Republican News · Thursday 27 March 2002

The forgotten massacre: One year after Jenin

BY SILVIO CERULLI

Jenin was loneliness, helplessness, emptiness; there was nothing anyone could do for the locals. Are there any words that can be said to a child who has just found a human leg in the debris?

Twelve months have gone by of total indifference and silence on the part of the international community.

Exactly a year ago the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) launched what is still regarded as the most horrific assault on Palestinian civilians since the Sabra and Chatila massacre in 1982. What happened last year in the West Bank, and especially in the town of Jenin and in its refugee camp, was condemned as a crime against humanity. During Operation Defensive Shield, as the attack was codenamed by the IDF, more than 600 Palestinians were killed across the West Bank, thousands were arrested (the vast majority of them are still imprisoned) and hundreds are still missing and in many cases their bodies have never been found.

The rape of Jenin lasted for more than two weeks but the butchery of innocent civilians has never ceased as ordinary people, medical personnel, UN officers and peace activists have all being shot regardlessly by the IDF.

The assault on Jenin began the night of 2 April 2002. For two days, Israeli artillery shelled the refugee camp from all directions. Then the shooting from the helicopters, often operating in pairs, began in a blaze of fire. It barely stopped over the next four days; eye witnesses counted over 400 missiles being fired in less than four hours.

Using a satellite, the IDF had outlined in red the positions of 1,100 houses; numbers and notes in Hebrew are still visible in the ruins. Sometimes the helicopter pilots got a random number and opened fire indiscriminately. The IDF tried to get the infantry in but because of armed resistance, the plan failed. The Israelis suffered 23 casualties, although the real death toll might well be much higher.

In retaliation, they razed the centre of the refugee camp to the ground, fired upon hospitals and ambulances, bulldozed hundreds of houses.

When I managed to get into the camp the IDF was still shooting, even if armed resistance had been wiped out in the previous days, and Operation Defensive Shield was far from over. It was a ghost place, you could hardly see the sky through a thick cloud of dust, ashes and smoke from burning buildings and rubbish set alight, floating in a deafening silence. It was like entering a nightmare. I'm determined to remember it and do not wish to forget it.

A family took me into their home to avoid army patrols; their child, zig-zagging to avoid the bullets of an IDF sniper, showed me the bodies of two children, wrapped in white plastic bags and left at a corner. When I returned to Jenin in July 2002, the family's house was a pile of debris, as the IDF bulldozers had pulverized the district. Twelve months after the attack, I still have to find out whether they are dead or alive.

I remember this woman, with a quilt wrapped around her, who took me into a house which had been raked by helicopter missiles. There were three bodies in a room, one of them was decapitated but the head was nowhere to be seen. Fat flies filled the rays of light filtering through the holes made by the rockets.

other body was partially covered with the pages from an Arab paper: the image of a smiling child on the paper advert was on his stomach; his arms were opened like Christ on the Cross and his mouth was filled with insects, his teeth as white as snow contrasting against the black swollen face.

The old woman took her quilt off, she sat on the debris, threw dust over her head and started crying.

I recall the old railway station at the bottom of the camp, which once linked Jenin to Haifa; like the mosque it had been turned into a morgue and four injured people were crying for help in a corner. The air was saturated with the smell of human flesh burning; body parts were stuck to the wall. Throughout the assault, medical staff were prevented by the IDF from reaching the wounded in a calculated policy which meant many people were left bleeding to death.

Jenin was loneliness, helplessness, emptiness; there was nothing anyone could do for the locals. Are there any words that can be said to a child who has just found a human leg in the debris? Is it possible to describe the horror of seeing the blood gushing from a woman who is bleeding to death in her daughters' arms?

Twelve months have passed since that assault on the Palestinian people and no one has been accused over the slaughter in Jenin: Brigadier Eyal Shlein, divisional commander for the IDF operation in the Jenin area, has since been promoted; Shaul Mofaz, the then chief of staff of all armed forces, is now Israel's minister for defence; the Sabra and Chatila instigator, Ariel Sharon, is still Israeli prime minister.

The silence following the war crimes perpetrated in Jenin was ensured by the lifting of the siege around Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah. Four months after the attack, the UN finally published a report without any of their officers being allowed into Jenin. Amnesty International, if possible, did even worse, with its findings (54 Palestinian deaths) related only to the refugees registered with UNRWA (the UN agency for refugees). These figures did not include all those from surrounding villages, Jenin city or those not registered but still living in the camp itself and the bodies which have never been found: crushed by the tanks, spirited away, burnt out, even booby-trapped, buried in mass graves or bulldozed in the sewage system.

When I returned to Jenin last summer, 150 bodies had already been identified.

Although the world has been unanimous in accusing Israel of a long catalogue of war crimes, human rights abuses and breaches of the Geneva Convention (both the UN and AI report confirm the accusations), the plunder of Jenin was silenced and put aside. But victims of human rights violations should be entitled to justice. Or have we really forgotten Jenin's mass executions, its children blown to pieces, the handicapped people bulldozed in their wheelchairs, the use of civilians and often kids as human shields, the torture inflicted on those caught and deported?

Maybe the search for the truth should start from the simple fact that this vicious act of evil was deliberately planned well in advance (it was made public in December 2001). Every politician and news agency in the world was aware of Sharon's plan for the reoccupation of the Palestinian Territories.

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Spanish Supreme Court bans Batasuna

Batasuna, the left-wing pro-independence political party, was outlawed by the Spanish Supreme Court on 17 March. The court decision again calls into question the independence of the judiciary in Spain, as the banning of this political party has been one of the main aims of Jose Maria Aznar's right-wing Popular Party since they took power in 1996.

Although Batasuna has always expressed regret for all victims of the Basque conflict, the Popular Party has accused Batasuna of "supporting terrorism" because they have failed to condemn ETA's actions, as the Spanish government would like them to do.

On 20 February 2002, PP and the main opposition party, the PSOE, reached an agreement to introduce changes in the Political Parties' Law - the new law was passed in the Spanish Congress on 29 June 2002 in order to make Batasuna's political position illegal. This political organisation had received over 270,000 votes in the last local elections held in June 1999.

In parallel with those acts in Parliament, on 26 August, Baltasar Garzón, a judge sitting in the Spanish Audiencia Nacional - a special court created by Franco - suspended Batasuna's political activities. This resulted in the closing down of all Batasuna's offices and the freezing of bank accounts.

The banning of Batasuna is only the latest move by the Spanish government to suppress resistance to their concept of a monolithic and homogeneous Spain. Attacks against Basque cultural expression and media organisations that don't follow the line established by the Spanish government are becoming common practice.