guardian.co.uk
The Sharon Files
A Belgian court will today decide whether to try Ariel
Sharon for war crimes. Julie Flint uncovers secret
documents that detail Israel's involvement in the 1982
massacres at Sabra and Shatila
Wednesday November 28, 2001
The Guardian
It is September 19 1982, the day after the Lebanese Forces
militia left Beirut's Palestinian camps after a 38-hour orgy of
killing, and it is finally possible to see what the Israeli soldiers
surrounding the camps claimed they had been unable to see.
Streets carpeted with bodies. Men, women and children shot
and hacked to death. Pregnant women eviscerated. In Christian
East Beirut, Israel's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Rafael
Eitan, the commander of the Northern District, Major General
Amir Drori, and a senior Mossad officer, Menahem Navot,
codenamed Mr R, meet the deputy chief of staff of the Lebanese
Forces, Antoine Breidi - "Toto" - and Joseph abu Khalil, the man
who made the first contact with the Israelis in March 1976. What
ensues is a cynical damage-limitation conference in which
senior officers of the Israeli Defence Forces utter not one word of
reproach for a massacre in which mili tiamen trained, armed and
sent into the camps by them killed at least 900 defenceless
civilians.
Gen Eitan: "Everybody points an accusing finger at Israel and
the outcome might be that the IDF will be forced to withdraw
from Beirut. Therefore some of you have to explain the subject
and immediately. The formula should be that they [the Lebanese
Forces] took part in an assignment and that whatever occurred
was out of their control."
Gen Drori: "On this occasion you should mention also what
happened at Damour [a Christian village where fighters including
Palestinians killed 200 civilians in 1976]. Also to mention the
fact that this is not your policy. You could mention that in the
places that they entered there were battles between rival sides
inside the camps and not only with the Phalangists [the LF's
political umbrella]."
Abu Khalil: "... You tell us and we will carry it out."
And so it goes on - a web of evasions and untruths concocted
by the IDF, which sent 200 Lebanese militiamen into Sabra and
Shatila on September 16 to "mop up" 2,000 "terrorists" who
Ariel Sharon, then Israel's defence minister, claimed had
remained there after the PLO's evacuation from Beirut. It is an
encounter that shows the intimacy between the IDF and the LF,
even after the massacre, and the virtual incorporation of the LF
into the IDF structure.
Two almost identical reports of this meeting - one identified as
"a transcript of a conversation recorded by an aide to the
commander of the Northern District"; the other as "Minutes of
Mossad (4222) of a meeting between Israeli chief of staff and
Gen Drori with Toto" - are among a stack of documents delivered
to lawyers seeking to bring Sharon, now Israel's prime minister,
to trial in Belgium for war crimes committed in Lebanon 19 years
ago when he had overall responsibility for the IDF.
The documents, exclusively obtained by the Guardian, cover the
period between June and November 1982 - from a meeting in
which "the cabinet has decided to have the Lebanese army and
the Phalangists participate in the entering of Beirut" to the
testimony to Israel's Kahan commission of inquiry of a senior
military intelligence officer, Colonel Elkana Harnof. Some are in
Hebrew; others in English. Michael Verhaeghe, one of three
lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the case against Sharon,
has little doubt about the documents' authenticity. They arrived
anonymously in June, within 10 days of the suit being lodged
under legislation that allows Belgium to prosecute foreigners for
war crimes, wherever they were committed.
"The documents give a very detailed account of a number of
events which would be very difficult to fabricate - especially in
that very short period of time," says Verhaeghe. Investigations
by the Guardian in Israel and Lebanon have confirmed the
identity of the intelligence officers named in the documents as
well as the dates, times and locations of some of the meetings,
those who attended them and some of their content. The
typescript of the Hebrew documents matches that used at the
time of Kahan. And the voices of many of the protagonists are
unmistakable - among them the courtly Pierre Gemayel,
patriarch of the Gemayel family, and Sharon, referred to
throughout as DM.
Thus, from minutes of a meeting on August 21 at Gemayel's
home in Bikfaya: Pierre: "I visited Israel several times. I was very
impressed." DM: "How to create power and how to convey its
presence is the great test. We were 18 million, six million were
exterminated... The use of power is what I want to discuss with
you."
The lawyers say the documents' importance lies in recurring
evidence that the IDF had "command responsibility" for the
Lebanese Forces before, during and after the massacre. Thus,
according to a summary of a meeting in which "the capture of
Beirut" was discussed with LF leaders on July 13, Gen Eitan
"explained that the IDF would provide all the necessary support:
artillery, air etc as if they were regular IDF units".
"Under the established law of command responsibility - also
known as indirect responsibility - this is watertight evidence of
the conscious and effective chain of command," says Chibli
Mallat, one of Verhaeghe's colleagues.
In February 1983, the Kahan commission found that no Israeli
was "directly responsible" for the massacre, but determined that
Sharon bore "personal responsibility". It ruled that he was
negligent in ignoring the possibility of bloodshed in the camps
following the assassination of the Lebanese Forces' leader,
president-elect Bashir Gemayel, on September 14 - a massacre
that Sharon publicly, and erroneously, blamed on Palestinians.
Sharon resigned his defence portfolio, but stayed in the cabinet.
In Brussels today an appeals court will meet in closed session
to decide whether to put Israel's prime minister on trial. Sharon's
lawyers will argue that he has immunity as a head of
government; that he is a victim of double jeopardy after the
Kahan inquiry; and that the Belgian law cannot be used
retroactively - claims that Mallat and his colleagues dismiss.
Only if the appeals court rules for the plaintiffs will the
documents be introduced to a court, obliging Sharon's lawyers
either to acknowledge them or to produce others that refute
them. Only then will a court hear of Sharon's early insistence
that the Lebanese Forces "clean" the camps, despite their
known proclivity for murder and rape.
Thus, even as the first PLO fighters left Beirut on August 21,
Sharon met Bashir and Pierre Gemayel to demand a new strike
against the Palestinian presence in Lebanon. Minutes of the
meeting quote Sharon as saying: "A question was raised before,
what would happen to the Palestinian camps once the terrorists
withdraw... You've got to act... So that there be no terrorists
you've got to clean the camps." Pierre Gemayel prevaricated:
"We are in the midst of a political process of presidential
elections... Bashir is the nominee... It is very important that
calm is kept." Sharon insisted: "What would you do about the
camps?" Bashir: "We are planning a real zoo."
In his testimony to Kahan, Sharon claimed that no one imagined
the Lebanese Forces would carry out a massacre in the camps.
This claim is contradicted by numerous testimonies in the
documents in Belgium - among them Sharon's own complaint to
Bashir Gemayel, minuted 10 weeks before the massacre, that
"it is incumbent that we prevent several ugly things which have
occurred - murders, rapes and stealing by some of your men". In
the same month, in a meeting with American diplomats at the
home of Johnny Abdo, Lebanon's military intelligence chief,
Sharon proposed that the PLO fighters in Beirut be given
"refuge" in Israel. "Although we are at a friend's house," he said,
according to the report of the meeting, "rest assured that they
would be more secure in our hands!"
Verhaeghe's documents show that this belief was shared by top
intelligence officials identified in a secret part of the Kahan report
- Appendix B. Kahan said Appendix B would not be published
for reasons of national security. The lawyers believe the
documents referring to these officers must come from Appendix
B, but do not know whether the entire file is from Appendix B.
Echoing Sharon's concerns, according to excerpts from
testimony to Kahan on October 22, Mossad chief Yitzhak Hoffi
says the Phalangists "talk about solving the Palestinian problem
with a hand gesture whose meaning is physical elimination... I
don't think anybody had any doubts about this... They raised the
issue of Lebanon being unable to survive as long as this size of
population existed there." Similarly, Col Harnof, in a summary of
his testimony a month later: "It was possible to surmise from
contacts with the Phalange leaders what were their intentions
towards the Palestinians: 'Sabra would become a zoo and
Shatila Beirut's parking place' ... When they participated in
actions east of Bahamdoun [when they operated against the
Druze] they ran straight to the villages and committed
massacres."
But the clearest indication of how the Lebanese Forces might
solve the "demographic problem" was given by Bashir Gemayel
himself in a meeting with Menachem Navot. In one account of
this meeting, Bashir "adds that it is possible that in this context
they will need several Dir Yassins" - a reference to the
Palestinian village where 254 villagers were massacred in April
1948, in the most spectacular single attack in the conquest of
Palestine.
In June this year, the first case involving the exercise of universal
jurisdiction in Belgium resulted in the conviction of four
Rwandans for war crimes committed in 1994. Mallat and his
colleagues say they are determined to press for a similar result
despite the accusations being levelled against them - among
them anti-semitism, animosity and hatred. They say their
starting point is not the criminal but the crime.
"I have a very profound belief that it is difficult to have peace in
the Middle East without minimal accountability, certainly for the
largest crimes," says Mallat. "We need a day of reckoning for
the outstanding crime against humanity committed in Sabra and
Shatila." |
