|
Innocent victims caught up in
a war of endless revenge
Robert Fisk reports from the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp,
northern Lebanon
By Robert Fisk
05/24/07 "The
Independent" -- -- It is a place of Palestinian
fury - and almost as much Palestinian blood. The
bandage-swaddled children whimpering in pain, frowning at the
strange, unfatherly doctors, the middle-aged woman staring at us
with one eye, a set of tubes running into her gashed-open
stomach, a series of bleak-faced, angry, young men, their bodies
and legs torn apart.
There was eight-year Youssef al-Radi who was cut open by
shrapnel in the arm and back yesterday morning and brought to
the Palestinian Safad hospital at Badawi, another refugee camp
in Tripoli, his feet bleeding, a tiny figure on a huge
stretcher. He hasn't been told that his mother died beside him.
Nor that his father is still in the Nahr el-Bared camp.
And let us not forget six-year-old Aiman Hussein, who was hit by
up to a hundred pieces of metal from a Lebanese army shell - in
the neck and the spine, the tibia, the foot, the back, you name
it. The doctors had to rush him to Tripoli because they could
not operate. Visit the Safad hospital if you dare. Or climb
gingerly out of your car on the Lebanese army's front line at
Nahr el-Bared and walk past the sweating, tired soldiers who
have been told they are defending Lebanon's sovereignty by doing
battle with the gunmen of Fatah al-Islam - who are still hiding
in the smashed, smoking ruins on the edge of the Palestinian
camp.
Some of the buildings look like Irish lace and a mosque's green
minaret has a shell hole just below the platform where the
muezzin's call would be heard five times a day, as if a giant
had punched at it in anger. There is even a field of ripped-up
tents, which must have been what this camp looked like when the
grandfathers of those wounded children arrived here from
Palestine in 1948.
The Lebanese armoured personnel carriers were dug into the rich
earth, and the soldiers were sheltering behind a collection of
smashed houses, petrol stations and lock-up garages. We found
two colonels in one garage, who politely offered us coffee, and
a lieutenant who had lived in Montreal and who called a mutual
friend of ours - a Lebanese army colonel in the south of Lebanon
- who roared with laughter down his mobile phone: "Robert, what
are you doing in Nahr el-Bared?" As if he didn't know.
I looked across the camp. Was it worth all this pain, the grotty,
empty streets, the broken apartment block with dirty grey smoke
still drifting from its windows? The Lebanese soldiers claim
they try never to hurt civilians (I can think of another army
which says that!), but did so many Palestinians have to be
killed or wounded for the crimes of a few, some - we do not know
how many - not even from "Palestine" but from Syria or Yemen or
Saudi Arabia? Just behind me was the checkpoint where the gunmen
of Chaker el-Absi (born Jericho 1955, later a MiG pilot in
Libya, according to his brother in Jordan) butchered four
soldiers at the weekend, slitting their throats and leaving
their severed heads on the road.
Most of the troops around me were from the north of Lebanon - so
were the murdered soldiers. Had there been feelings of revenge
rather than military discipline when they first opened fire?
There were certainly growls of retaliation in the Safad hospital
- named, with terrible coincidence, after the very town in
pre-Israel Palestine from which many of Nahr el-Bared's refugee
families originally came - and Fatah, the old Arafat PLO Fatah,
now had armed men on the streets to protect the medical
personnel and the new, wounded refugees from the next burst of
fury.
All day, the ambulances ran a ferry service of wounded from the
camp, sirens shrieking through the wards, spilling out the
wounded and the sick and the ancient men and women who could
bear no more. They were given small sacks of bread - like
animals newly arrived at market, I couldn't help thinking - and
led away.
They had heard all the political statements. Nicolas Sarkozy,
the new French President, had been on the phone to the Lebanese
Prime Minister, insisting that he should not give in to
"intimidation" - perhaps he thought the Palestinians were the
same kind of "scum" that he called the rioting Arabs of the
Paris suburbs last year - and President Bush gave his his
support to the Lebanese government and army.
And Walid Jumblatt said of the Syrian President that "the
Lebanese Army ought to crush Fatah al-Islam once and for all to
prevent Assad from turning Lebanon into a second Iraq". That's
all the talk now, that another sovereign Arab nation might
become a new Iraq. The Algerians were saying the same two days
ago, that Islamist suicide bombers were trying to turn Algeria
into "a new Iraq".
What, I kept asking myself yesterday, have we unleashed now?
Well, you can ask Suheila Mustafa who stood yesterday at the
bedside of her 45-year-old sister, Samia, so terribly wounded by
army shellfire in the face that she could neither talk nor focus
upon us with her bloated left eye. "We had just woken up when we
heard the first barrage of gunfire," she said. "My sister was
beside me and fell down with her head bleeding. She haemorraged
from 5.50 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. At last my
brother brought us all out in his car. But let me tell you this.
The Palestinian people have heard Walid Jumblatt and we say
'thank you' to him and let us have more shelling.
"And I would like to thank Prime Minister Siniora, and say
thanks - really thanks - very much to George Bush and to
Condoleezza Rice. I really want to thank them for these shells
and these wounds we are suffering. And if Rice really wants to
send more materiel to the Lebanese Army, she had better hurry
up. There is a woman still in the camp who is very pregnant and
the child in her womb will be born and will grow into a man -
and then we'll see!"
Of course, one wants to remind Suheila - perhaps not her
dreadfully wounded sister - that the Palestinians are guests in
Lebanon, that by allowing Fatah al-Islam to nest on the edge of
their north Lebanon camp, they were inviting their own doom. But
victimhood - and let us not doubt the integrity or the dignity
of that victimhood - has become almost a pit for the
Palestinians, into which they have fallen. The catastrophe of
their eviction and flight from Palestine in 1948, their
near-destruction in the Lebanese civil war, their cruel
suffering at the hands of Israeli invaders - the massacre of
Sabra and Chatila in 1982 where 1,700 were slaughtered - and now
this, have sealed these people into a permanent prison of
suffering.
I found an old lady in Safad hospital, whimpering and sobbing.
She was 75, she said, and her daughter had just brought out her
own two-month-old child and this was the fifth time she had been
"displaced". She used that word, "displaced". She had lost her
home in Palestine in 1948 and four more times in Lebanon her
home had been destroyed. And on what date did she leave
Palestine, I asked? "I can read and write," she said. "But I no
longer have the memory of being so exact."
No wonder that in all the Palestinian camps of Lebanon
yesterday, they were protesting the "massacre" at Nahr el-Bared
with gunfire and burning tyres.
And so we continued through the wards. There was Ghassan Ahmed
el-Saadi, who had arrived at the camp's medical centre to
distribute bread with his friends Abdul Latif al-Abdullah and
Raad Ali Shams. "A shell came down and my friends both fell dead
at my feet," said Mr Saadi, who is a mass of tubes and wounds
and a bloody foot.
There was Ahmed Sharshara, just eight years old, with a huge
plaster over his chest. A hunk of shell had entered his back and
broken into his spine and partly emerged from his chest. The
X-ray showed a piece of metal like a leaf in his stomach. His
lungs were still being drained.
And there was Nibal Bushra who went to his balcony on Sunday
morning to find out why the camp was being shelled when a single
bullet hit his brother. Then a sniper's bullet hit him. For two
days he lay bleeding in the camp before being brought out.
"I wish they would take us to a European country because we are
not safe here, and the Arab nations are beasts, monsters to us,"
he said. "I won't even talk to Arab journalists. They are not
prepared to tell the truth." And what has become of his desire
to return to the old Safad of Palestine, I asked. "We will never
go home," he said. "But I trust the Europeans because they seem
good and kind people."
And then - a little annex to this story - there was a small room
where I found Ahmed Maisour Sayed, 24, part-paralysed and unable
to speak, who was not a victim of the Lebanese army. He was
brought here on 3 May after being shot by two gunmen from Fatah
al-Islam because he was a PLO supporter. "His family and one of
their families had quarreled about ideology," his father told
me. "So they shot him and killed two other men. They are a
terrorist organisation and we don't know what they want. There's
only about 700 of them. But now my son can never work, We need
help from an international organisation." I dared not tell him
that I come from the land of Lord Balfour.
But I did notice, back at Nahr el-Bared, a heap of empty
Lebanese army machinegun cartridges, and I picked one up as a
souvenir. And when I got home to Beirut, I put it with a much
older cartridge case which I picked up back in the late Eighties
when the same army was besieging the Palestinians in Sidon. Of
course, the two cases were identical in calibre. The tragedy
goes on. And its identical nature has made it normal, routine,
typical, easy to accept. And woe betide if we believe that.
Click here
to comment on this and other articles
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
