21 Septembers ago
By Laurie King-Irani, Electronic Intifada 9/16/2003
OF PLACELESS LAWS AND LAWLESS PLACES: DOES INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE HAVE A LOCAL ADDRESS? - Researching Justice: The View from Nowhere -- Drifting between states of consciousness 36,000 feet above sea level, I awake to the hum of jet engines and a medley of conversations conducted in French, Arabic, and Armenian. I am on an Air France flight heading into a breathtaking September sunset.
Blinking sleep from my eyes, I peer at a small video screen embedded in the seat before me. The image of a small gray plane heading west on a bright green background comes into focus. We are somewhere above the cities of Munich and Nuremberg. Place names that resonate, venues of lawlessness and lawgiving; specific, intimate, and local to those who dwell there, but freighted with international and historical meanings for humanity since the end of World War II.
These German cities, neither of which I have ever visited, are deeply implicated in the journey I am undertaking and the research project I am pursuing: an ethnographic study of the processes and structures of international humanitarian law. I want to find out how the placeless principle of universal jurisdiction can be applied to lawless places like the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, where a massacre claimed over a thousand innocent lives 21 years ago this week. I want to know if it is possible for international justice to have a local address.
Murder, through the lens of outlaw eyes
By Peter Speetjens, Daily Star 9/16/2003
21 years to the day after the Shatila massacre, Jean Genet’s account remains a powerful literary force -- A photograph has two dimensions, so does a television screen; neither can be walked through.” So the famous French novelist and playwright Jean Genet begins the account of his visit to the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut in 1982, immediately after the Sept. 16 massacres of Palestinians took place.
“From one wall of the street to the other, bent or arched, with their feet pushing against one wall and their heads pressing against the other, the black and bloated corpses that I had to step over were all Palestinian and Lebanese. For me … walking through Shatila and Sabra resembled a game of hopscotch,” Genet continues in Fours Hours in Shatila. “(But) a photograph doesn’t show the flies nor the thick white smell of death. Neither does it show how you must jump over bodies as you walk along from one corpse to the next.”
His is a bloody, graphic and moving description, first published in French in the journal Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes No.6 in Paris in January 1983. It is a unique personal testimony, effortlessly mixing historical fact, reflection and clinical observation with horror and literary beauty an account little remembered today, 21 years to the day after the massacres.
Genet had come to Beirut in September 1982. On the day of Bashir Gemayel’s funeral, standing on the eighth floor of his apartment block, he had seen the Israeli Army entering the remnants of the capital.
“Almost all buildings have been hit in what they still call West Beirut,” Genet wrote, referring to two months of relentless Israeli bombardments.
Remembering Sabra and Shatila
By Amal Hamdan, Palestine Media Center/Al-Jazeera 9/16/2003
The piles of bloated corpses and the overwhelming stench of rotting flesh are still crystal clear memories in Mahir al-Srour al-Marei’s mind.
It was 16 September 1982 in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, and the sounds of gunfire echoed throughout the densely packed, impoverished area.
A thick cloud of uneasiness lingered over Israeli-occupied west Beirut. Two days earlier, Phalange militia leader and Lebanon’s president Bashir Jmayil had been assassinated after only three weeks in power.
The militia, close to Israel, blamed Palestinians for his death.
As the rattling of battle became more insistent, Mahir’s father told him to go to a nearby relative’s house and bring her back. Mahar, then 15, recalls venturing out with his sister Suad, then 18, into the night. Electricity had been cut off after Israel’s savage bombing of west Beirut.
“We arrived at the home of Abu Yasir’s, who had the largest bomb shelter in the neighbourhood,” said Mahar. Outside, rows of men lined the streets.
“We thought they were asleep. It was normal then to sometimes sleep outside because the shelter would become too full,” said the photo-journalist. The shelter was empty. "Then my sister screamed, 'run, they’re all dead,' " he said.
As Israeli flares lit up the skies, Mahir looked at the bodies in the street and realised his neighbours were dead.
This is just one of his memories of the three-day Sabra and Shatila massacre.
A nation still in need of reconstruction
By Alia Ibrahim, Daily Star 9/16/2003
Taif accord promised ‘balanced development’ which hasn’t happened - Since the end of the civil war, only $4 billion has been spent on reconstructing the country, an amount some critics call ‘ridiculous’ -- It is not by mere coincidence that the term “balanced development” featured prominently in the Taif Accord. Poor income distribution based on social, regional and sectarian divisions, often cited as a one of the reasons behind the war, have characterized economic development in Lebanon since the country’s independence in 1943. The fragmentation of the state between 1975 and 1990 only increased the sharpness of regional and social imbalances among the Lebanese.
Most academics who studied the reasons behind the civil war agree that the magnitude of social disparities was one of the factors that led to civil war, so it was only normal that the issue of balanced development be addressed by the National Reconciliation Document.
But if the text recognized and stressed the importance of an equitable redistribution of wealth as a prerequisite for social ohesion and national unity, its actual implementation left much to be desired.
From Bruria to Vicki Knafo
By Avirama Golan, Ha'aretz 9/16/2003
In Israel, every women's group continues to fight its own battle, disengaged from any political and social context. -- While Vicki Knafo and her friends are on hunger strike in Jerusalem, and feminist academics consider how best to accentuate the gender-based significance of their struggle, an utterly different drama is now being played out among national-religious women. From without, it shows signs of being a bitter cultural dispute, albeit one that affects a relatively small segment of the population.
Echoes of the argument have been reverberating loudly through two settler journals, Nekuda and B'Sheva. In the June issue of Nekuda, Channel 10 reporter Emily Amroussi boldly suggested that national-religious women (such as she) not rush to have children before they had a chance to cement their marital relationship. The July issue was positively bursting with a plethora of responses.
Now, at a time when certain rabbis have shown surprising flexibility in light of the reality, which has in any event deferred the average age of marriage among religious young women (although the director of the Puah Institute unsurprisingly threatened the transgressors, through a story about a woman who took the Pill and was punished with sterility), several educated and opinionated women moralized Amroussi with passion and pity for having given expression to the "hedonistic, self-centered, spoiled lifestyle that is also spreading through the modern-religious camp." (Puah is the Hebrew acronym for "fertility and medicine in accordance with halakha," and also the name of a midwife mentioned in the Bible.)
If Israel can ignore the IAEA, why should anyone else listen?
Editorial, Daily Star 9/16/2003
Media reports on Monday suggested that this week’s annual conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will include a serious discussion of Israel’s presumed nuclear capabilities. One can only hope that this takes place, that the long-running grievances of Arab and other countries are finally given their just due. With accusations relating to weapons of mass destruction having been a large part of the US pretext for invading Iraq and Iran now facing heavy pressure over similar claims, the double standard involving the Jewish state which has steadfastly refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has become too obvious to ignore any longer.
None of this has deterred the Israelis, though, from speaking out against the alleged ambitions of others. In fact, Israel has been at the forefront of countries demanding that the IAEA get tough with Iran. The Israelis are not at all embarrassed that Tehran is a signatory to the NPT and they are not; nor does it bother them that no one thinks the Islamic Republic has nuclear weapons, while the Jewish state is estimated by experts to possess something in the order of 200-300 warheads, not to mention a variety of air-, land- and sea-based delivery systems.
The unbridled hypocrisy of Israeli policy and rhetoric on this issue constitutes a major test for the IAEA, and indeed for two cornerstones of modern diplomacy: arms control and collective security. If the presumed violations of some countries are to be “punished” pre-emptively while those of others go unchecked, there is little point in cooperating with the co-opted organization that enforces its own regulations according to Washington’s whim. Israeli impunity relies on America for its sustenance, and the nuclear question is a case in point: US law is very clear in banning foreign aid to countries that either do not sign or fail to obey the NPT, but somehow more than $3 billion in illegal funds gets from Washington to Israel every year with nary a word of protest on Capitol Hill.
Violence is a symptom; the occupation is the disease - an interview with Uri Avnery
By Uri Avnery and Jon Elmore, OccupiedPalestine.org 9/14/2003
Jon Elmer, FromOccupiedPalestine.org: There is an active debate in Israeli society, in government and in the media about murdering Yasser Arafat. Have you ever heard of a discussion of assassinating the elected leader of another country taking place in a 'democratic' society? What logic drives the open discussion of assassinating Arafat? What would the consequences of such an action be?
Uri Avnery: First of all, there is no public debate in Israel at all - on this subject or on any other. We have now a situation where there is a group of generals - including the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defence, the Chief of Staff, the army Chief of Intelligence and Chief of the Security Service - who decide all these methods alone, with the help of a compliant media that accepts everything the government says.
For the past 30 years there has been a campaign to demonize Arafat in the media. I don't remember one single article saying anything positive about Yasser Arafat. So the public just takes this and the public also believes what it has been told since Camp David [of 2000] - that we offered the Palestinians everything and they rejected it; therefore, there is no partner for peace. Within Israel this is an axiom accepted by virtually everybody. When the public believes that peace is impossible, and that the suicide bombings will go on forever, they will accept everything the Prime Minister tells them.
A threat to the rich
By George Monbiot, The Guardian 9/16/2003
Forcing the poor countries to walk out of the Cancun trade talks may rebound on the west -- Were there a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, it would be awarded this year to Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade negotiator. A week ago, in the Guardian's trade supplement, he argued that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) "helps us move from a Hobbesian world of lawlessness into a more Kantian world - perhaps not exactly of perpetual peace, but at least one where trade relations are subject to the rule of law".
On Sunday, by treating the trade talks as if, in Thomas Hobbes's words, they were "a war of every man against every man", Lamy scuppered the negotiations, and very possibly destroyed the organisation as a result. If so, one result could be a trade regime, in which, as Hobbes observed, "force and fraud are ... the two cardinal virtues". Relations between countries would then revert to the state of nature the philosopher feared, where the nasty and brutish behaviour of the powerful ensures that the lives of the poor remain short.
At the talks in Cancun, in Mexico, Lamy made the poor nations an offer that they couldn't possibly accept. He appears to have been seeking to resurrect, by means of an "investment treaty", the infamous Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This was a proposal that would have allowed corporations to force a government to remove any laws that interfered with their ability to make money, and that was crushed by a worldwide revolt in 1998.
A slow and steady genocide - an interview with Tanya Reinhart
By Tanya Reinhart and Jon Elmer, OccupiedPalestine.org 9/10/2003
Jon Elmer, FromOccupiedPalestine.org: I would like to begin the discussion with the topic of September 11th, given the coming of the second anniversary. In The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis writes of September 11th: "There are few acts of comparable deliberate and indiscriminate wickedness in human history." Can you comment on this assertion with a view from the Middle East?
Tanya Reinhart: Well, just with a general view, obviously this was an indiscriminate and wicked act, but I don't think it is unprecedented. If you look at the type of things the US has been doing for years - the atrocities in Vietnam, or of the previous Iraq war where the Iraqi army, after being defeated, was bombarded by the US as its soldiers were withdrawing.
You could also look at the number of civilians that died in Iraq both from the bombardments and the starvation imposed on them for 10 years, which is clearly much more in scope [than the September 11 attacks]. So in terms of scope, there are really many acts comparable in history, many of which the US itself is responsible for.
What I think is new here is that it wasn't done by an army. We are used to the fact that those killing civilians are military airplanes with sophisticated weapons. [Even] then it is a conceivable act. But when it is done not by an army, but by a group with no military means, by a group driven by despair and determination to fight, this is shocking.
Stupid is as Stupid Does
Editorial, Miftah 9/16/2003
The idiocy of Sharon’s right-wing government continues to be exposed by three Israeli policies that vindicate the people who say Israel only understands the language of force. The threat to ‘remove’ Yasser Arafat, the accelerated construction of the separation fence and the extra-judicial targeted killing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members have all backfired and are exposing an irresponsible and lost Israeli government guided by a personal vendetta.
When Ehud Olmert, number two in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government, announced to the world in a television interview on Sunday that assassinating Arafat was an option being considered, condemnation from the international community followed rapidly. Oblivious to the repercussions of such a hostile act, Olmert, who is supported in his call to assassinate Arafat by Defense Minister Mofaz, went on to express that morally such an operation would be justified. With one swift move, Israel grabbed Arafat from the sidelines and placed him center stage, indirectly establishing that the Palestinian President remained off limits.
It is important to warn that an American veto of a Security Council resolution aimed at protecting Arafat from attempts to exile or kill him can be viewed as implied, though not express, permission to carry out such an operation by an extremist Israeli government looking for an excuse.
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