In fact some days later his officials provided us with a letter to help us transit
Posted in General on 27. Aug, 2010
In fact some days later his officials provided us with a letter to help us transit easily through Ben Gurion airport with our tapes.I read yesterday that an Israeli official had queried why the BBC was “focusing on old news”. I would reply simply by saying that the investigation of human rights abuses and the notion of accountability for such abuses is recognised by all civilised states as a fundamental moral and legal obligation.It was a point recognised by tens of thousands of Israelis when they demonstrated about Sabra and Shatila in 1982. About 400,000 Israelis took to the streets to protest against the massacre in what was believed to have been the biggest demonstration in the history of the state. This was precisely because the people of Israel recognised the scale of what had happened at Sabra and Shatila. When Shimon Peres now Mr Sharon’s partner in government addressed the mass rally he said to the world: “Israel is different. It lives by its conscience not just by its sword.” And Israel was different.Unlike any other country in the Middle East it instituted a judicial inquiry. (There was no such inquiry when the late President Assad of Syria ordered the destruction of the town of Hama with thousands of deaths in February 1982).The Kahan Commission’s report led to Mr Sharon losing his job as Minister of Defence.
And if the man whom Israel’s own commission of inquiry found “indirectly responsible” for the massacre is nearly 20 years later elected Prime Minister is it not reasonable to question what he really knew and did and whether his actions and omissions amount to war crimes?This is more particularly the case in an international environment where the prosecution of war crimes has become one of the issues through we try to define the nature of the world we want to live in. As I said earlier, one of the most fundamental precepts of democracy is the restraint placed on the power of leaders. The greater the power the greater the need for rules and restraints. In the field of international conflict we attempt to restrain or modify the behaviour of leaders and commanders through the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.
With questions now being asked in France over the behaviour of its generals in Algeria, a former US presidential candidate forced to explain his actions in the Vietnam war, not to mention the case of General Pinochet and the progress towards the establishment of an International Criminal Court, the debate over war crimes has never been more relevant.I don’t doubt that many supporters of Israel would regard an investigation of Mr Sharon’s past as an attack on the state of Israel It is nothing of the sort. It its very simply a factual investigation of a war crime in which the man elected Prime Minister of Israel was found to have “indirect responsibility”.I have investigated war crimes and human rights abuses in every continent and I have never yet been given a welcome by the people being investigated. Nor do I expect any thanks from the people who were “directly” and “indirectly” responsible for the slaughter at Sabra and Shatila or from their political supporters The job of a reporter is to deal with the facts. And the facts of Sabra and Shatila are deeply shocking.I spent four months trawling over the details of the slaughter, speaking to witnesses, reading tens of thousands of words and viewing hours of footage. There is a vast video archive of the Lebanon war and abundant written material available: the report of Israel’s Kahan Commission, the report of the International Commission, numerous books on Lebanon’s civil war and plenty of legal articles and tomes on the laws of war.I travelled with the Panorama team to Beirut, Israel, the United States and South Africa to interview witnesses and experts and those accused of different degrees of responsibility. In Beirut we confronted the man accused of leading the slaughter.
There was in Lebanon a sense of surprise that we would wish to revisit such an event. As one former militia leader said: “For God’s sake if you prosecuted for war crimes here we’d all be in jail.” Hadn’t everybody committed war crimes? Christians killing Palestinians, Palestinians killing Christians who also killed Druze who also killed Christians, not to mention the killings carried out by the Syrians, the Sunni and Shia Muslims.On the face of it he has a point, but not one I am inclined to accept. The idea that everybody is as guilty as everybody else and therefore you should have no justice at all is a dangerous way of proceeding; it leads us into a kind of moral free-fire zone. There must surely be a question of proportionality and in Lebanon there were killers and there were mass killers: there is a big difference between the young men who found themselves caught up in war and the butchers who personally directed the slaughter of hundreds of women and children in places like Karantina, Damour (where Palestinian guerrillas massacred Christians), Tel a Zatar and Sabra and Shatila.The idea that what happened at Sabra and Shatila should not be held up to public scrutiny on the grounds of the general beastliness of the Middle East may be seductive to those who killed and to those who are accused of failing in their responsibilities to the murdered civilians. But if the rest of us are seduced by this argument we abandon the most basic principles of democratic accountability. And that way tyranny lives.Panorama: ‘The Accused’ is broadcast at 10.15pm tomorrow on BBC1. A propos absolutely nothing, the artist Sidney Nolan once put his arm around my shoulder, treated me to one of his wickedly collusive, world-weary smiles, and said, “You know your trouble, Howard? You try too hard.”
A propos absolutely nothing, the artist Sidney Nolan once put his arm around my shoulder, treated me to one of his wickedly collusive, world-weary smiles, and said, “You know your trouble, Howard? You try too hard.”
I don’t recall where we were, though it must have been somewhere formal because we were both in dinner suits.