You wouldn't want to trade front yards with Hani Adnan.
For one thing, it's about the ugliest thing
you've ever seen, filled with some kind of
indestructible crabgrass and a gnarly creeping species
of tree that he calls a keena but which looks
like an overgrown weed bush with bark. Somebody
apparently tried to tidy up the place with a chainsaw
once, but they didn't know what they were doing and the
result is a grove of raw, dead stumps sticking up from
the ground like middle fingers permanently lifted to the
sun.
For what it is, though, Hani Adnan's front yard
looks exactly right - and that's the other reason you
wouldn't want to trade. Adnan guesses there are maybe a
thousand bodies buried in the field just outside the
ramshackle wooden lean-to in which he lives quietly with
his two dogs in the heart of the Shatila Palestinian
refugee camp outside Beirut.
That's just a
guess, though. Could be a few hundred less, could be a
few hundred more. In the immediate aftermath of the
massacre, getting the bodies buried was more important
than counting them.
Just trying to identify them
took long enough. For two days, the relatives of the
missing filed past corpses laid out in rows in a local
sport center like fish in a market, picking out their
loved ones and carting them home. But they ran out of
time - it was a Beirut September, after all - and the
ones without a name finally were shipped to this mass
grave near the far end of the Sharia Shatila, the camp's
main street and marketplace, which Adnan now calls home.
What happened here is not in dispute. On
September 16, 1982, a Thursday, Christian Phalangist
militias allied with Israel - then an invading force in
Lebanon and in control of the area surrounding the Sabra
and Shatila camps - entered the camps and began a lethal
rampage. For two days, non-stop, round the clock, they
went about rounding up Palestinians, tying them by hand
and foot, lining them up against walls and shooting them
with machine guns. They were able to work through the
night thanks to flares fired by nearby Israeli troops,
who seemed interested in the goings-on.
The
violence came in the wake of the assassination by a bomb
two days earlier of Bashir Gemayel, the country's
Christian president-elect. Although no one has been able
to pinpoint responsibility for the bomb, nobody here
today believes that the Palestinians had anything to do
with it.
There is also some dispute over the
number of those killed, with estimates ranging from a
low of 700 to a high of more than 4,000. Adnan himself
leans toward the higher end of the range.
After
the fact, the massacre was investigated by an Israeli
committee, the Kahane Commission, which acquitted itself
honorably in its final report, concluding: "In our view,
the minister of defense [today's prime minister, Ariel
Sharon] made a grave mistake when he ignored the danger
of acts of revenge and bloodshed by the Phalangists
against the population in the refugee camps." The
commission recommended Sharon's removal from his post.
You wouldn't think a graveyard of this magnitude
and significance would be easily missed, even after all
these years, but the burial ground today is nearly
hidden. There are no grave stones, as such - just a
stone wall surrounding an empty field, with those
hideous trees around the perimeter, and Adnan's roaming
dogs. You can walk right by and not notice a thing, just
flick your cigarette over the wall without a clue as to
the enormity of the sacrilege you've committed. The wall
is cut by a nondescript iron gate that's nearly blocked
by a VW microbus parked in the street out front. The bus
has been cut open and converted into a street stall
selling keychains featuring Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad and other useless trinkets.
Sabra and
Shatila aren't really camps, as such, with tents set out
somewhere and surrounded by a fence. They're just
Palestinian neighborhoods, albeit extremely run-down
ones. Shatila, just down the hill from Sabra, does have
a gate, of sorts, but it's just an iron trestle that you
pass under as you walk inside. There are three small
flags flying, those of Lebanon, Syria and the
Palestinian Liberation Organization. For an outsider to
find the mass grave inside, you have to be brought here,
there's no other way.
Yehya Abu el-Jabine, the
Palestinian who brought me, said, "Even many of those
who live in this camp don't know what happened here.
Very few of the people who live here now also lived here
then."
Mikdad Sheniya is one of them. A
40-something mother of two, she has lived in Lebanon all
her life, but not in Shatila. She used to live in a
Shi'ite neighborhood, but in 1986, when fighting started
between Shi'ites and Palestinians, she started getting
dark looks from her neighbors and decided it would be
best to live among her own people. She moved first to
Sabra, near the Dennah mosque, and then finally to
Shatila.
For Sheniya, the migration to Shatila
had a downward economic trajectory, since this is the
poorest of Beirut's Palestinian neighborhoods. There are
no telephones here since the Lebanese government won't
allow lines to go in. Nor do they have electricity - or,
at least, not legally. Every day somebody goes out and
hooks up another illegal connection to steal juice;
every day somebody else comes along and tears it down.
It's a neverending game.
Today Sheniya runs a
general store within sight of the still-shot-up office
building from which the Israelis are believed to have
watched the killings in 1982. She's not living in the
past. She just wants a better life and is willing to
work hard to get it. Her 15-year-old daughter, Enaam,
and 12-year-old son, Ahmed, both speak passable English
and both want out of this place. There are 125
professions which Palestinians are prohibited by
Lebanese law from practicing - a number that includes
the best ones, engineer, doctor, that sort of thing - so
Enaam's dreams are limited, unless she can get out, at
any price.
Despite its bloody history, and the
current stench of stifled dreams, Shatila is not an
overly somber place. Tonight, the Sharia Shatila is
lively and full of music. An ambulance is rolling slowly
along with Lebanese dance music blaring from the
loudspeaker to celebrate the imminence of the birthday
of the Prophet Mohammed. Street stalls are everywhere,
lit by bright, white unshaded bulbs.
But it's
the shadows that get you. Just off the main street are
the twisting narrow concrete alleyways where most of the
killing took place, and the darkness in these lanes
still has a mean feel to it. Sitting outside a lot of
the doorways here are a bunch of tough-looking young
guys, many with tattoos running up and down both arms,
and nothing apparently better to do than stare at
strangers in a way guaranteed to send a chill down their
spines. Somebody here remembers, that's for sure.
Now that mass graves are in the news again these
days, with more of Saddam Hussein's depredations being
confirmed every day, that's probably a good thing. Mass
graves shouldn't be forgotten. And there's something
else in the news these days, too - revenge killings
against the Iraqi Ba'athists. It's another good reason
why Sabra and Shatila should remain important names in
the collective memory.
They serve as permanent
reminders of what can happen when even the most
idealistic of nations, for the sake of a war, sets aside
its ideals for a few days and looks the other way while
somebody else does its dirty work in the dark.
Other articles in this
series:
A lesson to be
learned
May 21
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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