Sharon role in Shatilla returns to haunt him

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By Ali Al-Saleh, Arab News Staff
Publication Date: 
Tue, 2001-06-19 04:11

LONDON/BRUSSELS, 19 June — The hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s dark past returned to haunt him yesterday as a controversial British documentary revisited his role in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon two decades ago and a survivor sought to bring war crime charges against him.


In a courtroom thousands of miles away from the scene of her ordeal, Suad Srur El-Marai relived her terror when Lebanese Christian militiamen went on the rampage in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.


Srur, who was raped and left paralyzed in the attack on her family, is one of a group of survivors seeking to press charges in a Brussels court against Sharon for crimes against humanity. “We heard someone knock at the door. My father asked ‘Who is it?’ And they said, ‘We’re Israelis and we want to search the house.’ My father opened the door and there were 13 armed soldiers,” Srur said in a statement to reporters at the court.


“Afterward they started firing at us. My little sister was shot in the head, and my father was hit in the chest but he was still alive... But me, I was paralyzed right away and I could no longer move,” she continued. “They raped me, one after the other, right in front of my father. They shot at me ... and then they left. They came back later that night and were furious to see I was still alive ... they shot me twice more,” said Srur, now 36, who walks with two canes and still has nightmares about the incident.


Sharon, a hawkish former general known as the “Bulldozer,” was declared unfit to be defense minister after an Israeli commission of inquiry in 1983 found him indirectly responsible for the killings during the invasion he orchestrated. His career was blighted for years by the scandal.


And his government slammed a BBC “Panorama” documentary, which ran Sunday, for suggesting Sharon should be indicted for the massacre.

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