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Friday, May 13, 2005 - ore 22:20
Un po' di informazione non fa mai male...leggete, e poi ditemi chi sono i veri terroristi...
(categoria: " Vita Quotidiana ")
THE SABRA & SHATILA MASSACRES
On 6 June 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in what it described as 'retaliation' for the attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Argov in London on 4 June. The invasion, soon dubbed "Operation Peace for Galilee," progressed rapidly. By 18 June 1982, Israel had surrounded the Palestine Liberation Organisation's (PLO) armed forces in the western part of the Lebanese capital. A cease-fire, mediated by United States Envoy Philip Habib, resulted in the PLO evacuation of Beirut on 1 September 1982.
On 11 September 1982, Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the invasion, announced that "2,000 terrorists" had remained inside the Palestinian refugee camps around Beirut. On Wednesday 15 September, the day after the assassination of Israeli-allied Phalangist militia leader and Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, the Israeli army occupied West Beirut, "encircling and sealing" the camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were inhabited by Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. By mid-day on 15 September 1982, the refugee camps were entirely surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers, who installed checkpoints at strategic locations and crossroads around the camps in order to monitor the entry or exit of any person. During the late afternoon and evening of that day, the camps were shelled.
Around mid-day on Thursday 16 September 1982, a unit of approximately 150 Israeli-allied Phalangists entered the first camp. For the next 40 hours members of the Phalangist militia raped, killed, and injured a large number of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and elderly people inside the encircled and sealed camps. The estimate of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) to 3,500. The victims and survivors of the massacres have never been deemed entitled to a formal investigation of the tragedy, since Israel's Kahan Commission did not have a judicial mandate and was not backed up by legal force.
Ho voluto riportare questa notizia perchè la gente spesso non sa, perchè i telegiornali riportano soltanto gli attentati dei palestinesi e applicano un comodo silenzio stampa su tutto quello che riguarda le bastardate di Sharon e compagni, LEGITTIMATE dagli stronzi degli americani e dei loro alleati (dei quali, ahimè, facciamo parte). Per ulteriori informazioni, seguite questo link:
LINKWill all human beings be subject to the same law, and more importantly, to the same application of the law? Will all the victims of devastating September days see those responsible for their suffering appear before a court of law? The question is as old as history. In the Middle East, the question acquired additional meaning on 11 September.
As those responsible for the crimes against humanity perpetrated against New York and Washington residents are being pursued across the world, the case against Ariel Sharon for the massacres perpetrated in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila nearly 20 years ago is proceeding before the Belgium courts. Will the person who an Israeli commission of enquiry found to "bear personal responsibility" for the massacres in Sabra and Shatila in September 1982 finally be held to account and put behind bars?
A few weeks before the complaint was filed by 23 plaintiffs in Brussels on 18 June 2001, the first full trial held under a Belgian "universal jurisdiction" law resulted in the conviction and sentencing of four persons who were found guilty of the large-scale massacres in Rwanda. A week after the case against Sharon was brought before the Belgian criminal courts, Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in Belgrade and delivered to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. With the Sharon case, and the massacres of 11 September, a further test for global justice is underway.
Comparisons are always difficult. Massacres are too complex and dramatic to be exactly similar in every respect, and the massive crime perpetrated in New York on 11 September is sui generismore info in many ways. But it is no different in essence from the massacre perpetrated between 16 and 18 September 1982 in the Palestinian camps of Beirut.
Then Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon encircled the camps, sealed them, and sent in his closest allies amongst the Lebanese militias to "cleanse" the area of the "2,000 terrorists" which he insisted had remained there. As a result, hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were subject to three days of relentless torture, rape and killing, while hundreds more were arrested and trucked away, never to be seen again: an estimated 2000 civilians were killed or disappeared.
All massive killings remain stuck in the memory of horror and guilt. Unlike occasional murders, they are remembered by every human being. Unlike any other violent act, the wantonness and scale of large-scale killings of innocents puts the event on a different level altogether, a level shared by other notorious tragedies in modern history: Halabja in Kurdish Iraq in 1988, the killing fields of Cambodia, Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia, Sabra and Shatila, and now New York. Such atrocities are different from ordinary crimes because of their context and magnitude. By its sheer size, its wantonness, its ferocity, its callousness, its planning, the means used and the thousands of innocent civilians destroyed in a brief lapse of time, the crime then qualifies as a crime against humanity, a category which is well defined in international law and carries the common responsibility of all humankind.
Article 7 of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Statutes of 1998, for example, describes a crime against humanity as an act "committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population." There is consistent case-law in serious courts across the world that have tried these and related crimes, from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials to the Pinochet case in Britain, irrespective of the place where the massacre took place. The principle of universal jurisdiction can be found in the very early principles of "the law of people." The great European publicist Vattel wrote in 1758 that even if justice is normally limited territorially to the state in which a crime is committed, "one must except from the rule those thugs who, because of the magnitude of their crimes, declare themselves the enemy of human kind." This is why "universal jurisdiction" is compelling: any court can, nay should, try the perpetrator and his accomplices.
There is more in common between September 1982 in Beirut and 11 September in New York. The Belgian law of 16 June 1993 (modified on 10 February 1999), under which the case was brought by survivors against Ariel Sharon in Belgium, offers a good example of a precise, common language: not only does the statute condemn mass killings and other crimes as crimes against humanity under the ICC treaty's definition, but the Belgian law also calls for the prosecution of "those who design, hold or carry an instrument - or transform an existing instrument or construction - for the purpose of carrying such crimes." The details of the use of aircraft as mass murder instrument on 11 September could hardly be better qualified.
The consequences for crimes against humanity are significant. Under international law, all mankind is legally involved. Every single person in the world is concerned, and every government is bound to cooperate to produce the suspects and culprits, and to assist in the investigation. Crimes against humanity mobilize the whole world, as the crime occurs on a scale of its own, as in the treatment of Nazi crimes in the 1961 Eichmann case in Israel, or the increasing case-law emanating from the Rwandan and Yugoslavian massacres. The principle of trying mass crime in a different way than ordinary murders is graphically expressed by a French author, who finds it inconceivable "to make the Holocaust lose it nature by permitting its division into six million individual murders."
Mechanisms designed to punish crimes against humanity are also specific. They stress short-term measures such as the rejection of sovereign prerogatives and long-term pursuit. They refuse amnesties and time limitations, involve worldwide investigations, accountability, and responsibility coupled with the need to pursue the perpetrators and accomplices. They also reject traditional obstacles in both investigation and trial. For crimes against humanity, there is no acceptable obstacle between justice and the author of the crimes.
No decent person doubts that Osama bin Laden should be pursued and brought to justice for the 11 September massacres. The question posed to the world by the Sharon case in Belgium is similar: will the man without whom the Sabra and Shatila massacres would not have taken place continue to remain beyond criminal retribution?
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