Democratic Palestine : 5 (ص 16)
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- عنوان
- Democratic Palestine : 5 (ص 16)
- المحتوى
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Mass Movement
to Return the Disappeared
Hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian women shut down
Beirut in a general strike on July 9 to protest government inaction on
returning over 3,000 kidnap victims to their families.What has mush-
roomed into one of the most important mass movements ever in
Beirut, had its origins in the spontaneous demonstrations mounted
by women in the wake of the 1982 Sabra-Shatila massacre.
An estimated 3,000 Lebanese and
Palestinians were slaughtered by
Israeli-backed Phalangist militiamen
during the three-day massacre ending
on September 18, 1982. While the mas-
sacre was in progress, the Israeli army
rounded up thousands of Lebanese and
Palestinian men from both Sabra-
Shatila and = surrounding — Beirut
neighborhoods. Some _ of those
abducted later turned up in the Ansar
concentration camp near Nabatiyeh, but
hundreds of others were handed over to
the Phalange and have since disap-
peared.
Within days of the massacre,
rumors spread through West Beirut that
the Phalangist butchers were returning
in force to the camps. Hundreds of
women clutching their babies in their
arms, gathered at an office of the Inter-
national Red Cross to register their
names in case they too disappeared.
Others gathered at the residence of
former Prime Minister Saeb Salam
demanding protection from continued
Phalangist outrages. Their protestations
went unheeded, the kidnappings con-
tinued on a massive scale and the move-
ment for the disappeared took on a mili-
tant momentum.
Forty days after the massacre,
2,000 Lebanese and Palestinian women
mounted a demonstration in Shatila
camp in defiance of the Lebanese Army.
The women carried Palestinian and
Lebanese flags as well as enlarged
photographs draped in black of family
members who had been massacred.
The women moved en masse out of
Shatila, hurdling the rubble and stagnant
pools of water left by two months of
Israeli aerial bombardment of the camp
16
during the summer. They marched to the
Gaza Palestinian Red Crescent Hospital
where over 1,000 of the massacre vic-
tims had been herded off to their deaths
by the right-wing Lebanese death
squads. The women’s screams broke
the silence in the streets: «We will
redeem you with our blood and souls;»
«Sabra and Shatila could only be
destroyed after the revolutionaries left.»
The demonstration ended at one of the
mass graves of the massacre victims
with the laying of a single wreath. The
wreath read: «We salute the blood of the
martyred men, women and children of
Sabra and Shatila. Your blood has not
been spent in vain.» Since that day the
mothers, wives and sisters of the disap-
peared have carried out weekly
demonstrations explicitly modelled after
the Mothers of the Disappeared in
Argentina.
How many disappeared?
In addition to the hundreds of per-
sons who disappeared during the mas-
sacre, thousands of other Lebanese and
Palestinians disappeared in the follow-
ing two months when the rightist-control-
led Lebanese Army entered West Beirut
after the departure of the Israeli army.
The first act of the newly installed gov-
ernment of Phalangist President Amin
Gemayel and Prime Minister Shafiq
Wazzan was to launch a massive «sec-
urity sweep» of West Beirut and the
southern suburbs. While the Israeli army
orchestrated the Sabra-Shatila mas-
sacre, this time thousands disappeared
while US Marines and the rest of the
multinational force were allegedly pro-
tecting the refugee camps and
Lebanese civilians.
The Lebanese Army arrest cam-
paign began on September 26, 1982,
less than one week after the massacre.
The Amin Gemayel government was
said at the time to have a secret plan to
expel 50,000 Palestinians from the zone
under its control. Even Western press
accounts of the «security sweep» list the
number of the disappeared in the
thousands. Richard Ben Cramer wrote
in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sep-
tember 30, 1982:
Since Monday, Lebanese soldiers
and secret policemen have stormed
and searched thousands of homes,
offices and shops in the camps of
Sabra, Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh. The
soldiers and _ plainclothesmen took
away the young men. Anyone could be
seized and held in this great roundup.
More than 1,500 prisoners, mostly
Palestinian men, are being held in an
East Beirut prison, where - according to
aman who said he had been there - they
are packed too closely to lie down,
denied food, forced to live amid their
own excrement and beaten during «in-
terrogation».
The New York Times reported on
October 3, 1982 that «some officials
said that up to 2,000 civilians had been
picked up during this week for indentity
checks». David Ottaway in the
Washington Post on the same day
reported that «the Lebanese Army has
been rounding up hundreds of Palesti-
nians, spreading new terror in the camps
where the massacres took place last
month, in what appears to be a govern-
ment effort to reduce the number of
Palestinians here by about 90 per-
cent...The roundup of Palestinians is
also taking place in camps around
Sidon. There it is the Israelis rather than
the Lebanese Army making most of the
arrests.» Finally, the New York Times
reported on October 7, 1982, that «sol-
diers of the Lebanese Army today made
their first intensive search of downtown
West Beirut...Some unofficial estimates
put the number of people detained at
more than 400...The searches paral-
leled others in the last 10 days, with
unofficial estimates that up to 3,000, - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 5
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