NPK-info / 24 juli 2003

Mohamed Shaukat Abu Rudeina believes that his family will never receive justice. “It’s all over,” he says. “The world has changed since Sept. 11, 2001. The Americans rule the world.”

A few yards from his concrete breeze-block home, the bullets that killed his father and uncle still puncture the walls. In 1982 up to 1,700 Palestinians were massacred here, in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla. The Israeli Kahan Commission stated that Ariel Sharon — then the Israeli defense minister, now the prime minister, who sent the killers into the camps — was “personally responsible” for the killings. On that basis, Mohamed was one of the survivors who brought the legal case against Sharon to Brussels.

“All my life,” he says, “I wanted a father and I resented the fact that he was killed. I hated his absence in my life.” Alas, for Mohamed Shaukat, America’s pressure on the Belgian government meant that Brussels — under threat of losing its rebuilding of NATO headquarters and the presence of US officials in the capital — demanded changes in Belgium’s war crimes laws, so that US soldiers could not be taken to court in Europe. The Belgian administration caved in — not least because of claims that George Bush and Gen. Tommy Franks were accused of war crimes during their March invasion of Iraq. In future, any defendants would be transferred to their own countries for trial. The Americans were safe.

But, as Chibli Mallat, one of the three lawyers representing the survivors, pointed out, this was not enough. “After the Belgians agreed to the changes, [US Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld said he wasn’t happy with the changes. Is this to save Sharon from coming to trial?” Mallat has studied Belgian law all too carefully. “The Belgians decided that the accused could be tried in their own country, provided it had a fair legal system. We said, ‘Fine, but our plaintiffs cannot go to Israel — they, as Palestinian refugees, won’t have any chance of setting foot in Israel to state their case’. So the case has to be heard in Belgium.”

Mohamed Shaukat still remembers the day his father and uncle and other members of his family were ordered from their shack and taken to the yard outside. He heard the bullets that killed them, fired by the Lebanese Christian Phalangists sent into the refugee camps by Ariel Sharon in 1982 to fight “terrorists”. “I knew they were murdered and I saw their bodies,” he says. “Now the Belgians will submit to whatever the Americans say.” Mallat won’t accept this. “We are making the case in the next session of the Belgian court that if they want to ‘transfer’ the case to Israel, that’s all fine — but our clients won’t be allowed to set foot in Israel. So how can there be a fair trial?” In February, Belgium’s highest court, the court of cassation, decided the case should go forward, though Sharon, as a head of state, had immunity. In June the appeal court in Brussels confirmed the decision. After this, Sharon and another defendant, an Israeli officer also charged with war crimes, withdrew from the court proceedings. “The latest thing is that Rumsfeld is not happy with the changes in the Belgian law — even though the Americans now have to be tried by American courts,” says Mallat. “The Belgian government panicked and said ‘we’ll change the law again’.”

“It’s finished,” says Mohamed Shaukat in the yard where his father was murdered. “The political situation around the world is different today. In the past, I was convinced we would have justice. But now America is a monster ... and they can terrorize the world. The Belgians will submit to their orders.” Mallat takes a more legalistic view. “Do the Americans now want to say ‘we are the same as Sharon’? Do they really want that? Because Sabra and Shatilla was a war crime.”

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http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=2003071118303069

In Jenin, 'People Are Very Tired': Special Report

Friday, July 11 2003 @ 06:30 PM GMT

By Chris Sands

Palestine Chronicle Correspondent

JENIN, West Bank (PC) - Ahmed was sitting outside his shop in the early morning sunshine, watching Jenin’s bruised and battered residents pass by.

He said: “On the TV they say we kill the Israelis. But they kill our mothers, our brothers and the smiles on our faces. Do you see anyone smiling here?”

Ahmed, who was afraid to give his full name, is a fairly typical Palestinian man.

The butcher once spent time in jail, he has lost a friend to the occupation and he now finds all his hopes resting with God.

The 31-year-old said: “It is very bad here, the people are sick of this. What can you do? What can you say?

“I am very tired, the people here are very tired – they want this life to change.”

Ahmed is from a place called Kabatia, situated just outside the northern West Bank town of Jenin. He spent his youth coping with the daily grind of life, but in 1987 another option suddenly seemed possible.

Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza embarked on their first uprising – or ‘Intifada’ – against Israel and Ahmed got involved.

However, this only led to him being sent to jail in 1991 for resisting the occupation. He said: “It was very, very bad in prison, a great tragedy. I did not see my mother, my brother or my friends for years.”

Ahmed was eventually released during 1994 but he has still not found freedom or happiness.

The 31-year-old must now travel through checkpoints every day and his best friend was killed by Israeli forces in the on-going al-Aqsa Intifada.

Ahmed is also denied the chance to see his wife and young son regularly as they live in Jordan and cannot take-up residency in the West Bank.

He told the Palestine Chronicle: “This life is shit. People blow themselves up to go to paradise.

“A person who killed himself in Israel last year came to his mother in her sleep. He said ‘mother, please do not cry, please do not cry, I live in paradise’. And he told the people here that if they want to go to paradise they should do what he did.”

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