Authors: Caroline Moorehead
Fatah, Arafat’s political group within the Palestinian resistance movement, was already active in Shatila, though the organization
proper remained secret and underground. They were looking for energetic young boys with initiative. Tariq, who sometimes walked around the open walls at the top of the half-built cinder-block houses four and five stories up—he had no fear of heights—was just the kind of boy they wanted. His father was already a member of Fatah. One day, he asked Tariq to come and sit with him in the main room. They sat on the floor together, on mattresses. His father showed him a gun he kept hidden in a wardrobe. This, he said to Tariq, “is for Palestine.” The occasion stuck in the boy’s mind, and though the gun was later destroyed when the camp was shelled and part of a wall fell on the wardrobe, Tariq always remembered the solemnity with which his father had spoken. Before he was sixteen he had had several brushes with Lebanese policemen, when they came flaunting their authority over the refugees around the perimeters of the camp.
In 1973 the eighteen-year-old Tariq graduated from school with high marks and was among the handful of boys chosen to take the entrance exam for the American University in Beirut. To his great pleasure, he passed. He began to attend classes in the handsome colonial building in West Beirut, passing between the medieval dark alleys of Shatila and the airy lightness of the Lebanese capital each day. But the work was hard and unfamiliar, and by this time Tariq was far more drawn to the political discourse of Fatah and the PLO anyway. It was a good moment for the new generation of Palestinians, who were better educated than their parents and beginning to challenge the authority of the traditional elders. There was money in the camps, and work, and the freedom to meet and talk in the evenings at classes and in clubs.
Soon, Tariq was skipping classes in favor of full-time politics, attracted, like his friends, to the increasingly influential resistance movements, each with its slightly different ideology. Fatah, which held that the struggle was nationalist and something apart from the overthrow of conservative Arab countries, remained a secret organization, with cells, wings, and branches. Tariq liked its brand of nationalism, its aim to free Palestinians from the arbitrariness of
Lebanese control, to give an impetus to nation building. For a while, he was made a probationary member, but by 1974 he had been selected to work in the schools that surrounded Shatila because he was popular with the young Palestinians. By that summer, he had recruited and was training more than two hundred students, and by the time the civil war broke out in 1975 he was leading his own unit of a hundred teenaged boys and girls. Fatah opened a war operations room and Tariq led a section of the militia, young fighters with guns but no military experience.
There had been tensions between Palestinians and Lebanese for years, ever since Nasser of Egypt had persuaded the Lebanese to allow the Palestinians to govern their own camps. From the mid-1960s, when it became clear that conventional warfare was never going to be anything but ineffectual against Israel, because the Arab forces were worse equipped, worse trained, and disunited, the importance of Palestinian guerrillas began to grow more apparent. And when the Palestinians lost Jordan as their power base and moved their forces into Lebanon, the tensions with the Lebanese led to confrontations, the participants egged on by Christians and Falangists who found it convenient to blame the Palestinians for Lebanon’s ills. The Israelis decided to expand their security zone and, in March 1978, invaded South Lebanon. A thousand civilians died, and eleven villages around Tyre were destroyed. The Palestinian fighters adopted guerrilla tactics, withdrawing before the attacking forces, and the Lebanese grew increasingly angry at the Palestinians for causing Israeli aggression.
While the civil war between the alliance of the Christian Falangists and the Israelis on one side (Israel had been training and arming the Falangists since 1976) and the Muslims and the Palestinians on the other was becoming more bitter, Tariq was rising through Fatah’s ranks, coordinating missions of fighters against the Falangists. Wounded one day by a sniper, he came around from a series of operations to find that his injuries had relegated him to office work. Fretting at the inactivity, he agreed to go to Moscow to learn Russian, most of it now, he says, forgotten. The plan had been
for him to stay seven years and take a degree. He liked life in the Soviet Union, and he was intrigued by Palestinians from other parts of the diaspora whom he met in the university halls, but he felt too distanced from the things he really cared about. Before the first year was over, he was making his way back through Egypt and into Beirut. When he got there he found that seventeen of his own recruits were dead, killed in the fighting. He blamed himself for having recruited them and began to drink heavily, uncertain about his own future. The Syrians were now bombing Beirut; Tariq and the rest of his family, who had connections in Ein el-Helweh refugee camp in Sidon, moved to greater safety along the coast.
Then, on June 6, 1982, the Israelis again invaded, in response to a series of Palestinian guerrilla attacks launched from Lebanon. Bombing and shelling, they made their way along the coast, reaching Beirut, their tanks bowling along the Corniche. The highest casualties were in Beirut itself, but many also died in Sidon and the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh, and hundreds more in the villages of southern Lebanon. It was a while before people realized that the Israelis were using cluster bombs, having bought them from the Americans on the express understanding that they would never be used against civilians.
Tariq was in Shatila in late August when the PLO agreed to evacuate the camp under a UN-sponsored cease-fire agreement, taking its fighters into exile in return for guaranteed safety for the civilians and families left behind. He was not among the 12,000 or so who left, but instead avoided the dragnet and hid himself and some weapons, fearing some dark event of retribution, but not knowing how and where it would come from. He was in the camp the night of September 14 when Bashir Gemayel, the newly appointed Falangist prime minister, was assassinated and the Palestinians were blamed for his murder, and he was at home, in the family house, the night the Israelis began advancing on Sabra and Shatila. He began to try to organize some kind of resistance, seeking out those few Palestinians who still had weapons, bringing together one with a rocket launcher, another with a Kalashnikov. Most of the
night of September 16, the Israelis and the Lebanese forces shelled the camp; inside, the rubble from the falling houses, their cinder-block walls and powdery foundations pitifully inadequate as protection, blocked the path for those trying to reach the wounded. Tariq decided that his job was to rescue the injured. His friend Jamal, shot in the head, died as he was carrying him in his arms. Talking of the killings now, Tariq weeps.
His family had scattered in the shelling. Some of his relations were taking shelter in Sabra, where the massacre would continue next day. Others were hiding in a basement under the offices of Fatah, or behind the main water tank supplying the camp. For the next three days, the killings and arrests and disappearances continued, but Tariq and his father and uncles succeeded in getting the family together and to safety. Israeli soldiers with loudspeakers were rounding up all Palestinian men and Fariq fled to Lebanese friends at the other end of Beirut, only to be turned away. He felt bitter, but not surprised. Returning, he was arrested with his father and two brothers. A Lebanese friend, working with the soldiers, intervened to have them released. Many Palestinian men were led away to the sports stadium whose tall stands still loom over the camp; few were ever seen again.
No one has ever established precisely how many people died in the attacks, though it was later said that the Israeli offensive, and particularly the shelling of Beirut, killed 18,000 people and wounded 30,000. When reporters were at last able to approach Shatila they noted, first of all, the smell, and then the flies. As they advanced, they found bodies everywhere—small children, women, elderly people—lying in the alleys, inside the houses, by the roadside, on the rubbish dumps, knifed or machine-gunned to death. When they reached a hundred corpses, they stopped counting. There were pools of blood on the ground, still wet.
Tariq escaped and was hidden by American friends in the city. Three weeks later, he took up an invitation from a printing school in the UK to study abroad. “My mother told me to go. She was terrified that I would be killed if I stayed.” He was slipped out of
Lebanon and eventually found himself in London, in the gray solitariness of a foreign autumn day. He had become not just a refugee, but doubly an exile, without possibility of return. Behind him, he left attacks and resistance against the Israelis fueled by Amal, an increasingly vocal Shiite Muslim militia. He was in Oxford, not in Shatila, where he felt he should be, when in 1985 the Israelis withdrew, the Syrians returned, and Amal launched an attack on Shatila, which was still largely in ruins. The “war of the camps,” pitting Amal against the Palestinians, would last until the end of 1987. Sabra, and Gaza Hospital, which stood along its edge, were destroyed; patients and staff from the hospital were led away by Amal militia, many never to reappear. Those who had survived the massacre in Shatila now lived through a series of sieges that took them to the very edges of endurance. Intensive shelling drove them as far underground as they could burrow, in garages and basements. Medical services for the wounded and dying became minimal, as the one trained doctor remaining used coins and Band-Aids to stop air escaping from perforated lungs and made splints out of wooden doors. Under assault, Shatila’s inhabitants grew close together. Communal kitchens produced food, contributed by those who still had supplies. Zainab and the other women left their dark houses, with a freedom they had never had before, and carried food to the fighters. The rationed water and cigarettes were shared until they ran out altogether. At one point, 6,000 shells a day were falling on the 245 acres of the camp.
Unable to carry the dead for burial to the cemetery on the edge of the camp, the people buried them in the mosque, in the concrete floor. Today it is a shrine to 350 men who lost their lives in the fighting. A flat platform of gray marble covers the place where they were laid, swaddled roughly in sheets, alongside and on top of one another. It is one of Shatila’s stopping points for visitors, with its grille looking into the makeshift tomb, decorated by Palestinian flags, the names of the dead engraved down one marble wall. After the invasion and the wars, a floor was built above, where today the men gather to pray.
Between the three sieges, which saw
2,500
Palestinians dead and three of every four of their houses destroyed, it was, says Marwan, Tariq’s elder brother, like 1948 all over again, with the women queuing for powdered milk and building materials. Only now the camp was poorer and dirtier, the women queued in filthy water that reached above their ankles, and the camp looked like a war zone. Rosemary Sayigh, a British writer and academic working on a study of Palestinian women at the time, listened as they compared massacres, the old and the new. There was a story in the camp about how someone had found the bodies of three small children blocking the drains. Children slept fitfully, wet their beds, woke screaming from nightmares. It was not like 1948, the women said, it was worse. They were now hated by the Lebanese, who blamed them for the savagery of the invaders. When peace finally came, Shatila was little more than rubble surrounded by a wasteland, and the road to Jerusalem, so it was said, no longer led through Beirut but through Washington.
A wasteland, in many respects, Shatila remains: a wasteland of garbage and ruined buildings, the jagged fragments of former houses left standing empty, or camped in by the poorest of the refugees; a scene of devastation both utterly violent and utterly ordinary. To this day it is illegal for the PLO to have a presence in Shatila, or for the Palestinians to have their own militias. The memories of those days are violent, and when the inhabitants of Shatila talk about the massacre and the sieges, they talk about the snipers who waited in the surrounding houses to pick them off as they ventured out for food, or the day that someone found a head, impaled on a pole.
In twenty years, Tariq has seen his sisters only once, the time that he was smuggled back into Beirut. “Tell him how long my hair is,” Souha, the younger of his two unmarried sisters, said to me as I was leaving, shaking her thick black hair loose so that it fell right down her back. “Explain to him how much it has grown.” When they last met, she said, it had been cut very short. “That is how long we have not met: almost two feet of hair.”
Zainab visited Tariq in Oxford once, sixteen years ago, when his first daughter, Hanan, was born; she has never seen his second, Rasmiyya, who is now thirteen. His father has also traveled to England once; he stayed for six weeks, then said to Tariq that though he found it peaceful and the countryside green, and though he liked the fruit and vegetables, he could not bear to stay any longer. One uncle went to Libya for eight years to earn money to rebuild his house in Shatila: it had been destroyed three times by shelling. Another uncle has worked in Abu Dhabi. A nephew is in Norway, where he has asked for asylum. Tariq used to keep a record of where the members of his family live, the uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces. Three years ago, he reached thirty-six living scattered among Abu Dhabi, Britain, Sweden, Jordan, Denmark, and Germany, and then he stopped counting.
For Tariq, too, displacement is mostly about loss, though it is also about memory. When he speaks to his mother on the telephone, he asks her what she is wearing, and what she is cooking for dinner that night. “When I think of her,” he says, “I think of a little girl who never left her home in Balad al Sheik. Everything that happened to her afterwards is a nightmare, with happy moments. For my mother, her children became the personal possessions she had lost. It is cruelest for her. What she wants more than anything in the world is to have her four sons together in one room. She will never have this.”