September 1, 2010

Hello Dearest Maisoon,

I certainly understand and share your sadness and feeling of hopelessness after your visit to Shatila Camp. Most people i take there leave feeling much the same as you.

In the Palestinian Refugee camps in Lebanon tomorrow begins the 'black month' during which the World commemorates the September 1982 massacre at Sabra-Shatila—this year being of course the 28th anniversary but for many its like the carnage happened last year.

Perhaps the commemoration will be a bit more somber than usual this year given the realization that the same mentality, indeed some of the same people, who committed, condoned and granted themselves amnesty for the massacre three decades ago were the most adamant last month in insisting on denying Palestinian refugees the most elementary civil rights. The Phalange,( Kataib--Lebanese Forces) Saad Haddad militia, and their Israeli allies for example—who were of course guilty in 1982 but all in Parliament, as with all of us inside and outside of Lebanon, are responsible for what happened between Sept. 16-18th in 1982 and what didn’t happen on August 17, 2010 with respect to civil rights for the massacre survivors.

As some of the thousands indelibly marked by that carnage 28 years ago, and as is our custom and duty, we at the Sabra Shatila Foundation will submit a brief essay in a couple of weeks to remind readers and pay our respects to the dead.

But not without some field research for this years article, some of which we conducted in today's heat and humidity.

This years article will discuss 12 year old Munir Mohammad’s miraculous survival at one of Shatila’s 15 "Walls of Death", being the number of 'Walls of Death" the SSF has documented inside Shatila camp. These walls were used during the 43 hours of the slaughter arranged, observed, condoned, and attempted to be covered up by the enemies of humanity and Palestine.

Hopefully we will contribute a little bit to the historical record of one of the darkest periods of the 20th Century. There are so many victims families, and indeed some perpetrators, still able and willing to shed light for interested researchers. An important project if you know of interested available researchers who want to come and work on it becuase 28 years after the Massacre at Sabra-Shatila, accountability, justice and civil rights are too long delayed and denied.

This noon, map, notes and photographs from the 1982 carnage in hand, we worked on documenting the location of the 15 'Walls of Death’ repeatedly used by the killers between Thursday September 16, 1982 beginning around 6 p.m. until Saturday September 18, 1982 at 1 p.m. It was at these locations that camp inhabitants were pulled, dragged and herded from shelters and homes to be butchered against walls in the alleys of Shatila.

The photos below show some of today’s work locating ( only the old people appear to know the precise locations) where Palestinian women and children were quickly found ( with the aid of information provided by Israeli operatives to the killers on Wednesday September 15, 1982, the former having surveyed Shatila Camp asking the kids and women, as the strangers pretended they had come from NGO’s and wanted to help the camp residents, by documenting their locations. But their real work was to identify the location of the shelters for the killers scheduled to be ushered into the camps the next day. When the butchers began their work, those quickly located in the shelters were all slaughtered fast…with a very few survivors like Munir, who had hidden with with mother and brothers and sisters underground inside "Abu Yassirs" Shelter in the Horst Tabet area opposite Akka Hospital. The women and children were raped and slaughtered, more than a dozen unborn slashed from their mothers’ wombs, and dismembered and any men found were lined up against these walls, arms raised, and shot in the back. Hundreds of bodies were recovered near or along these "walls of death". The walls remain after 28 years with bullet scares and holes still visible although some efforts have been made to feather them over with cement mortar and plaster. This area of Shatila as you may notice from the Amal logos on some of the walls was taken over from Palestinians by Lebanese following the Amal "camp wars" in 1986-88. These Lebanese Arab Muslim attacks on Shatila killed more than the 1982 Christian/Israeli Massacre. The attacks on the camps that forced some residents to eat cats and dogs, and reports of cannibalism to survive, was done at Syria’s instruction to prevent Arafat from regaining a power base in the Beirut camps of Shatila and Burj al Barajneh.

My young companions shown in these photos, all of whom live in hovels inside the "walls of death" use them for games, unaware, of course, that some of their relatives were butchered there.

The lady shown to my left in photo # 9030 was spraying for insects. She says the neighborhood can still smell the death that happened outside her door nearly

Will send you a copy of "Munirs Story" when we finish it.

Very best wishes to you and please try not to get too discouraged, i know its hard these days.

franklin

Palestine Civil Rights Campaign-Lebanon

PLEASE SIGN HERE!

http://www.petitiononline.com/ssfpcrc/petition.html

"Failure is not an option for the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, our only choice is success"

15 year old Hiba Hajj, PCRC volunteer, Ein el Helwe Palestinian Camp, Saida, Lebanon

Please check our website for UPDATES:
www.palestinecivilrightscampaign.org

Franklin P. Lamb, LLM,PhD
Director, Americans Concerned for
Middle East Peace, Wash.DC-Beirut

Board Member, The Sabra Shatila Foundation and the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Beirut-Washington DC
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp
- fplamb@palestinecivilrightscampaign.org

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Palestine Civil Rights Campaign-Lebanon