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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (3749)	4/21/2002 1:41:23 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15516

Israel: We have nothing to hide in Jenin probe Observer Worldview Ed Vulliamy in New York and Graham Usher in Jerusalem Sunday April 21, 2002 The Observer The United Nations is to send a mission to investigate allegations of Israeli brutality during its violent occupation of the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin on the West Bank, which ended last week. Palestinians said they hoped the UN Security Council's unanimous decision late on Friday to send a 'fact-finding' team to the camp could lead to an international criminal trial of the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and other senior figures. But Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon, said: 'We have nothing to hide and we will gladly cooperate with this UN inquiry.' Israel has faced accusations that its troops massacred Palestinians, including civilians in Jenin, which it described as a centre of Palestinian terrorism. Observers claim that Israeli troops behaved with extreme brutality, preventing humanitarian aid reaching its beleaguered residents and destroying the homes of hundreds of innocent civilians. Watching camp refugees dig in rain-soaked rubble for bodies and possessions, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for the region, William Burns, yesterday called Jenin a 'terrible human tragedy'. Burns said: 'It's obvious that what happened here in the Jenin camp has caused enormous human suffering for thousands of Palestinian civilians.' But he declined to comment on whether he saw evidence of a massacre. The Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, made an offer to accept the UN envoy in a phone call to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, after intense backroom dealing between US and Israeli diplomats in New York. Israel had, it emerged, been faced with a more strongly worded, Arab-backed UN motion urging a wide-ranging inquiry, which the US would have vetoed. The mission was being seen in New York as very much a personal initiative by Annan, following his call on Thursday for a peacekeeping force to be sent to the region. Peres is understood to have told the Secretary-General: 'Israel has nothing to hide regarding the operation in Jenin. The IDF (Israeli army) did its utmost to prevent harm to innocents.' But the Israeli Foreign Ministry insisted that 'co-operation' did not mean Israel would agree to the establishment of an international committee of inquiry as the Palestinians want. The fact-finding mission is 'the first step toward making Sharon stand trial before an international tribunal', said Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. 'We will follow the issue so that the murderers who planned the massacre, including [Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin] Ben-Eliezer and [army chief of staff Shaul] Mofaz, are brought to justice.' Without being drawn into whether the army's assault on Jenin camp was a 'massacre', international agencies in the occupied territories welcomed the Security Council's decision. 'Some kind of international investigation must be launched,' said Peter Hansen, Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. 'The Jenin camp residents have lived through a human catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history,' he said. 'What is needed is an international investigation with a mandate to analyse and investigate the events in the Jenin camp factually and interpret those events in the light of the relevant international laws and breaches of those laws.' Amnesty International lawyer Kathleen Cavanagh says it is clear the army breached the Geneva Conventions. These range from mistreatment of Palestinian detainees and wanton destruction of Palestinian civilian properties, to the denial of medical and humanitarian access to the dead and wounded during the siege. guardian.co.uk