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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nukeit who wrote (3021)	4/23/2002 7:20:56 PM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Respond to of 32591

Witness to Jenin justice By Robert Plotkin A man suspected of collaborating with Israel was shot Monday afternoon a short distance from where I stood in the Jenin refugee camp. As aid workers sifted the rubble for bodies in the devastated center, I heard multiple shots coming from an alley. I, along with my Palestinian guides, ran up the alley toward the sound of the gunfire. An aid worker fled down the alley, shaking a stick at men surrounding the victim. Camp residents spotted me running towards the shots with my camera, and tried to pull me away screaming out, "No pictures! No pictures!" Struggling free of the crowd, I continued up the alley. There I saw the victim of the shots. He was in his mid-20s being carried head first down by half a dozen men surrounded by a screaming throng. As the wounded man and the crowd passed within meters of me, I began to take pictures, all the while being pulled and yelled at by a crowd demanding I stop. As the victim himself passed me, he was conscious but mute. Like a hunted animal, he looked toward me with a wide-eyed stare and reached his arms toward me. After he was carried away, a tall gunman dangling a black revolver in his hand slowly approached me. As I raised my camera to photograph him, several men grabbed my arms and yelled in broken English that he would shoot me. To my right, an old woman stood in the doorway of a house. I ran up to her and she stood aside. I fled into the house and ran into a room that overlooked the alley and waited until I saw the gunman depart. I later saw him being driven away in a waiting car. At the outset, my Palestinian guides claimed the man had been shot in a private dispute. Later, they claimed the IDF had shot him. When I objected, saying there weren't any troops in the camp, my driver said he would only tell me the truth about what had happened after we left the camp. But, an hour later, still inside the camp, he relented and told me the wounded man I had photographed was shot because he was suspected of having collaborated with Israel. In his words, "He help the jaish [army]. That's what the men said. He help the jaish." I asked him why he had lied to me, and he said, "It looks very bad for my people." In sharp contrast to the screams and shoves that greeted me when I photographed the shooting victim, other residents received me warmly and asked me to photograph the damage to their homes and businesses. In one such such instance, a woman reached through a hole into what had been her bedroom and pulled out brightly colored socks, placing them in a plastic bin. A man was being shaved in a barbershop whose facade was pulled off by a passing tank. The blue walls were pocked with bullet holes. Small children played on large piles of rubble. In another instance, however, one camp resident wanted me to stage a photograph. He pulled me into a home on the perimeter of the destruction. The front of the house was peeled away like a thin veneer. The floor was buckled, and the few pictures that remained on the walls were tilted at a distressing angle. But then the man lay face down on a mattress, splayed out his arms, and closed his eyes. When I didn't take his picture he looked up at me and said, "You take picture now." I declined. I arrived in Jenin on the second day of a break from journalism school in New York. I went to journalism school to become a firsthand witness to history. I can now leave having done so.