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A personal account of the Terror of Sabra and Shatila.
I felt I was being watched and targeted for some reason so I went out and a cannon suddenly blasted next to me..
At 5 am on the morning of Sept. 18, 1982 Japanese photojournalist Ryuichi Hirokawa woke up startled. Something had happened. He knew it. A massacre had taken place in Sabra and Shatila camps.
"I was turning in my bed, I was afraid, I didn't want to go to the camps. I kept turning and turning until 8 O'clock when I finally decided to get up and go. But still I was too afraid to go alone. I went to the Commodore Hotel, where all foreign correspondents were staying, to round up some others, but no one wanted to go", he said.
"So I went alone".
Hirokawa recounted the events of that fateful day to The Daily Star at the inauguration of an exhibition of his photographs on Sabra and Shatila, as well as Jenin and Ramallah, at UNESCO Palace in Beirut.
The photojournalist is in Lebanon to mark the 20th anniversary of the massacres. He was the first foreign journalist to enter the camps.
Once at Shatila, Hirokawa tried to enter from its eastern side but found it completely sealed by Israeli tanks.
He then tried the southern entrance, where a terrified man approached him saying: "A massacre just happened".
Hirokawa headed on, stumbling over a body in his way. He feared for his life. He heard bulldozers and bombardments. It was about 10am.
"I felt I was being watched and targeted for some reason so I went out and a cannon suddenly blasted next to me. I hid for while, then entered the camp from the main entrance and found many, many bodies lying around. Then I started to take pictures", he said.
At 12am, the Red Cross entered together with other journalists, Hirokawa explained.
"I felt like I had to get this film out to the world immediately so I rushed out", he said. "At the entrance, I saw an Israeli tank, and a soldier sitting under a beach parasol reading. I broke down in tears".
Hirokawa had difficulty recounting the story. He fell silent for several minutes.
Then he added: "On one side there was a massacre and on another, this Israeli soldier reading as if nothing happened. Everyone else was crying".
The next day, Hirokawa found himself emotionally unable to handle returning to the camps. He returned to Japan.
Hirokawa first became interested in the Middle East just before the 1967 war. He had wanted to be in Israel. At the time he did not know anything about the region. All he knew was that there was a beautiful kibbutz in Israel he wanted to work in.
He arrived in Israel after the war and noticed that people were very happy that they'd won.
"People were saying 'we won the war of justice, just like the Americans won the war of justice on Japan'. Coming from a country that lost the 'war of
'I was turning in my bed, I was afraid, I didn't want to go to the camps'
justice' I started looking where justice really was", he said.
He noticed many ruins next to the sunflower field where he was working and started questioning what had happened there. But no one would answer his questions. He figured they were ruins from the time of the Crusades. That is, until he encountered Israelis who were fighting against their country's occupation of Palestine.
"They showed me an old map, from the time when the country was under British control and I suddenly realized that the ruins in question were of a Palestinian village that was entirely demolished in 1948.
"I realized that I was working in the Palestinians fields. I started taking pictures of Palestinian villages and did an exhibit in Jerusalem and people started getting angry with me.
"I stayed for three years in Jerusalem studying Palestinian history before I returned to Japan", he said. "There I almost forgot about Palestine".
But not totally, and Hirokawa returned to Galilee on April 1, 1976, a day after Land Day, where Palestinian demonstrators were killed for protesting against Israeli occupiers taking away their land.
On that day, he met a man who told him: "Had you been here yesterday, my son would be alive today".
The man believed journalists would be able to prevent Israelis from hurting Palestinians by their mere presence, as the soldiers would not want to be portrayed negatively to the world.
Hirokawa remembered the man's words when he decided to journey to Lebanon in 1982.
"I couldn't forget them", Hirokawa said. "So when the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) left Beirut in 1982, I was sure that a massacre would happen and I went there on the Sept. 15. I carried with me guilty feelings for not being in Palestine on March 30, 1976, I wanted to be in Lebanon in case something happened".
Yet being in Lebanon did not make him feel any less guilty.
"Although I am sure that if I had entered Sabra and Shatila and hour earlier, I would have been killed, I still feit ashamed. I really believed that journalists could do more to prevent horrible events from occurring.
"Before meeting the Palestinian man in Galilee and witnessing the massacres of Saba and Shatila, I thought a journalist's job was only to report news after it happened", he added.
Sabra and Shatila still haunt Hirokawa. In the years after the massacres he suffered post traumatic stress disorder from, as he says, "seeing all these corpses lying around, mutilated in front of my eyes and captured through my lens".
"For years after seeing this horror, I couldn't eat meant, and at night I dreamt of illumination flares. Every evening. I had to drink myself to sleep", he said.
Yet Hirokawa has continued to cover the conflict, most recently in Ramallah, Tulkarem, Gaza and Jenin.
"None have been like Sabra and Shatila though. I witnessed the most formidable carnage I had ever seen and am likely to see in the future".
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The officially registered parties and political groups participating in the coming elections in Israel number 61; and these parties are financed by the general budget, which has no lack of problems, ailments and deficits.
Do you not remember Damour Lebanon. Let me remind you. Arafat and the PLO plunged Lebanon into "massacres, rape, mutilation, rampages of looting and killings. Out of a population of 3.2 million, some 40,000 or more people had been killed, 100,000 wounded, 5,000 permanently maimed
In January of 1976, the destruction of Damour, a town of some 25,000 was completed by the PLO within two weeks. "The priest of Damour, Father Mansour Labaky desperately trying to save people of the town telephoned Kamal Jumblat [one of the Lebanese leaders], in whose parliamentary constituency Damour lay. 'Father, Jumblat said, 'I can do nothing for you, because it depends on Yasser Arafat' " . All efforts were useless. In the morning following the first night of invasion, when more than fifty people were massacred, Father Labaky "despite the shelling managed to get to the one house, to bring out some corpses. An entire family had been killed, the Canan family, four children all dead, and the mother, the father, and the grandfather. The mother was still hugging one of the children. And she was pregnant
The eyes of the children were gone and their limbs were cut off. No legs and no arms" (123). In total, 582 people were massacred in the storming of Damour. Father Labaky went with the Red Cross to bury them. "Many of the bodies had been dismembered, so they had to count the heads to number the dead. Three of the men they found had had their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths"
Azmi Zrayir, the PLO Member, an organizer of the terrorist attack in March, 1975 on the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv in which seven people were killed and eleven wounded, was remembered in Lebanon as "a thief, a murderer, a rapist and a torturer." Being a PLO headquarter commander in Tyre, "he formed a football team into which he conscripted teenage children. The players were forced to gratify Zrayir's sexual appetites. He debauched both girls and boys. At least one child who defied him was shot dead.
Arafat was ruthless not only with the Lebanese citizens but with the Palestinian Arabs too. In January, 1976 during the Christians' attack on Tall alZa'tar refugee camp the PLO tried to prevent the people in the camp from leaving. "Conditions within the camp became critical, with acute shortages of food and water, as bombardment continued day after day. The ideal of selfsacrifice, imposed on the civilians by a leadership which itself took no risks, was never known to be the choice of the unhappy people themselves. And not all of the fighters who fell with their guns in their hands were cut down by the fire of the Christians. Some who tried to surrender or escape from the camp were shot in the back by their own comrades. The high command in the PLO headquarters in West Beirut "not only refused to let the Palestinians leave the camp, or let the fighters surrender in order to save them all from hell, but insisted that the entire population, including the children, were to be sacrificed"
Knowing the atrocities perpetrated against their Arab "brethren" one can only imagine the fate of those who were considered by the PLO to be "spies" or "traitors." "While searching a citizen in Sydon, the PLO found on him Israeli money and a pair of shoes made in Israel His hands and legs were chained to the fenders of four vehicles. When a Fatah officer signaled with his pistol, the four cars raced away, tearing his body apart while horrified spectators screamed. The cars raced through the streets with the bloody limbs dangling"
"Nada alMurr the daughter of Alfred alMurr, a well known Lebanese civil engineer and industrialist, and May alMurr, a poet and historian saw a man torn apart by two vehicles". If one wonders where the PLO bandits learned their barbaric skills one should be advised to look into a book by Jhon Laffin. He wrote in "The PLO Connections," how the PLO trained their youth. "An instructor gave an order and a boy reached into basket and pulled out a chicken. Then he wrung its neck and dropped the dead bird. "No, no, no!" Arafat said reprovingly. He too reached into the basket and dragged out a chicken. And without wringing its neck he pulled the thing apart."
The Lebanese crimes are only a short page in Arafat's criminal biography. Torture, murder and the kidnaping of innocent people was Arafat's and the PLO's signature wherever they were present. Thousands of people perished in Jordan in September of 1970 when Arafat tried to wrest power from King Hussein. More than a thousand Palestinian Arabs accused of "collaboration" with Israel were brutally killed by Arafat's cronies during the "intifada." During the thirty five years of the PLO's existence thousands of Jews have been maimed and murdered in bombings, driveby shootings, stabbings, etc.
The terror unleashed by the PLO all over the world has destroyed and ruined lives of countless people in countless countries. The PLO leaders proudly declared that Arafat bears full responsibility for everything done by the PLO. Ahmed Tibi, Abu Mazen, and Mohammed Dahlan have repeatedly said that it was "Arafat who sent [the "fighters"] out on their operations." Is it possible to imagine a greater hypocrisy than the arrest of a half conscious 83year old former Chilean dictator in a hospital, and the embrace of Arafat by the leaders of almost all countries in the world.
See, that's the problem -- it was Uncle Yasir's finger on the trigger, and therefore the attack has gone down the progressive memory hole, since every good progressive anti-Zionist knows that Uncle Yasir is a saint and a freedom fighter who "had no other choice," and that if it weren't for that darned Israel, all the Arabs in the world would be living in peace as brothers.
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