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Subject: EYEWITNESS TO MASSACRE, 2 Articles by Robert Fisk - MER Special
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M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S - S P E C I A L
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The American media is so "inadequate" to say the least, when it comes
to the Middle East. Below, excerpts from two articles by Robert Fisk
published in THE INDEPENDENT in London:
MASSACRE IN SANCTUARY; EYEWITNESS
By Robert Fisk
The Independent 4/19/96, page 1
Qana, southern Lebanon - It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and
Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese
refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms
or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a
hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had
scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter,
believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the
Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.
In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion
headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey-
haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse
back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same
words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier
stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft
the body of a headless child.
"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area,"
a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank
them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of
the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof
had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of
my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...
Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day
offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious,
that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the
ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day
before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four
days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a
family of 12 - the youngest was a four- day-old baby - when Israeli
helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.
Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs only 250
metres from a UN convoy on which I was travelling, blasting a house
30 feet into the air in front of my eyes. Travelling back to Beirut
to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last
night, I found two Israeli gunboats firing at the civilian cars on
the river bridge north of Sidon.
Every foreign army comes to grief in Lebanon. The Sabra and
Chatila massacre of Palestinians by Israel's militia allies in 1982
doomed Israel's 1982 invasion. Now the Israelis are stained again by
the bloodbath at Qana, the scruffy little Lebanese hill town where
the Lebanese believe Jesus turned water into wine.
The Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres may now wish to end this
war. But the Hizbollah are not likely to let him. Israel is back in
the Lebanese quagmire. Nor will the Arab world forget yesterday'a
terrible scenes.
The blood of all the refugees ran quite literally in streams
from the shell-smashed UN compound restaurant in which the Shiite
Muslims from the hill villages of southern Lebanon - who had heeded
Israel's order to leave their homes - had pathetically sought
shelter. Fijian and French soldiers heaved another group of dead -
they lay with their arms tightly wrapped around each other - into
blankets.
A French UN trooper muttered oaths to himself as he opened a bag
in which he was dropping feet, fingers, pieces of people's arms.
And as we walked through this obscenity, a swarm of people burst
into the compound. They had driven in wild convoys down from Tyre
and began to pull the blankets off the mutilated corpses of their
mothers and sons and daughters and to shriek "Allahu Akbar" (God is
Great") and to threaten the UN troops.
We had suddenly become not UN troops and journalists but
Westerners, Israel's allies, an object of hatred and venom. One
bearded man with fierce eyes stared at us, his face dark with fury.
"You are Americans," he screamed at us. "Americans are dogs. You did
this. Americans are dogs."
President Bill Clinton has allied himself with Israel in its war
against "terrorism" and the Lebanese, in their grief, had not
forgotten this. Israel's official expression of sorrow was rubbing
salt in their wounds. "I would like to be made into a bomb and blow
myself up amid the Israelis," one old man said.
As for the Hizbollah, which has repeatedly promised that
Israelis will pay for their killing of Lebanese civilians, its
revenge cannot be long in coming. Operation Grapes of Wrath may then
turn out then to be all too aptly named.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REALITY BITES FOR PR MEN AT QANA
By Robert Fisk
The Independent' - 4/22/96
Qana, Southern Lebanon
Herve de Charette's face was as white as death. The French Foreign
Minister, neatly clad in blue suit and tie, had gingerly walked through the
scene of last week's massacre at the UN's compound, nodding diplomatically
as the UN's Fijian commander described the 12 minutes in which Israeli
shells slaughtered up to 120 refugees, the sliced-up corpses that his
soldiers were forced to pick up, the difficulty in identifying parts of the
children who had been torn to pieces. Mr de Charette listened with
distaste. But then he was confronted by a survivor.
Fawzaya Zrir, a small, frail woman in a scarf, simply walked up to the
French Foreign Minister and began talking to him with an odd mixture of
affection and anger. "For us, France is our mother and God is our father,"
she said in a flight of rhetoric that might have been written by the Quai
d'Orsay public relations men, who beamed happily at this fortunate encounter.
Then things began to go wrong. "We have lived through hell," Mrs Zrir
continued. "The people were chopped into pieces by the Israeli bombs. They
bleed, these people. You should have seen the heads."
At the French foreign minister's right, a Lebanese softly translated the
woman's dreadful words. The PR men began to look uneasy. "We have lived
here 40 years and now we are treated like animals," the woman cried. "Do
you know what the dogs did at night after the killings? They were hungry
and I saw them in the ruins eating fingers and pieces of our people."
Mr de Charette stared at her as if he had seen a ghost. This had clearly
not been part of the programme, a schedule that was supposed to have whisked
the foreign minister from a light lunch at UN headquarters in Naqqoura to a
photo-opportunity on the roof of the wrecked UN battalion HQ, a
three-minutes press conference to give the impression of openness and a
swift drive back to the coast and a helicopter to Beirut - everything, in
fact, that would enhance France's much-trumpeted love for Lebanon. Reality
had very definitely not been part of the programme.
A UN soldier was quite blunt about it. "This place is going to be turned
into one of those awful pilgrimage sites for the great and the good," he
muttered. "Boutros-Ghali sent his emissaries today to express their horror.
But they'll do no more than they did after Srebrenica. They'll tut-tut and
shrug it off. and they wont even have the guts to condemn Israel even now
- for this wickedness."
And indeed, the UN Secretary-General did send General Frank Van Kappen of
the Netherlands army - not, perhaps, a happy choice after the Dutch army's
disgrace at Srebrenica and he duly marched round the site of the worst
carnage, asking how many rounds landed, where the Katyusha missiles were
fired from and whether he could be shown this site to discover if any
Israeli shells bad fallen there.
He would be meeting with General Amnon lipkin Shahak, the Israeli chief of
staff, he said.
Yes, he would be asking to meet the soldiers who fired the fatal artillery
rounds - "fat chance of that," another UN soldier said as he listened to all
this - and with that, Van Kappen, an immense figure in his steel flak jacket
and huge helmet clanked out of the compound with a colonel from the Royal
Engineers.
Mr de Charette was even more gentle of spirit. What had happened on
Thursday was 'unfortunate", an event for which France wished to show its
sympathy for the Lebanese. So how did it rank in the scale of civilian
atrocities? How did it rank, for example, beside the Sarajevo market
massacre?
"Frankly," the Foreign Minister replied sharply, "I have not had an
opportunity to make categories of unhappiness we have to work to do is to
make it impossible for this to happen in the future in Lebanon." And so say
all of us. Did he believe Israel had given sufficient explanation of the
massacre? "I hear there is an inquiry we have to await the result."
The problem, however is that neither America nor Europe are going to
condemn a country which pounded refugees of Qana with 155mm shells for 12
minutes; and such condemnation is about the only palliative that the
Lebanese might accept for the moment.
And you can see their point. On the coast road back to Beirut last night
there were burning cars, civilians deliberately targeted by Israeli warships
north of Sidon, three of whom had been badly wounded. Had this being a
Syrian warship shelling Israeli civilians on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road, of
course, Mr Clinton himself would have deplored -rightly- an act of
"international terrorism". But not a word of criticism about this
scandalous targeting of Lebanese civilians was uttered by the foreign
ministers of America, Russia, France and Italy as they sought to bring an
end to an apparently unstoppable war.
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Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 13:13:34 -0400
From: MIDDLEEAST@aol.com
Subject: EYEWITNESS TO MASSACRE, 2 Articles by Robert Fisk - MER Special
To: MIDDLEEAST@aol.com
Sender: owner-nemer-l@igc.apc.org