20 - 26 September 2001
Issue No.552
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552 |
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A tale of two massacres
Sharif Elmusa* listens to the silence
I started writing this article in commemoration of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Then came the stunning news of the mass killings in New York and Washington. In Sabra and Shatila, more than 800 residents [some estimates place the number of dead at over 3,000] of these two Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut were slaughtered on 16 September 1982, after Israel had occupied Beirut and forced the PLO out of Lebanon. The perpetrators were members of the Phalangist right-wing militia.
Both massacres were deliberated and executed in cold blood. They were committed against civilians to instil fear. The Phalangists intended the Palestinians to panic and flee Lebanon, or to be cowed if they stayed. The plane hijackers wanted the Americans to lose their sense of invincibility. The Phalangists intended to hammer the last nail into the coffin of the PLO presence in Lebanon. The hijackers took aim at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, prime symbols of US economic and military might. Had the fourth plane -- the one that crashed in Pennsylvania -- been successful in its mission, perhaps the White House and the Capitol building would have been hit, and the hijackers would have added a principal political symbol. They meant to humiliate the superpower.
The Sabra and Shatila massacre was executed by technologically primitive means: machine guns and axes. The militias took direct hold of their victims. Bringing down the World Trade Center was an engineering spectacle, reminiscent of the Pentagon's videos of the Gulf War. Mighty jets sheared the sparkling, gigantic steel towers, massive fireballs blazing behind. The 110- storey towers were engulfed by smoke, collapsing in slow motion. Columns buckled, girders bent and thousands perished.
We only saw the mutilated bodies of the Sabra and Shatila victims. The way the men approached their victims and the act itself were not captured by the camera. The butchery could only be imagined. In New York and Washington, the carnage unfolded time after time before our eyes on television screens. The dead themselves were largely hidden or maimed and mingled with the rubble. The scene has been engraved in our heads, a lasting archetypal image.
Though one crime was committed against the population of a powerless and a defeated movement, and the second against the civilians of the most powerful country on the planet, both elicited the sympathy of the world. Helpless civilians are the same everywhere. The Palestinians could do nothing about the slaughter of the refugees. They grieved and pleaded with the world to mete out justice. They could not punish the Phalangist gunmen who perpetrated the murders, let alone the Israeli army officers who were in on the act. It was Israel, under world and internal pressure, that finally held Ariel Sharon, the mastermind of the invasion of Lebanon and destruction of Beirut, as indirectly responsible. Sharon was fired from his job as defence minister, only to rise again 18 years later.
In contrast to the Palestinians, US politicians can speak words of power, as the Ancient Egyptians used to describe the utterances of their gods. Colin Powell and George W Bush can form global coalitions to fight terrorism and legitimise their military campaign. They want to think of the world as having been frozen as it was in 1991, and to their chagrin their wish has been grimly answered. They can claim there is a great Satan hovering out there, bent on destroying Western civilisation; and their pronouncements will be heard in every corner of the globe.
They can tell world governments to be either with the US or against it, on the side of good or that of evil. The US administration has already convinced many countries to state they are on the side of good. Never mind that the world is more complex than this Manichean, Hollywoodish duality leads us to suppose. Never mind that just yesterday this right-wing administration turned its back on the world in Genoa, rejected the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and, in Durban, refused to acknowledge its responsibility for slavery and Israel's racist suppression of the Palestinians. Never mind that many governments have jumped cynically at the opportunity to portray their suppression of other nations as a battle against terrorism. The putative coalition thus will include Turkey, which prevents the Kurds even from speaking their own language, and Russia, which is crushing Chechen nationalism. The alliance will also count Israel within its ranks. Unsolicited, that state has furthered the message of good against evil. Even Sharon, who has a case pending against him before the War Crimes Tribunal in Belgium for his role at Sabra and Shatila, has stood up to say, without blinking, that he is a force of good.
As I write, the rhetoric of vengeance is escalating and the US cabinet is in session. Pictures are shown of US warships setting sail, of menacing geometrical Stealth bombers and giant AWACs taking off to scan the mountains and valleys and caves of Afghanistan in search of Osama Bin Laden. These images will gradually replace those of carnage, mourning and the devotion of rescue workers. The compass of death is shifting to its next victims: the impoverished Afghans, and perhaps others. If they don't die from bombardment, they will suffer or perish from hunger and hopelessness. But power is anticlimactic, and only those whose conscience, like that of the plane hijackers, has been numbed or blinded will find vengeance sweet.
There are more effective ways to fight terrorism. A massive military campaign against a defenceless people proves nothing about America's capabilities or resolve. The circle of America's foes can only widen in consequence. The US should identify -- truly identify -- the perpetrators and bring them to justice; it should not implicate the innocent. That is not easy, but it is the right moral course, and it is in line with the humanist values that many Americans cherish.
In the medium term, only a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, lifting the sanctions on Iraq and fair American dealing with the Arab and Muslim peoples will change the climate that spawns among some the nihilistic readiness to kill and die. Still more urgently, the US needs to reconcile itself with the world and emerging sensibilities on environmental, political and economic issues. It cannot treat the world as a coat it dons and shrugs off according to the weather.
It has been suggested by Dennis Ross, the former US special envoy to the Middle East, that extremists oppose peace anyway and a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not help. This is an oversimplification. Even if some were not swayed by a resolution of the conflict and carried out terrorist acts against American targets, their actions would be akin to last gasps. To be sure, terrorism will not be eradicated from the world in the near future, but addressing the grievances of the oppressed and reconciling the US with the rest of the world's opinion on numerous issues can go a long way toward reducing its occurrence.
In the meantime, the bodies of all those who died in New York and Washington, like those who died in Sabra and Shatila, will have been returned to the ground, where they will lie in vast repose. To dignify their death, we can only say prayers -- and keep quiet.
* The writer is director of the Middle East Studies Programme and associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo.
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