Documentary Relives Horror of Shatila Massacre

DUBAI, December 15, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Twenty-three years after hacking to death Palestinian refugees, six Israeli-backed Lebanese Christian militiamen show no remorse recounting the massacre in a new chilling documentary.

"With hanging or shooting you just die, but this is double," recalls one of the men, explaining how he took an old Palestinian and held him back against a wall, slicing him open in the shape of a cross.

"You die twice since you also die from the fear," he says nonchalantly of the act, describing white flesh and bone.

German director Monika Borgmann's film "Massaker" shows the six speaking out for the first time about their role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre during Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

Though no definite figures are available, around 2,000 Palestinians were massacred inside the camps in September of 1982 by the Christian militia under the watchful eyes of their Israeli alley.

Unlike massacres in some other conflicts, the perpetrators of Sabra and Shatila have not been brought to justice.

No Remorse

After several months finding and befriending the members of the Israeli-backed Christian Lebanese Forces militia, Borgmann coaxed them into giving testimony on camera.

She told an audience in Dubai, the latest stop in the film's tour of cinema festivals, she wanted to examine the individual and collective mindset that could lead to such atrocities.

The documentary is disturbing for the almost total lack of remorse shown by the men, whose faces are kept in shadow by the German crew's nifty camera work, said Reuters.

Chatting in a bare room with the sound of Beirut traffic filtering in and chinks of light showing through the shutters, they draw diagrams showing how they systematically moved through the camps "cleansing" sector after sector.

They flick through photographs of carnage and try to remember if they had had a hand in a particular scene, while the camera shows their muscles, a way of holding a cigarette or playing gently with a cat.

In the film, the men talk of their obsessive love for Bashir Gemayel, a Lebanese military commander, politician and president elect, their hatred of Palestinians whose presence in Lebanon challenged Christian domination, and how they became inured to violence as the war progressed and the atrocities mounted.

Gemayel's Lebanese Forces had made common cause with the Israeli army to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon.

He was killed along with twenty-five others in an explosion on September 14, 1982, nine days before he was due to take office.

Enraged by their charismatic leader's death, his supporters took revenge in an orgy of violence at the Palestinian refugee camps, where they believed the killers were hiding.

Israeli Trained

In passing, the men give details of the links between Israel and the militia it had helped train.

They describe trips in 1980 to Israel, where they were shown films about the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jews in World War Two.

The militiamen explain how they began a frantic rush to dispose of as many bodies as possible before the media came, in part accounting for the absence of an exact figure for the dead.

One says the Israeli army gave them large plastic sacks for bodies, another says they herded people into army vehicles to ferry them to a sports stadium where they were killed. They said they used chemicals to destroy many of the corpses.

Several mention that Israeli army officers conferred with the militia's leaders in Beirut on the eve of the massacres.

Belgium’s highest court had ruled that Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon could face war crimes charges once he leaves office after an appeal by 23 Palestinian survivors of Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Sharon was defense minister at the time of the massacre, and he was forced to resign after investigations said he shared blame for the slaying.