PART V
From Beirut To Jerusalem
1985-1988
Chapter 24
Our medical team returned to London in August 1985. While we had been away, there had been an overwhelming response from members of the public in Britain wanting to support the work of our charity. Dr Rafiq Husseini, the director of MAP, had worked himself flat out during our absence. He is a Palestinian born in Jerusalem, married to an Englishwoman. Prior to becoming the founding director of MAP, he qualified at Loughborough and was a researcher in microbiology in the University of Birmingham. He gave that post up to be the person responsible for providing the direction and executing the policies of our charity. He is also a cousin of Dr Azziza Khalidi, the Palestinian woman who ran Gaza Hospital in 1982. Like Azziza, he is gentle, patient and chronically optimistic in the face of the worst disasters.
Before our departure, the charity had placed a small advertisement calling for medical volunteers, and this had attracted over sixty applicants. Money had poured in. Although our funding from large institutions was minimal, we received a huge amount from individuals. The office was flooded with donations: a one-pound note from an old age pensioner, a five-pound note from a widow, another from an unemployed person, and so on.
The donations were usually accompanied by letters. A typical example would be:
‘Dear Medical Aid for Palestinians,
‘I read of your efforts in Lebanon. Please accept my small gift of £2 to support your good work. I am sorry I can’t give any more, as I am unemployed. God bless you all. From...’
The letters that came with the donations convinced me that generosity was inversely proportional to wealth. The poorer a person is, the more he or she is ready to give. The first time we received a cheque for fifty pounds it came from an unemployed person, and I wept. The ‘dole money’ was about twenty-one pounds a week, so his cheque represented two weeks’ livelihood. The second time, we received a donation from an old age pensioner with a note: ‘Dear MAP, Please accept this to support your work. I am sorry it isn’t more…’ The third fifty-pound donation came from a woman who wrote: ‘Dear MAP, I am a widow. But I want to give this for the children in the refugee camps in Lebanon, because their need is greater than mine…’
The office also grew. Many people came in to help: they licked stamps, did the mailings, looked after the collection boxes and organised fund-raising events for the Palestinians. It was our supporters who kept the whole Lebanon project going, who raised the money and did the work. Often when people in Lebanon thanked me for all the work I had put in, they did not really appreciate that the work of the medical team was only made possible by all those people in Britain. They were the true friends of the Palestinians and Lebanese, although they never had the chance to meet them.
In 1986 MAP moved to new premises. To save on rent, Rafiq Husseini arranged for us to rent the basement of an office building in London. It looked like a dump before we moved in, but some hard work gave it a very respectable appearance, with cream paint on the walls, proper carpeting on the floor, effective ventilation and decent lighting. Here we set up offices with word processors, a design room and an exhibition and sales hail, putting in eight phones, a telex and a fax.
As MAP relies heavily on volunteers, there were lots of tables and chairs in the main hall where volunteers could sit and work. They made out receipts, wrote thank-you letters and packed sales items such as printed tee-shirts, mugs, greeting cards and pieces of Palestinian embroidery. The walls were usually hung with paintings donated to MAP to be sold to raise money.
Between 1985 and 1987 our charity sent more than sixty medical volunteers, of nine different nationalities, to Beirut. Lebanon could be a very dangerous place at times: bombs, shells and snipings were the facts of life. But for European men, there was the special danger of being kidnapped. On more than one occasion, we had to evacuate our people from Lebanon as their lives were directly threatened. Nevertheless, doctors, nurses and health workers continued to come forward, volunteering their skills and willing to risk their lives in order to look after sick and wounded people in Lebanon.
The living expenses we provided for the volunteers were extremely low, just enough for subsistence in the refugee camps. We were able to select the best people, those who came forward from a sense of commitment, rather than those who thought working in Lebanon would just be one more paid job. Our doctors and nurses sometimes even offered to pay their own way in the Lebanon.
All our people had to undertake to treat anyone in Lebanon, regardless of race, colour or religion. There was already enough sectarianism in the country, without foreign health workers making the divisions worse.
The ‘bureaucratic’ aspect of the Lebanon programme was vitally necessary. We had to be sure we explained the situation in Lebanon to those who volunteered their services. We had to be systematic about it. The risks had to be spelt out, and volunteers had to sign a release form stating that they understood the dangers and were taking the risk of their own volition.
Although we did not pay the volunteers much, we had to pay a lot to insure them against war, civil war and invasion. Those clauses added a great deal to the usual insurance premium. Even worse, we were unable to find any insurance company willing to provide a policy which covered the risk of being kidnapped in Lebanon.
A constant dilemma faced us: should we go on sending volunteers to such a risky and volatile area? But we saw it as our duty to act as a channel between those in Lebanon who needed help and those in Britain who wanted to help. It would have been irresponsible to sever the link between them. So we continued with our volunteer programme, and tried to cope with the nightmares it caused. Rafiq bore the brunt of the responsibility that went with the volunteer programme: but some of us, like myself, still went to sleep every night halfexpecting to be awakened by a long-distance S.O.S. call from our volunteers. By this time I was back in my Senior Orthopaedic Registrar post in the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The clinical responsibilities attached to this post were demanding enough, but the added responsibilities of the Lebanon programme continued to take up whatever energies I had left.
Rafiq was away from the MAP on a visit to his family in Jordan when disaster struck. In January 1987, our office received a shocking telex from our volunteers who were working in Bourj el-Brajneh camp. It read:
We, as foreign health workers living and working in Bourj el-Brajneh camp, declare that the situation in the camp is critical and conditions inhumane. The camp has now been under siege for more than 12 weeks and we and the 20,000 residents are being subjected to conditions of deprivation and misery. Drinking-water is the most basic human need. Most houses do not have running drinking-water and it has to be collected daily from taps in the streets and at great risk of personal safety. Several women have been shot and killed collecting water for their families. Food stocks have been completely depleted. There is now no baby-food or milk and babies are drinking tea and water. There is no flour and therefore no bread, no fresh food so pregnant women and children are suffering undernourishment. People are eating stale food and suffering vomiting and diarrhoea. Many families now have no food. It is winter and the electricity was cut off from the camp two and a half months ago. People are cold and have chest infections. There are huge piles of garbage which cannot be cleared and rats are thriving. One old lady who was bedridden was unable to get help when her foot was eaten by rats for three consecutive nights, before she was rescued. The constant bombardment of the camp forces the people to crowd into poorly ventilated shelters with no sanitation, or to risk being blown up at home. Hundreds of children have scabies and many have severe skin infections. Approximately 35 per cent of homes in Bourj el-Brajneh have now been destroyed. In the hospital, many medicines have run out and we have no more gauze. The hospital building is rendered unstable by repeated shelling and patients and nurses have been injured by shrapnel. Water is dripping down the walls and mould is growing in every room.
We declare these conditions to be inhumane and on humanitarian grounds we call for the lifting of the siege and the admission of food and medicines by the international relief agencies.
Dr Pauline Cutting, British Surgeon
Ben Alofs, Dutch Nurse
Susan Wighton, Scottish Nurse. 23 January 1987.
Mike Holmes contacted me and asked me to come to the MAP office to discuss the situation. I came in, and we read the statement. ‘Swee,’ said Mike when we had finished reading the message, ‘what are we going to do about this?’
Mike was our newly appointed publicity officer. An ardent supporter of the Palestinians, he had just come down from Scotland to join us at MAP. Like many others who have spent hours working in the office, raising funds and generating publicity for the camps, Mike had not been to the Middle East before.
‘I don’t know, Mike,’ I replied. ‘But it looks as though the whole lot are slowly dying because of a really long blockade.
Today is Friday. We’d better spend the weekend launching an urgent appeal, and get everybody in. Could you let Pauline and Suzy’s folks know what is happening?’ ‘Sure,’ said Mike.
‘Oh, and we’d better make sure we keep all the people who talk all the time and never do any work from coming into the office and getting in the way.’
Mike immediately set off to get things going. What was so infuriating for us was that the siege seemed to have been going on for at least three months, but there had been no coverage of it in the British media. We assumed our volunteers in Bourj el-Brajneh must have been trying to reach us and had been prevented from getting through because of the siege. We knew that Rashidiyeh, a Palestinian refugee camp near Sour, was under siege, and we had been working out ways to help the people there, but never realised that the Beirut camps of Bourj el-Brajneh and Shatila were also being attacked and besieged. The western press concentrated on the
PLO’s storming of Magdoushe, a Christian village near Saida, but nothing was said about the camps.
We were very upset to read the declaration of our three volunteers, and were angry with ourselves for not realising how bad things had become. It was particularly difficult to tell the families of our volunteers the truth, but we knew we had to. One of our volunteers in Bourj el-Brajneh camp was an Austrian physiotherapist called Hannes. Although he had been working in Bourj el-Brajneh camp he had not signed the statement. We knew he was still alive as the NORWAC coordinator in Beirut had managed to speak to him on the radio after the statement was sent out. One day the police came to our office in London: they had been asked to find out about us by the Austrian police. Apparently Hannes’ mother was convinced that her son was dead and we were hiding the truth from her! So we had to make sure that all the families, including his, knew what was going on.
Soon we received another desperate message from our volunteers in Beirut:
We declare that the situation in the Bourj el-Brajneh camp has become intolerable. The camp has been under siege for more than 14 weeks. Two weeks ago we sent out a declaration that there soon would be no more food in the camp and that the situation was critical. We are still under siege and now the people are beginning to starve. We have seen children hunting in garbage heaps for scraps of food. Today one woman was shot while trying to collect grass on the outskirts of the camp to be able to feed her seven children who no longer have any food at all. Some women and children are taking the risk of leaving the camp and many small children have been taken prisoner. Some of those who have no food now eat dogs and wild cats to survive. We appeal to all parties in this war to stop fighting, and we appeal to the United Nations to take steps to achieve a ceasefire immediately, so the international relief organisations can get in with food and medicines to stop this massacre.
The people in our London office got very desperate on receiving this message. I had a very unpleasant feeling that something awful would happen soon. It brought back all the horrors of 1982, when the camps had been sealed off. We had called for help then, but no one had answered. When the siege was lifted in 1982 and the outside world was allowed in, the roads were strewn with dead bodies. This time, the camps were defended, so a massacre could not happen so easily.
But it had become a long, drawn-out war of attrition. Maybe the camp would be starved into surrendering, and then as they came out of the bomb shelters, they would get gunned down. This had happened before: the siege of Tel al-Zaatar in 1976 had ended after six months in a massacre of three thousand people, just when the camp had agreed to a ceasefire and was about to be evacuated by the International Red Cross. A journalist friend told me what it was like immediately after the siege of Tel al-Zaatar. He had visited the camp, which was being bulldozed. Dead bodies were everywhere. The bulldozers drove over the bodies and incorporated them into the earth.
Hunger is an effective weapon, as those of us who had starved before knew. Hunger could drive even the Palestinians to surrender. Then there is thirst. I remember the story told by an orphan from Tel al-Zaatar: ‘At night the mothers went out to get water. The wells were in open squares which were under fire the whole time. The mothers kissed their children goodbye before going out of the house, because they didn’t know whether they would ever see them again.’ Of the ten women who went to get water in Tel al-Zaatar one night, only four returned: the rest were killed.
Late in January 1987, news arrived at the MAP office that the Palestinians in the camps had asked for a fatwah, a dispensation from their religious leaders, allowing them to eat dead bodies. It smacked of imminent death for all in the camps. Even at the height of the 1982 Israeli siege, no one had had to eat cats and dogs; in 1987 people were even thinking of eating human bodies.
I went to the filing cabinet in the office and pulled out the file marked ‘Medical Volunteers’. Inside it there were four completed sets of forms, with photographs of Ben Alofs, Pauline Cutting, Susan Wighton and Hannes. I felt sick to think I might never see them again. Ben I had known since 1982, Pauline I had only met once, Susan and Hannes I only knew through what Alison, who had been with us on our first medical team to Lebanon in 1985, had told me about them.
Yet as I studied the forms and their pictures again and again, I felt as though I had known them all my life. Four wonderful young people who had only gone out to help others – what had they done to deserve such a fate in the camp?
It was in August 1985, in a tiny room packed with reporters, that I first met Pauline Cutting. I had just come back from Beirut, and was addressing a press conference on the situation in the Palestinian refugee camps. Being so tiny, I could not be seen by anybody, and so the president of our charity, Major Derek Cooper, brought me a chair to stand on while I was speaking. While I was taking off my shoes to get up on to the chair, Major Cooper whispered to me, ‘There is a wonderful young lady surgeon who wants to volunteer for Lebanon. Will you talk to her after this?’
Swee spent a lot of time taking wounded
children out of the camps for treatment
abroad. Form left to right: Bilal Chebib, saying goodbye to Pauline Cutting,
together with Samir Ibrahim el-Madany – the two boys are on their way back to Beirut with Dr Ang Swee Chai.
That was how Pauline and I met. Now it was nearly a year and a half later, but I remembered her so well. She had a sensitive face, and looked as though she felt the sufferings of others instinctively. God forbid that anything should happen to her now!
It was no use being fearful for the safety of our volunteers in the besieged camp, or feeling guilty that things had got to such a state. We had to do something, had to push as hard as possible to publicise the situation, had to campaign for the lifting of the siege, and we had to bring our people home. I decided to forget my job as an orthopaedic surgeon on the National Health in Britain until all this got sorted out.
At the beginning of February 1987, events in Lebanon once more attracted the attention of the British media: some hostages were threatened with execution by kidnappers unless their demands were met by a certain deadline. Terry Waite had just been kidnapped. Mike Holmes managed to wangle an invitation for me to appear on a BBC television programme to discuss hostage-taking in Lebanon. Of course I regarded our volunteers trapped in the camps as hostages too. In fact all the Palestinians trapped by the siege of Shatila. Bourj el-Brajneh and Rashidiyeh camps were hostages.
After the programme, I introduced myself to the editor of the BBC foreign news, and showed him a copy of our volunteers’ statement. An ex-hostage himself, he understood the plight of those caught in the siege. I said to him, ‘The lives of twenty-five thousand Palestinians and our volunteers depend on your publicising the situation.’ He agreed to give the camps coverage, and as a result our little office was thrown into chaos by journalists over the next few days.
In spite of the massive international publicity, the siege was not lifted. Every time Nabih Berri, the leader of the Amal militia besieging the camps, announced that the siege would be lifted and food allowed into the camps, his promises were followed by the news that relief convoys had been turned back and even shot at.
Friday 13 February was one more of those days when the morning news announced that Nabih Berri was going to lift the siege to allow food into the camps. The Cuttings came to the MAP office hoping that we would be able to contact their daughter, Pauline, via a radio link. They were extremely courageous and understanding people. We all knew how anxious they must have felt – but they never once blamed us for letting Pauline get into such a dangerous situation, and they were always very supportive of everything our charity did. Whenever asked about their daughter, they would always point out that she was just one of the thousands under siege.
We did finally get through to Pauline at nine o’clock that night. The siege had not been lifted, and the hospital was inundated with casualties. Fourteen legs had been amputated that day. There had been six deaths and eighteen wounded. The food convoy had been fired on, and the driver had been shot in the head.
Our volunteers told us, ‘We will stay with the people of the camp until the danger is over. We will remain with them – to live or die with them.’
I was very proud of them, but when I looked across the room at Pauline’s parents, and thought of Suzy’s parents and Hannes’ mother as well, I knew it was about time I returned to Beirut myself.
Chapter 25
We had to get a team together to replace Pauline and company in Bourj el-Brajneh camp, and we had to raise funds to pay for medicine and equipment to replenish those used up in the camps. The next few days were really hectic.
Replacing the medical team was not just a simple matter of swapping two groups of people. A lot had to happen before it became possible. It needed a ceasefire, the partial lifting of the siege and a safe escort out for the besieged team while their replacements went into the camp. There was no indication any of these things would actually happen. The situation in the camp deteriorated as the siege tightened still further and there was even more sniping and shooting. To make things worse, an awful civil war had erupted outside the camps among the Lebanese of Beirut: the flare-up was the worst such war for years.
So we asked for four thousand ‘blood bags’, half of which were to be given to the Lebanese Red Cross, and the other half to the Palestine Red Crescent. We also got hold of anaesthetic drugs, surgical instruments, antibiotics, plaster of Paris, and all sorts of things we knew the hospitals needed – about four tons in weight. We put together a team of eight medical volunteers. To make kidnapping less likely, we picked medics who carried non-British passports.
We left for Beirut on 2 March 1987, via Cyprus this time, as Beirut airport was closed again. Unfortunately, I went no further than Cyprus, as I was refused a Lebanese entry visa. It did not surprise me to be singled out by the official Lebanese authorities in this way. It was only too obvious that those attacking the camps would not want the Palestinians to be joined by friends and supporters and they would know my name. They must have put pressure on the Lebanese Embassy not to give me a visa.
We got news that Pauline Cutting had received death threats. Everything had become very grim, and I felt helpless. The Guardian newspaper in Britain did a profile of me entitled ‘Angel with Clipped Wings’. I thought it a very apt headline, at least as far as the clipped wings were concerned.
The rest of the team continued by boat to Lebanon, with thirty-nine crates of medicine and equipment. They were led by Major Derek Cooper, President of MAP. When they arrived in East Beirut, Major Cooper and Lady Pamela, his wife, were advised by the British Ambassador not to cross the Green Line. All British passport holders were kidnap targets in Lebanon. The Ambassador had enough on his plate with Terry Waite and John McCarthy having been kidnapped, and Pauline and Suzy being stuck in the siege of the camps: he could do without Major Cooper and Lady Pamela being taken hostage as well.
So the five volunteers who did not carry British passports, none of whom had been to Beirut before, went on to West Beirut without the Coopers. Their job was to get the thirtynine boxes of medical supplies across the Green Line, make their way to Bourj el-Brajneh camp, negotiate a ceasefire and get in to replace the team who had been trapped by the siege. They bravely volunteered to go on their own. As team leader, I must have been crazy to let them do so!
Meanwhile, I took a plane to Egypt. I figured few people in Cairo would know about my support for the Palestinians. Maybe Lebanese representatives there would give me a visa.
The British consul in Cairo wrote a supportive letter to the First Secretary in the Lebanese Foreign Interest Section of the French Embassy, asking them to speed up matters so I could get to Beirut on a humanitarian mission. I did get my visa, on 30 March 1987, twenty-eight days after setting off from London.
When I spoke to people in London, I found out that the MAP team of five had not yet managed to enter the camps. The siege had not been lifted, and sixty-three women had been sniped at and wounded while trying to bring food into the starving camps. Twenty-one of the women had died. Shatila camp had run out of fuel, and they were burning furniture to keep warm. The young men of Shatila camp had volunteered to starve so that the women and children might be fed. Pauline had received a death threat in writing.
The Syrian peacekeeping force had moved into Beirut and had put an end to the civil war outside the camp. Syrian troops had not, however, been deployed around the Palestinian camps, and the Syrians seemed content to allow Amal to continue the siege and to go on sniping at women and children. Pauline’s parents had sent a telegram to Hafez alAssad, the President of Syria, begging for the siege to be lifted so that they could have their daughter home. Nothing had happened. The Syrian peacekeeping force kept its distance, and the siege went on.
I thought Damascus probably held the key to the situation. The Syrian peacekeeping force had just moved into Beirut and stopped the Lebanese from fighting each other. If the Syrians were powerful enough to put a stop to the civil war between the Druse, Amal and other Lebanese factions, surely they could stop Amal attacking the camps. President Assad had taken the position that Palestine was part of Greater Syria: in that sense he had adopted the Palestinian cause.
Although the relationship between Syria and the PLO was very strained at that time for a number of reasons, Syria would understand there was also a humanitarian case for imposing a ceasefire and allowing provisions in for the starving. Many of us recognised that for Syria to stop the attacks on the camp would strain Syria’s relationship with
Amal, one of her major allies in the fight against the Israelis. But for the sake of human lives, President Assad might consider it a reasonable price to pay. But would he?
Sooner or later I was going to have to talk to the Syrians to arrange an escort out of the camp for our people. I decided I might as well start immediately, in order to lay the groundwork before arriving in Beirut, so I wrote a letter to President Assad:
His Excellency
President Hafez al-Assad.
30 March 87
Your Excellency,
I hope you have received the telegram from Dr Pauline Cutting’s parents, begging for the siege to be lifted so that they may have their daughter home.
I am the Leader of the International Medical Team, which left London for Beirut on the 2nd March 87. The British people has sent us, hoping that we could relieve Dr Cutting’s team, currently in Bourj el-Brajneh Camp in West Beirut. It might seem imprudent for me, a foreign doctor, to address Your Excellency so directly, and I do beg your forgiveness and your patience to hear me out.
I first set foot in Lebanon in 1982, having volunteered my services to the suffering people in Lebanon, then victimised by the Israeli invasion. I have seen much suffering and cruelty then, and was one of the doctors who was trapped in Sabra and Shatila camps during the massacres. Having been brought up a Christian, it was then that I found out, at first hand, the true story of the Palestinian people – and that story was written with blood, I then went to testify before the Israeli Kahan Commission on behalf of the people of the camps. I felt I had to lend voice to those innocent women and children killed so brutally while the Israelis occupied the camps.
This time the cries of the Palestinian women and children in Shatila and Bourj el-Brajneh camps have again reached me, and not only me, but the International Community including the people in Britain.
Five months of siege on these camps have resulted in starvation, death and misery. Those wounded continue to suffer and perish. The International Community and people in Britain have responded overwhelmingly to the plight of the Palestinians. We have now medicines for the sick, surgical equipment to treat the wounded, food for the starving. Doctors and nurses from all over the world have left their own countries and volunteered their services to the Palestinians, knowing full well of the risks to their own lives in so doing.
All over the world, people follow with interest the entry of the Syrian peacekeeping forces, and look forward to the lifting of the siege on the camps so that relief could he brought to the Palestinians who have suffered for so long. Instead, news on the camps takes the form of women being sniped at and killed while trying to go out and buy food for their children, relief convoys being shot up while trying to bring food into the camps. ‘These acts must have been committed against the wishes of Your Excellency and your peacekeeping forces.
The International Community can continue to donate food and medicines. Doctors and nurses can continue to volunteer their services. Dr Pauline Cutting and her team can work themselves to exhaustion in the besieged Bourj el-Brajneh camp, till the entire camp perish through hunger, disease and injury. But only Your Excellency could bring an end to this insane suffering.
In 1982, at the height of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, we appealed to the Israeli Defence Forces to stop the massacres – but our plea went unheeded, and the massacres continued. I brought this fact to the attention of the Israeli Kahan Commission. Today in 1987, I appeal to Your Excellency to do all in your power to bring an end to the sufferings of the Palestinians in the besieged camps, and the lives of women and children to be spared. I also beg you to grant protection to Dr Pauline Cutting and her team, and allow the new medical team already in West Beirut for nearly a month to safely replace them. In this way, Your Excellency has not only honoured the wishes of anxious British parents, but also the British people who sponsored the whole relief effort. I eagerly await your instructions, and would personally call at your Embassy in Cyprus this week.
Dr Swee Ang.
In order to get the letter to Syria, I faxed it from Cairo to Mike Holmes in the London MAP office, and asked him to take the letter to the chargé d’affaires of the Syrian Interest Section of the Lebanese Embassy in London. The Syrian Embassy had recently been shut down, and the Lebanese Embassy was looking after the Syrian Government’s interests. Mike also took along a few newspaper clippings about me, so that the whole lot could be sent in the diplomatic bag to the President.
I knew that whoever opened the President’s mail in Damascus might think I was crazy and just file the letter in the wastepaper basket. To make sure this did not happen, I told Mike to tell them that I was prepared to have the letter broadcast on Arabic radio: then the whole of the Middle East would hear it, and the President would have to hear what I had written. On the same evening, I learnt that Mike had already gone to see the chargé d’affaires and had told him exactly that. Now all I had to do was make my way back to Cyprus and check in at the Syrian Embassy to find out what was going on.
On 2 April I called at the Syrian Embassy in Cyprus to see if there were any developments. No one there seemed to know about a British medical team trapped in the siege of Bourj elBrajneh, but the First Secretary kindly offered to check with Damascus. Leaving my phone number with his secretary, I went off to await developments.
The next morning at nine o’clock, the Syrian Embassy telephoned and asked me to call at the Embassy immediately with the original of my letter to the President, together with my travel document. .They wanted to send the letter to the President that morning. The letter Mike had produced in London had not been an original and was not signed by me, and now they evidently wanted it done correctly.
After hanging around for nearly a month just trying to get a visa from Lebanese representatives, I must admit that I was very impressed by the efficiency of their Syrian counterparts. The First Secretary of the Syrian Embassy advised me to wait a few days for things to happen.
Three days later, on 6 April, the morning bulletin on the World Service of the BBC announced that the Syrian peacekeeping force was going to move in and take over Amal positions at Shatila camp in order to enforce a ceasefire. This meant food would be allowed into Shatila camp. Two days later, the Syrian peacekeeping force imposed a ceasefire at Bourj el-Brajneh. The next day, the First Secretary at the Syrian Embassy in Cyprus urged me to leave for Beirut and to go to Bourj el-Brajneh to see our people. He must have grown tired of me hanging around the Syrian Embassy every day, asking him if I could see President Assad, and asking if there was a reply to my letter.
He assured me that there would be no problems once I reached Syrian-controlled areas in Beirut. Off I went and bought myself a ticket for the overnight ferry from Larnaca to Jounieh.
It was precisely seven in the morning of 10 April when the ferry from Cyprus docked in Jounieh harbour. The sun had already risen, and I looked out to sea. Lebanese soldiers came into the ferry, and lined the side of the road leading out of the harbour. The security was tight, but they were not rude. Women passengers hurriedly put on lipstick and sprayed themselves with perfume as they looked out at the eagerly waiting crowd. People jumped with joy and blew kisses at their loved ones from both sides of the gangway. A young soldier shouted loudly across in English: ‘I love you!’ An embarrassed young lady blushed and tried to conceal a smile. The weeks of worry and uncertainty, capped by the rough and sleepless night on the crowded deck of the ferryboat, probably contributed to the sense of unreality I experienced on finding myself back in Beirut.
Had I really made it? Was this the East Beirut harbour where I had arrived in 1982? I cleared customs and the security checks, and as I walked out I spotted the fair hair and faded blue jacket of Øyvind, the NORWAC co-ordinator. He waved vigorously and I waved back. ‘Welcome, Swee!’ Øyvind shouted from across the crowd. Tall and in his midthirties, he was very patient and soft-spoken – this was a legacy of his training as a clergyman. He laughed a lot, and his smiling eyes showed that he was a man who was in love with life and people.
Øyvind took me to a taxi waiting by the roadside, and we put my large suitcase – the same one I had used in 1982 – into the boot. The taxi set off. East Beirut appeared much more prosperous and tidy than in 1982: the roads were smooth and there were traffic lights which people were obeying. There were shops and offices, and large pictures of the Lebanese President, Amin Gemayel, were everywhere. We drove towards the Green Line: Øyvind decided to use the civilian crossing, which was open and free from snipers. The traffic jam at the crossing was awful. We decided to get down, walk across the Green Line with my luggage, and pick up a different taxi on the West Beirut side. East Beirut was just another city in the Middle East to me, but once I crossed the Green Line into West Beirut and saw the bullet-riddled walls, the bomb-damaged buildings, the streets full of dirt and dust, and the anarchic traffic, I knew this was no dream: I was back on home ground. ‘Hello, Beirut,’ I thought. ‘Here I come!’
The taxi whizzed through narrow streets. I was going to be able to stay with our Norwegian friends in the NORWAC flat in Hamra. He asked, ‘How does it feel to be back?’ Øyvind knew I had been refused visas in the Lebanese embassies in London, Rome, Athens and Cyprus. He understood that I had nearly not made it.
‘Fantastic!’ I said. That was the best and only word I could summon up to describe my feelings. Even after all these years of war, Beirut was still a very beautiful city. The driver asked me, ‘Do you love Beirut?’ I said I did, and he continued, ‘The first time I drove my little son up to the mountains and showed him Beirut from the mountaintops, he cried. He asked me why people are trying to destroy such a beautiful country.’
Chapter 26
The Lebanese people were still warm, friendly and hospitable. When they were bitter, the bitterness was no longer directed at each other. It was terribly sad that Lebanon had been a battlefield for so long. Much of the economic infrastructure had been destroyed by successive wars. The Lebanese lira had collapsed almost completely. Over the years, great efforts had been put in to destabilise and cantonise Lebanon, and to turn her children into cannon fodder. Wages were low, and jobs hard to come by. Most young men were forced to fight for a living. They joined various militias, and when they were on duty they shot at each other. But once they were off duty, they did not have to kill. It was then that one really appreciated their good qualities – remnants of Arab courtesy and warmth which stood out against being brutalised. In dreams, I could hear myself shouting out loud: ‘Leave Lebanon alone, give the children a chance to grow up. No more guns, no more tanks. Leave them alone!’
After thirteen years of war, I sensed people wanted peace. The level of tolerance was amazing. There were no traffic rules – people just drove through the streets with a lot of give and take. If there was an accident in which no one was injured, it was ‘ma’lish’ – never mind. If someone was injured, it was ‘al-humdullelah’ (Praise be to God) that no one died. Here no one had to preach forgiveness – it was built into the place.
There were many people I wanted to see, people I had not heard of for two years, both Palestinians and Lebanese. Øyvind assured me that the MAP team in Bourj el-Brajneh was alive and in reasonably good spirits. We called in at the PRCS clinic in Mar Elias camp. This is a small Palestinian refugee camp, which started off as a camp for the Christian Palestinians, a group of significant size. In recent years, most of the Christian families had left, and Mar Elias had become the administrative headquarters of nearly all the Palestinian political parties, like the Fatah Intifada – the party of Abu Musa who split from the mainstream Fatah; Sa’iqa; the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the two parties of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the party of Nidal – the Fatah Revolutionary Council (Abu Nidal); and so on – all except groups loyal to Arafat. Those loyal to Arafat had to function underground since the Syrians were actively arresting them.
Along with these political offices there were those of the various European relief agencies and the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA). And of course, the PRCS. Although Um Walid was still in charge of PRCS work in Lebanon, there were now regional directors – like Dr Mohammed Osman in Beirut, Dr Ali Abdullah in Saida, and so on. It was good to see Um Walid again, and to be introduced to Dr Osman. The PRCS clinic in Mar Elias treated a hundred and fifty to two hundred Outpatients daily; now a new hospital was being constructed. Wherever you went – in Lebanon, in Egypt, in Sudan – the PRCS would be putting up a building, a clinic or a hospital, whether there was peace or war.
The Syrians had imposed a ceasefire and the camps were not being attacked, but they were still under siege. The entrances to the camps were closed, and were guarded by President Assad’s Special Forces and the Syrian Intelligence. Palestinian women were now being allowed to go out to buy food for their families and to carry their rations back. Before the Syrians moved in, women were shot at when they tried to enter or leave the camps to buy food and fetch water and many had been wounded and killed. No one dared shoot at the Palestinian women in front of the Syrian peacekeeping forces. It was amazing how everyone feared the Syrians – both Lebanese and Palestinians!
It was noon before I left Mar Elias, but I wanted to visit Shatila and Bourj el-Brajneh. According to the ceasefire agreement, women did not need special permission from the Syrian Intelligence to enter or leave the camp – so I decided I was going to chance it. I bought a scarf, tied it round my head and arrived at the Sabra end of Shatila camp.
Sabra market was bustling with life and there were people buying and selling. As well as clothes, shoes and toilet items, there were stalls stocked with fish, meat, fruit and vegetables. It all looked fine, and the visitor who went no further into Shatila camp would probably not realise the true situation. Some western papers had printed cruel lies that the markets and shops of the camps were packed with food. But the market was not inside the Palestinian part of Sabra – it was in the Lebanese part of the camp. In 1982, Sabra and Shatila camps were the homes of both Palestinian and Lebanese people, who had lived together for many years. When the Israelis invaded and sent in their mercenaries to massacre the camps, both suffered. But after 1985, when the first camp war started, it was a deliberate policy of the attackers to isolate the Palestinians.
Sabra camp fell in 1985, and most of the Palestinian families either fled or were killed, leaving only the Lebanese families as sad witnesses of what was happening to their Palestinian neighbours in Shatila. The part of Sabra where most of the Palestinians had lived was near Gaza Hospital. Palestinian homes there were destroyed, so that even if there was a ceasefire those who escaped had nowhere to come back to. The homes had not been rebuilt. Across the road, Shatila camp put up a fierce resistance and did not fall. Instead it was besieged from 1985 onwards.
The siege had been total for nearly two years now – from May 1985 to April 1987 with only partial lifting at one point for a couple of months. All the entrances and exits to the camps were surrounded by tanks and militiamen so that no one could enter or leave the camps. There were full-scale attacks on the camps, raining shells and rockets on to the homes of people. At other times there were ceasefires, and the situation was more like a tight curfew. Throughout the last six months of the siege on Shatila camp, the market continued to see all kinds of delicious fruits, meat and vegetables, while the Palestinians in Shatila camp starved. When they asked for food, they only received bullets and mortar bombs.
When Muslim religious leaders granted the starving Palestinians in Shatila a dispensation to eat human corpses during the siege, the camp people replied to the world:
Throughout history, countries and communities have been wiped out through wars, natural disasters and epidemics, but not through deliberate starvation in the way we are being subjected to. Are you using hunger as a weapon, to starve us into submission? Where is the conscience of the twentieth century? If we perish in this way, let it go down in human history that the world which allowed the Sabra and Shatila massacres less than five years ago also let us die in this manner.
You said we could eat the flesh from human corpses. But how could we eat the bodies of our loved ones, of our brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers and children.
The young men of Shatila volunteered to starve to conserve food for their old, their wounded, their women and children. Shatila was slowly dying. But they were proud and dignified as they awaited death. It was clear that nothing – not the massacres, not the two-year siege and not the food blockade – could break the spirit of Shatila camp. The siege tightened and the shells continued to rain down day and night on to the ruins and the debris. Early 1987 meant starvation, disease and the bitter cold and floods of the Lebanese winter. I wondered if Shatila would make it.
This little camp, two hundred yards square, had become a symbol of steadfast Palestinian resistance – it had become the Alamo, the Stalingrad, of the Palestinian people.
In the West, there had been relatively little news about Shatila. I did not know exactly what to expect, and my heartbeat quickened as I turned off from Sabra market to head towards Shatila camp. Uneven and muddy, the road was partially flooded, with bits of rubbish floating about. I could see the back of Gaza Hospital, and it looked deserted and desolate. As I walked on, the front of Gaza Hospital, covered with soot, came into view. The neighbouring buildings all looked empty – the families must all have fled, I thought to myself.
Suddenly there was a shout: ‘Stop!’ An armed man in plain clothes materialised from nowhere. He was an Amal intelligence officer in his twenties, slimly-built. I suppose I might have thought him good-looking, but I noticed his bloodshot eyes and trembling hands and automatically started diagnosing what was wrong with him. Coarse tremors – bloodshot eyes – he smoked hashish, more than likely, and maybe took some stimulant as well. His manners were nasty. I was in an unpleasant situation: the Amal gunman and I were the only living beings in sight. Taking a quick look at his pistol, I noticed it had no silencer. Well, at least if he shot me, someone would hear
It was a case of hoping for the best, as I really had no idea what he was up to. Thank God I was carrying some letters addressed to residents of Shatila camp. They were family letters from Palestinians in Europe to their relatives in the camps – all of the mundane ‘How are you? I am praying for your safety’ type. The man spoke reasonable English. After giving me a bad time, going through my handbag, my papers, my shoes, he suddenly seemed to decide I was not smuggling guns into the camp, and was telling the truth when I claimed to be on a social visit. He let me pass. The incident was so nasty I never wanted to venture near that part of Sabra camp again without a very good reason.
As I continued towards Shatila camp, I kept being stopped by members of Amal, some in paramilitary uniform and others in plain clothes, but all armed. It was a stressful walk. I thought of the women of Shatila having to walk this way each day to get to the market to buy food for their families, and then having to return the same way laden with shopping. If the Amal people could harass and intimidate a newly-arrived doctor who was obviously a foreigner, I could only guess what it was like for the Palestinian women. The ceasefire was in force, but I was sure that if it was not for the Syrian troops, I would have joined the ranks of the ‘disappeared’, or would just have been shot.
After being stopped ‘unofficially’ by these people, I finally arrived at the official station of the Amal militia. This was a block of flats, about four storeys high, which had been damaged by shellfire. Through the shell holes, I could make out stacked up sand-bags, and soldiers with machine-guns. On the wall outside there was a large portrait of the Amal leader, Nabih Berri. A dozen or more Amal soldiers were manning the checkpoint. My travel document and belongings were taken for inspection. Inside the tall building, more soldiers were visible. They were a hideous bunch: I was completely terrified. I had never experienced such terror before – not even during the mock execution in September 1982. I was actually trembling, my knees felt as though they were giving way and then suddenly they seemed to have vanished. As a foreigner I could be kidnapped, and as a friend of the Palestinians, I could be shot dead. They seemed to have read my thoughts, and one of them loaded his machine-gun, and pointed it at me.
I had to do something before I trembled to the ground. I drew a deep breath, threw my shoulders back and told them as loudly as I could manage that I had an appointment to see the Syrian officer at Shatila checkpoint. At the word ‘Syrian’, they relented, gave me back my travel document and belongings and motioned me to go to the Syrian checkpoint.
This incident taught me the usefulness of a particular sentence, one I was to use on subsequent occasions whenever stopped by Amal: ‘I have an appointment with the Syrian officer at the checkpoint.’ It regularly got me out of trouble.
As a doctor, I found it interesting that my legs, which had almost failed to support my weight a second before, now decided of their own volition to take off at an embarrassingly high speed towards the Syrian checkpoint at the entrance to Shatila camp. I wanted to slow down, so no one could see I was afraid, but my legs would not allow me even that bit of self-control. The Syrian checkpoint was only a stone’s throw down the road: I told the Syrians there that I wanted to hand some letters over to people in the camp. They opened all the letters and read their contents and finally decided to let me visit the camp for no more than one hour. They kept my travel document, telling me they would tear it up if I stayed longer than their authorised sixty minutes. That, to me, was a decent deal, after the treatment I had had from the Amal. I thanked the Syrians and went into Shatila camp.
The place was physically unrecognisable: it was a demolition site. Everywhere there were ruins, collapsing concrete, rubble, dereliction and destruction. Palestinians were standing on both sides of the camp road. This time no one waved or shouted at me to grab my attention. There was no laughter, there were no greetings. Nobody moved. I had never seen Shatila camp frozen like this. It was impossible to accept: it was diabolical. What had happened? Then I walked past the first Palestinian on the road. He still did not move, but he muttered a welcome under his breath: ‘Ahlan, Doctora, ahlan.’
It was the same as I made my way on into the camp. Standing up or sitting down, Palestinians greeted me very, very quietly, without moving at all.
Remembering the way vaguely from my 1985 visit, I turned left into one of the narrow camp alleys towards Shatila mosque. Once I was in the alley, and shellfire-damaged buildings obstructed the view from Amal and Syrian military positions, some children and a woman came up to me, and guided me to Shatila hospital. ‘What is your name?’ asked the children.
I turned to them, and asked, ‘What is your name?’ The smallest of them, a cute little girl, gave me a big smile, put her hand into her mouth and blushed. The whole party escorted me to Shatila Hospital, telling me to see Chris Giannou, a Greek Canadian doctor.
Dr Chris Giannou in the operationg theatre of Shatila Hospital.
Chris and I had met once before, in 1983 in Paris. He had a long history of commitment to the Palestinians, and was arrested by the Israelis at the beginning of the 1982 invasion. Chris went to Shatila camp in 1985 to set up the hospital, and had remained inside the besieged camp for nearly two years. If ever there was a foreign doctor who had given everything to the Palestinians, Chris Giannou was that person. His surgical skills, his administrative abilities, his patience and courage, even his personal life all belonged to the Palestinians.
‘Hello, Chris!’ I said.
When I tried to give him a big hug, I broke down and cried. It had been just over four years since we last met. Now Chris was no more than a human skeleton covered with skin.
‘It’s all right, dear,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about us. How is Francis? Come, I’ll show you the hospital. We have everything. It is going to get better for everybody. Look, the women even managed to bring back a box of chocolates. Have one, will you?’ He offered me a piece of chocolate.
‘No, you have it, Chris,’ I said. ‘You need feeding up more than I do. Have you seen yourself in the mirror?’ Almost at once I realised what a stupid thing it was to say, and both of us burst out laughing. There was no mirror for him to look into.
A quick tour of Shatila Hospital revealed how much it had developed from the little shelter of 1985. It was now housed in a number of separate blocks. The main hospital was built over the underground bomb shelter. The shelter was now converted into an efficient, well-kept operating theatre, above which were two wards for in-patients. The top floor was badly shelled and put out of action. The operating theatre was clean, and all the items neatly arranged. Here the surgical team had performed over three hundred life-saving operations over the last six months. The floor space was limited, thirty by twenty feet at most, but the theatre was divided so that two operations could be carried out at once.
The out-patients and emergency department was in the old PRCS clinic of 1985, separated from the operating theatre and ward block by a narrow alley. It also contained the X-ray department. The small portable X-ray machine had been put to full use, and had been skilfully adapted to produce intravenous urograms and other specialised contrast films. There was a laboratory, a blood bank, and a room for dentistry. The pharmacy stores and dispensary were in yet another building. Across from this was Chris Giannou’s office – the kitchen pantry. There Giannou, the chief surgeon of Shatila camp and the Director of Shatila Hospital, would sit on a wooden stool behind a small square wooden table and carry out his administrative responsibilities. Visitors would have to find themselves seats on sacks of rice, on the floor or on large containers of cooking oil, paraffin or detergent. ‘Mine is a low-cost outfit,’ said Chris with a chuckle. The next room was the kitchen proper, about twenty feet square, and from here eighty hospital meals were churned out three times a day. The staff dining room, next to the kitchen, was half its size. It had a long wooden table and two rows of wooden benches, where hospital staff sat to eat, and also had meetings. This hospital was the most compact and efficient set-up I had ever come across. Many of the PRCS staff recognised me, and here in the hospital, out of the view of the Amal, we were free to embrace and kiss each other.
As I hurried to leave, I heard people saying from all around, ‘Good, Doctora Swee, we are very good. Please don’t worry. Come back and see us again.’ With these words of reassurance in my ears, I hastily left for the Syrian checkpoint, to pick up my travel document and leave Shatila.
Chapter 27
That evening, back in the NORWAC flat in Hamra, I felt drained and exhausted, but I could not sleep. When I did manage to sleep, I was crying in my dreams. Shatila camp now had food, but would the Palestinians be strong enough to rebuild their broken community yet again? They had been imprisoned in their ruins for nearly two years. Shatila was now a terribly deprived and dangerous place – a concentration camp. Deprived, because it was little more than an open demolition site, without water, electricity or any semblance of social life. Dangerous, because Amal could fire bullets and shells into the camp at any time without warning.
I lay in bed thinking of my friend Nahla, whom I had hoped to see this time. In 1982 she had been with me in Gaza Hospital, training to be a nurse. In 1985, when Sabra and Shatila were attacked, Nahla gave up nursing and fought to defend the camp. When Shatila camp ran out of ammunition, Nahla braved the Amal tanks to buy bullets. Four women brought thirty-five thousand rounds into the camp. In 1985, Nahla had been wounded and in hiding. I could not visit her, because she was on Amal’s ‘wanted’ list.
Major Nahla, who gave up nursing to defend
Shatila. She died in 1987, with fifty-seven bullets in her body.
While I was on my way to Beirut in April 1987, I learnt that Nahla was dead. Now the reunion we planned would never take place in this world. I kept asking myself if Nahla’s fate was a reflection of Shatila’s. But Nahla had been strong, and though her military career was short and she died young, she had already become a major when she lost her life. I just could not sleep that night, and I wrote a poem to Nahla. In the poem, I mourned her death, and especially how I had missed being by her side when she died. At the time of her death Nahla had just become engaged, and I thought of the bridal gown she would never put on.
Time passed slowly until, just before dawn, I gave up the idea of sleeping. I got up, washed myself and waited for Øyvind to wake up. We were to go to meet the Syrians today, to negotiate a safe conduct for Pauline Cutting and her team out of Bourj el-Brajneh camp. Amal had formally threatened to kill Pauline and Susan once they ventured out of the camp. We knew that they meant what they said. Only the Syrians could stop them, and so Øyvind and I were going to negotiate directly with General Ghazi Kanaan, the head of the Syrian Intelligence in Lebanon.
We arrived at the Beau Rivage, once a famous Beirut hotel, now taken over by the Syrians as their military intelligence headquarters. General Kanaan had gone to Damascus, but his deputy agreed to see us. After my hassles with Amal at Shatila the day before, the Syrians seemed very civilised indeed. I gave the Syrian official standing in for General Kanaan a copy of my letter to President Assad, and asked if they would escort our medical team out of the camp. It was difficult to communicate, as the Syrian officials in this particular office only spoke Arabic and French, and Øyvind and I could only come up with English, Norwegian and Chinese. But they seemed to guess what we were after and sent for Major Waleed Hassanato, the Syrian intelligence officer in charge of the Beirut camps, so that he could take me to Bourj el-Brajneh to see the MAP team.
In his early thirties, Major Waleed had a round face with a well-trimmed moustache. My first impression of him was that his manners were pleasant and cultured. It was difficult to imagine him dealing harshly with Palestinians on his wanted list, but many in the camps said he could be an absolute terror when exercising his power as the intelligence officer in charge.
Major Waleed decided to drive Øyvind and myself to Bourj el-Brajneh camp to ask Pauline Cutting and our trapped team if they wanted to leave. We were shown to his car, and set off. The whole situation was very bizarre. In a way it was lucky that I had forgotten nearly all my Arabic, because I was able to maintain very polite relations with Major Waleed, who spoke nothing else.
About all I could say in Arabic was, ‘Thank you,’ so I said this whenever it seemed appropriate. Major Waleed was very kind and proper, and each time replied, ‘You are most welcome, doctor,’ in Arabic.
He dropped us off at an office belonging to a pro-Syrian Palestinian faction in Bourj el-Brajneh and said he would be back at 1 PM to collect us. That would give us time to speak to our people. After Major Waleed left, I went to Haifa Hospital to look for Pauline and company. The hospital was still there, but it was in a terrible state. Pauline Cutting was very, very thin. So was Ben Alofs. And I met Susan Wighton and Hannes for the first time. They were all in good spirits.
It was difficult to tell them it was time to go back home to be with their families, because in fact none of them wanted to go. The people of Bourj el-Brajneh would he upset too. For a moment, I wondered if I had any right to raise the question of the team leaving. In the end I decided to be unpopular. Six months in this dreadful siege was enough, and they needed a break. If they wanted to come back after they had seen their families, MAP could always send them out again. After warm embraces and greetings, I pulled myself together and asked, ‘When do you people want to leave? Your families are all very worried about you. I have to make arrangements with the
Syrians.’
There was complete silence. I felt that I had uttered the unutterable. But then Pauline suggested that they could leave on Monday 13 April. They said they wanted to spend a few days in Mar Elias camp to be with friends, and were obviously convinced that Mar Elias camp was very safe. They seemed to have forgotten that some of the team had received clear death threats, not to mention that scores of journalists were waiting to get hold of them once they were outside the camp.
‘I’ll have to discuss that with Um Walid and the people in Mar Elias,’ I said; ‘but if we work on you leaving on Monday morning from here and perhaps going to Mar Elias camp – we can take it from there. I’ll also have to contact the British Ambassador to take you across the Green Line to catch the boat – Beirut airport is still closed. I suppose all your visas have expired by now?
We all agreed to this plan, and I went to have a look round the hospital. The top two floors had been blown off by shells, and the rest of Haifa Hospital had neither water nor electricity. The walls were dark, damp and mouldy. But I was glad to find many old friends – Nuha, Dr Reda, Ahmed Diep the anaesthetic technician and others. They were all PRCS medics, and had been through four camp wars over the past two years. I had first met Dr Reda, the director of Haifa Hospital, and Nuha the theatre sister in 1985. I had known Ahmed Diep since the days of Gaza Hospital in 1982: he was one of those who worked many long hours in the basement operating theatre during the Beirut massacres, till Azziza ordered him to leave on Friday, just before the hospital was overrun by the murderers. He was an excellent anaesthetist, and I could trust him to anaesthetise poor risk patients for very major surgery. My friends all looked exhausted, but were eager to tell me about the recent camp war.
As we were talking, someone suddenly came up with a message for me: ‘Doctora, Major Waleed has arrived, and wants you to leave now.’
Ben Alofs stared at me with astonishment, and said, ‘This is Waleed Hassanato, the Syrian?’
I knew why he was surprised, but it was impossible to explain everything in a short time. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Major Waleed Hassanato. He has agreed to provide security for your leaving, you see.’
Ben looked even more astounded. Because Syria supplied the Amal besiegers with arms and advice, many people in the camps saw the Syrian Army as the allies of Amal. Syria justified its support for Amal by stressing their reputation as a significant part of the anti-Israeli ‘South Lebanese
Resistance’. This fitted in with Syria’s anti-Zionist stand: the Israelis had occupied South Lebanon, Palestine, the Golan Heights and neighbouring Arab territories, lands which Syria claimed were historically part of ‘greater Syria’, and so Syria supported Amal in their fight against the Israelis.
Nobody ever gave me a convincing explanation of how tanks and guns supplied to Amal to fight the Israelis ended up being turned against the Palestinian refugee camps. My own suspicion, after asking many different groups, was that Amal was under pressure from the Israelis to attack the Palestinians. In the south, the Palestinians had accused Amal of making a deal with the Israelis to empty out the Palestinian population, thereby ensuring the security of Israel’s northern border. Amal of course denied it. But the Palestinians said that they had arrested three Israeli advisers working side by side with Amal when Palestinian fighters captured the village of Magdoushe, near Saida, in 1986. If that were true, then Amal obviously collaborated with Israel, and that would explain why they were so vicious towards the Palestinians.
But Amal had their own explanation for the camp war. Many times, I had been pulled up short by Amal officials and told that the Palestinians brought just too many disasters to Lebanon. If it were not for the Palestinians, they told me, Lebanon would never have been bombed and destroyed so cruelly by the Israelis, Lebanon had suffered enough playing host to the Palestinians. Amal feared a repeat of the full-scale Israeli invasion of 1982. They were especially annoyed that the Palestinians in the refugee camps dared to arm themselves. One Amal person asked me: ‘Tell me, doctor, which Arab capital would ever allow a group of refugees to carry arms?’
Of course, he did not realise he was talking to me, a survivor of the 1982 Sabra-Shatila massacres, which happened precisely because the Palestinians were disarmed. I had seen the state of Shatila and Bourj el-Brajneh camps in 1987. How could anyone ask the Palestinians to surrender their right to self-defence, so that a repeat of the massacres of 1982 could take place? Teenage Palestinian fighters in Shatila camp could never be persuaded to surrender their
Kalashnikovs, not after the bitterness of 1982 and the last two years of siege. They had lost their right to a homeland, to security in exile, and their very existence was now being challenged. Who would dare ask them to surrender the right to life? One woman fighter in Shatila camp told me: ‘They have to recognise us, because we fight back. They want to make us anonymous, wipe us out and bury us in mass graves, but we will die fighting.’
The last few decades in the Middle East have seen at least four major conflicts. These are between Iran and Iraq, between the Israelis and the Arabs, between the Israelis and the Palestinians and between the Arabs and the Palestinians. With the exception of the Iran-Iraq war, the conflicts revolve round Israel and Palestine.
The conflict between the Israelis and the Arabs has resulted in a number of wars between Israel and Arab countries. Israel has invaded and occupied not only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but also the Golan Heights, which are part of Syria. The Israeli air force has attacked various Arab countries – Iraq, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt are a few examples. I have heard Israeli politicians boast that they have fought and won five major wars against their Arab neighbours: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. The last of these was not really a ‘genuine’ war between Israel and one of its neighbours. Although Lebanon is still suffering from the phenomenal damage to the country’s economy and society, the 1982 war was really between Israel and the PLO.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict exists because Israel could only be created over the destruction of Palestine and the expulsion of its people. In 1988, the State of Israel celebrated forty years of existence; while the Palestinian exiles remembered the loss of their homeland. For Israel to flourish, all traces of Palestine had to be obliterated. The wounds inflicted by Israel go on festering; Israeli bombs cause death and destruction; torture and mutilation in Israeli detention camps, such as the Ansar camps, will take more than a lifetime to fade from the memory. And Israelis complain that the Palestinians refuse to ‘recognise’ the State of Israel. After being forced to give up their country, their homes – even their lives – the Palestinians are being asked to surrender their souls to the victors.
The Palestinian-Arab conflict is still more complicated. Some argue that it arises from the conflict between host countries and refugees. But the Palestinians are exiles, not refugees, and they want to go home. The host countries support them, in principle, at least. But when the Palestinians use the host countries as bases to launch attacks into Israel, the host countries suffer Israel’s revenge: one rocket fired into Galilee would mean the flattening of dozens of Lebanese villages by Israeli air raids. This has led to Palestinian-Arab conflicts, but it is a tribute to the courage of the Arab people that in spite of the price they still supported the Palestinian struggle. A further complication in the case of Syria arises from an unresolved issue. Is Palestine part of Greater Syria?
Does Arafat – the Chairman of the PLO – or Assad – Syria’s leader – have the right to speak for the Palestinians?
I am not an Arab, nor am I a Muslim. I am not a European, and I have neither the difficulty of living with the guilt of Nazism, nor responsibility for the British Mandate in Palestine. For me, supporting the Palestinians is not a political matter: it is my human responsibility. They seek to return home. Failing that, they demand the right to a decent life in exile: the right to exist. Their demands are just. I support them. Because I have no political angle, I was able to ask the Syrians to protect our medical volunteers so that our work in the camps could continue.
Some people discussed the fact that a few days earlier Syria had been supporting Amal’s attacks on the camps. Now Syrian troops had taken control of the camp entrances to stop the Palestinian women being sniped at, and were escorting food convoys into the camps. I did not have the luxury of wondering about the whys and wherefores of it. If the Syrians were now the friends of the Palestinians, then they were my friends too, for the time being. I did not speculate about the next day, or the next week. It was all as fragile as desert moisture, but while there was time to breathe, to eat and to live, people had to seize the opportunity. Women made repeated trips back and forth bringing food and water for their families. While the ceasefire imposed by the Syrians lasted, they were making the most of it.
When we arrived back at the political office where the Syrian major had arranged to pick us up, I could see a large crowd which had congregated to greet a United Nations relief convoy loaded with sacks of flour. Children and women were clapping and cheering as Syrian troops escorted the convoy on its way into the camp. Meanwhile, behind the political office, the body of a woman had been dug out of a temporary grave to be taken to the cemetery. She was one of the women killed while trying to get food for the camp during the siege. As her exhumed body, wrapped in a large plastic bag, was carried past, its stench was evil. It reminded me of the mutilated, decaying corpses of the 1982 massacres. Was the camp celebrating the ceasefire, or mourning the loss of loved ones?
Øyvind and I told Major Waleed that our people would be ready to leave on Monday 13 April. He asked us to contact the British Ambassador and request him to provide security across the Green Line, as the Syrians did not control Christian East Beirut. So Pauline and the rest of the MAP team would be the responsibility of the Syrians from Bourj el-Brajneh as far as the British Consulate in West Beirut, and from there to the ferry at Jounieh they would have to be the responsibility of the British Ambassador, John Gray.
Swee with children of Bourj el-Brajneh, saluting the uprising in the occupied territories, 1988.
Having made these provisional arrangements, we bade Major Waleed farewell. The British Ambassador kindly met me, and agreed to provide security for Pauline, Susan, Hannes, Ben – and Chris Giannou, if he decided to leave as well. Chris’s mother had contacted Um Walid, and expressed concern over her son, and Um Walid thought that it was about time Chris left Shatila camp for a break.
So Monday 13 April was to be the day of the great team swap. New foreign nurses and doctors were going into Bourj and Shatila, and those who had worked so tirelessly throughout the siege were going to be able to leave. I was told to call at Major Waleed’s office at nine in the morning. His soldiers showed me to his office, and I found him just getting out of bed. He was acutely embarrassed at my bursting into his office while he was trying to put on his shoes and socks. I tried to assure him everything was all right. Not only was I a doctor, but I was also happily married. I pulled out of my wallet a picture of my husband Francis with his precious black-and-white tabby cat, Meowie.
The major’s soldiers all studied the picture closely, and then declared their admiration for the beauty of the Meowie cat, and the kindness of my husband’s face. Then they expressed their regret at the fact that I had not produced any children for my husband, so that the poor man only had a cat for company while I was away. They even suggested that Francis should find himself a good Syrian wife so that she would give him many, many children. I found their advice totally unacceptable. But I guess they were only winding me up.
The Syrian intelligence officers first went to Bourj elBrajneh to get the foreigners out, and drove them to Mar Elias camp. We then went on to Shatila camp to ask Chris Giannou whether he wanted to leave or not. I had sent a message to Chris the night before asking him to be packed and ready if he wanted to leave for Canada. Major Waleed stopped his car at the camp checkpoint and told me through an interpreter to go and fetch Chris. I found him in the hospital kitchen, and told him Major Waleed was at the checkpoint, waiting to escort him to the British Embassy.
Chris refused point blank to come. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I just can’t leave. There is too much to do. Apart from that, if I left now it would be very bad for the morale of the camp. I’ll try to talk to my mother and reassure her that I’m okay.’ ‘Well, Chris,’ I said, ‘I must say I’m really proud of your commitment, but at least will you go out and thank Major Waleed for coming all this way to get you, otherwise I am going to look like a fool.’
So he came out with me and we went to the checkpoint, where he spoke to Major Waleed in Arabic, before walking back into the besieged camp. Major Waleed was not too pleased that Chris had turned down his offer of help, but the glimpse of Chris Giannou as we drove away, skin and bones covered with a tattered old blanket, proudly walking back into Shatila, on the morning of 13 April, will always stay in my mind.
On Easter Sunday, I persuaded Øyvind he ought to take a day off, and go up to the mountains. I wanted to be alone in the NORWAC flat to read the Bible, to pray and thank God for getting Pauline and her team safely home, having heard on the BBC World Service news that they had arrived safely in Britain. I turned to the letter of the Apostle Paul to the Roman believers. I read, ‘Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans, VIII, 37-39). Over the years, I have seen much destruction and death, but I have seen so much love and faith that I am fully assured God is still there.
After my meditations the Lord brought me a wonderful visitor: old Dr Said Dajani. I had first met him in 1982, and had always respected him. He founded the PRCS nursing school in Lebanon, and was the medical director of the PRCS doctors in Lebanon for many years. He taught in numerous medical schools in Lebanon, and many of those he taught have now become well-known specialists. He was nearly eighty, and his hair was pure white, but his face still carried the wonder of a young child. We had a long, long chat and the poor old man cried. The past four and a half years of hell had just been too much. His PRCS nursing school had been closed, and opened, and closed again so many times. At the moment it was closed. His wife had breast cancer, and his knees were full of arthritis. But then he said something wonderful: ‘It has got into my head that somehow I will die in
Palestine – so I cannot possibly die here.’
Then he spoke enthusiastically of Palestine. What a wonderful thing it would be if old Dr Dajani was back in Palestine, and we could all go to visit him there! I looked at the face of this kind and gentle Palestinian doctor and thought of the pain and anguish he must have suffered over the years. Yet there was no bitterness or hatred – just faith and a radiant smile when he talked about Palestine. He told me of three battles he had won in his life.
The first, not a peculiarly Palestinian problem, was giving up smoking. He used to smoke ninety cigarettes a day. He had a major battle with that, but won, and gave up smoking.
Then he had a more moving story to tell. In 1947, Dr Dajani was on his way to the United States to attend a medical conference as medical director of the Palestine Medical Services. Stopping over in Paris, he heard the news of the decision to partition Palestine and he knew there would be great trouble in his country. He knew he could go on to the United States and call it quits – or return. It was a great struggle – one voice said, ‘Dajani, you are a coward, running away.’ Another said, ‘No, you are not a coward, you are going back.’ He finally returned to Jaffa to direct the medical services during those very difficult days. War, chaos and many wounded people awaited his return.
Then there was the time after 1983 when the American Embassy in West Beirut was bombed. The Americans retaliated by shelling and bombarding West Beirut. It was a terrible time, and friends from Australia, Denmark and Spain offered to get him out, but eventually he decided to stay. ‘Run away?’ he asked me rhetorically. ‘No, I am not a coward.’ So he stayed. Then came the camp wars, and the Amal’s reign of terror against Palestinians. He stayed on. Today, he was talking enthusiastically about reopening the School of Nursing which had been closed down during the camp wars. I felt proud to meet a senior colleague of such great moral strength and courage.
Dr Dajani told me about when he was setting up medical services in Sour city in south Lebanon, then an area of great poverty. One day, he passed a house and heard children crying. He pushed open the door. The parents were too embarrassed to tell him why the kids were crying, but it was obvious they were hungry. So Said Dajani went out, got bread, cheese and olives and fed the kids. The children then started to laugh and play, but the doctor and their parents wept.
Before the Sour hospital was built, he used to spend nights sleeping on the sand. One morning, he woke up to find that someone had covered him with an old blanket. He was very grateful, but had never found out whom he had to thank. This story is typical of Lebanon – a place where kindness and generosity abound in the midst of poverty and war.
Then I told him about all the trouble I had trying to get a visa. He was very upset and said, ‘They refused you a visa because they didn’t want you to come to help the Palestinians. Is helping the Palestinians a crime? How cruel can people get?’
But I told him not to worry: they would have to try harder before they could stop me being a friend of the Palestinians. He laughed at my cheek, said goodbye and wished all of us well.
Although this picture was taken in 1988, these primitive shelters in Beirut have been there since before 1982.
Chapter 28
The following days were chaotic and hectic. It was fortunate that the Italian Dr Alberto Gregori was able to work as MAP’s volunteer surgeon in Haifa Hospital while I ran around doing other things. Alberto was great, and was loved by the camp people, who nicknamed him ‘Abu Garfil’ – after his toy cat, Garfield. Soon he began to look like a Palestinian – and was in fact stopped at the checkpoint for questioning because the Syrian intelligence thought he was a Palestinian disguised as an Italian doctor. His MAP volunteer colleague, an Australian anaesthetist called Dr Murray Luddington, had meanwhile gone into Shatila camp. Murray caught the Palestinian ‘bug’. Within a few days of entering the camp he wrote his letter of resignation to his British hospital – which till then had kept his job open for him. He asked them to look for another anaesthetist, because he had chosen to stay with the Palestinians in Shatila camp. He soon began to look more scruffy than the camp people, and they had to get him decent clothes to wear. Ills Arabic improved, and before long he could argue with the hospital cook, and answer the Amal at checkpoints with not so polite words. He was never mistaken for a Palestinian, but his large beard often got him nearly arrested. In those days, only members of the Lebanese Shi’ite Hezbollah (Party of God) wore beards – and neither the Syrian Army nor Amal got on too well with Hezbollah.
Soon Alberto left, and I had to take up the post of surgeon in Haifa Hospital. It would have been great if only I could have stayed in Haifa Hospital to work properly as a surgeon. But at that time the Palestinians needed more than a surgeon. They needed someone to run around and organise the bringing of medical supplies, negotiate arrangements for fuel and food to come into the camps, and evacuate wounded people out of the camps to different European countries for specialised medical treatment. As team leader, I found myself doing all this during the day, and doubling up as resident surgeon at night as well. This was important, as people were still injured at night, and needed surgical attention. As the siege was still in force they could not be transported out of the camp for treatment.
Spending the night in the camp after a hectic day’s running around was not always easy. Whether I slept in Haifa Hospital, or in the clinic at the opposite end of the camp, I would usually find myself either talking late into the middle of the night, or being kept up by people with all sorts of complaints, not necessarily medical. The atmosphere in the camp remained tense. I would jump when a door slammed shut, thinking an explosion had gone off. An innocent event such as the loudspeaker of the Bourj el-Brajneh mosque asking for blood donors would find me racing uphill from the clinic to Haifa Hospital thinking that fighting had broken out, and the wounded needed attention. It was usually just an open call for blood, not an emergency. I really had no reason to be so neurotic and on tenterhooks, as the PRCS doctors were extremely competent. They had worked through the long siege, and had saved so many lives, and there was nothing I could do which they could not do better.
One morning, Ahmed Diep, the anaesthetist, knocked frantically on the clinic door at 4 AM: ‘Doctora Swee.’ he shouted, ‘urgent laparotomy in Haifa Hospital.’
Nuha sewing laparotomy packs by hand – Haifa Hospital, Bourj el-Brajneh, 1985.
We ran uphill towards the hospital on the uneven, winding camp alleys, tripping over rubble, water pipes, and puddles of water. In the emergency room of Haifa Hospital was a young man who had shot himself in the abdomen. The PRCS doctors had already resuscitated him, set up a drip and organised blood for him. Nuha, the theatre sister, had already got ready for a major abdominal operation. Dr Nasser, the surgical resident on duty that night, was already changed and scrubbed in theatre. They only sent for me because some of these gunshot wounds could be very nasty, and it would be good to have an older surgeon around to give a hand.
Dr Nasser did most of the operation, with me assisting. The bullet, as one might have predicted, had gone through the front of the abdomen, hitting the small intestine in two different places, the edge of the liver, the large intestine in three different places, and coming out through the pelvic bone behind. Ahmed Diep gave an excellent anaesthetic: and Nuha and Dr Nasser both performed extremely well.
The only mistake was mine. I decided to take the chance of not doing a ‘defunctioning colostomy’ – a procedure regarded by many surgeons as mandatory in these circumstances. This meant pulling a loop of large bowel out of the body at a point before the injuries and making a hole in it, so that all intestinal contents drained out through this opening. In this way, no fecal material would pass through the injured portions of the bowel, thereby minimising contamination, as they slowly healed. I took a stupid risk, and even told Dr Nasser that at worst, the patient would develop a fecal fistula (or abnormal passage) through the exit wound of the bullet, and we would face the problem when it arose. The patient of course did exactly that, and had to undergo a second operation for a defunctioning colostomy and resection of fecal fistula.
Thank God the patient survived. Nuha gave me the scalpel towards the end of the first operation thinking that I would do a colostomy, and nearly dropped to the floor when I said, ‘It is probably going to be all right, Nuha. Let’s take a chance.’ Now I sheepishly remembered the words of the surgeon who first taught me surgery: ‘The thing to do is to anticipate trouble and avoid it. Do not deliberately get into trouble and then try to get out of it.’ Nuha still laughed kindly at me whenever we talked about this, months later.
As all the camps were still besieged, every piece of equipment had to be brought in by special negotiation and with written permission of the Syrian Intelligence who in turn had to inform Amal they had authorised it. Life was very, very miserable. For instance, just to apply for permission for a Palestinian doctor to leave Shatila to visit his father in a West Beirut hospital outside the camp could take me up to five visits to the Syrian military intelligence. On each visit I might have to wait three or four hours, often in the hot sun, sometimes late into the night. This was bureaucracy carried to unprecedented lengths.
The Palestinians did not need my medical skills, because the PRCS had many well-trained doctors and nurses. At the height of the camp war, as many as sixty PRCS doctors and nurses were trapped in the camps. This was not surprising, if one bears in mind that before 1982 the PRCS provided medical care on demand to West Beirut and all of southern Lebanon. Now there was a ceasefire, what the camp hospitals needed was to replenish their stores of medicine, oxygen, nitrous oxide and surgical equipment, and to stock up in case of a new attack on the camps. Someone had to cross the checkpoints with stores for the hospitals. Only the Palestinians could have persuaded me, a British-trained surgeon, to take on the job of a truck driver, and to spend hours at the Syrian intelligence office waiting for permission to bring things into the camps.
The first permit to bring an ambulance-load of medicines into the camps took ages to obtain. The permit had to come from the Syrian Intelligence, and so the bureaucracy swung into action. Once the request was tabled, days passed with no response. I threatened to fly back to Britain with all the medicines and announce to the British public that the Syrians were preventing medical aid getting to the camps. They were furious with me, but in the end relented. The four tons of medicines, gifts donated by the British public, got into the camps bit by bit.
The Palestinians in Bourj el-Brajneh camp fixed up an old, battered ambulance for me to drive around fetching food, medicines, electric cables, blankets, paraffin, furniture – and even a coffin on one occasion – in and sometimes out of the camp. When I had time to think about it, I shuddered to think of what my medical colleagues hack in Britain would make of me, a woman Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, reduced to an ambulance driver – no, even worse, a truck driver. I was very happy to be a truck driver, but in class-conscious Britain doctors arc respected and truck drivers are not.
As it happened, I was not even a good truck driver, because I was born with a very poor sense of direction. Quite often, I drove east when I meant to go west, and in Lebanon that could be dangerous. One day, I drove the wrong way along the coast road and found myself on the non-civilian crossing on the Green Line. This was the ‘Museum Crossing’ and only vehicles with special permission from the military were allowed to pass. I was promptly detained at the checkpoint and questioned. After a while, the soldiers were convinced that I was genuinely lost, and one of them jumped into the ambulance and directed me back to where I wanted to go. From then on, I took care to carry a compass with me wherever I drove.
Driving a new car in West Beirut was not the easiest thing in the world. To drive a battered old ambulance without any signal lights or mirrors and a gearbox that was about to fall off was a real challenge. There was no glass in the windscreen, but the windscreen wiper miraculously survived and sprang into action at the slightest provocation. The first time I drove it out of Bourj el-Brajneh camp, the Syrian soldiers at the checkpoint were astonished to see this ‘thing’ come out of the camp and they ran towards it. Only then did they realise that it had a driver. I was so small that they could not see me, and thought the old heap of rust had taken off on its own!
Driving that ambulance was difficult for yet another reason. People from Britain were accustomed to driving on the left. You were supposed to drive on the right in Beirut – but in practice you drove wherever you could. When you approached a junction, the thing to do was not to stop, otherwise you would he waiting all day to cross. You simply had to keep going and expect the other vehicles to stop. It was a test of nerves. None of the principles of good driving learnt in the British School of Motoring applied. If the traffic lights went red, you put your foot down and got across quickly, or else the driver behind would get really irate. Pedestrians would cross the road anywhere, and often walked straight in front of cars.
I used to stop at the Syrian checkpoint, and show the intelligence officer my permit for driving the ambulance, signed by Major Waleed Hassanato, which might read:
‘Doctora Swee is given permission to drive the ambulance out of the camp and return with it with five oxygen and five nitrous oxide cylinders and thirty boxes of medicines for Haifa Hospital. She and the ambulance have to be searched thoroughly as she leaves and enters the camp. Date…’ The permit was good for one trip only, and I would have to apply for a fresh permit each time I made a trip to fetch supplies for the hospital.
Once the intelligence officer was satisfied that my permit was not a fake, he would let me go. The Syrian soldiers would then usually walk on to the airport road and stop the traffic so that I could turn right into the main road without crashing. I suppose they trusted neither my driving nor the dodgy vehicle.
Heading north along the airport road, after a couple of turns, I would soon arrive at Kola, the flyover near the Arab University. This is if the ambulance did not fall into a shell crater and become stuck, in which case some kind person would have to help me lift it out. On the way I would pass Akka Hospital, the Sports Stadium, the Fakhani entrance of Shatila camp and several checkpoints. Apart from stopping at each checkpoint to show my identity card, I also ended up treating patients, examining them and giving out medications, or writing out referral slips for them to be seen at the PRCS clinic in Mar Elias.
The Amal soldiers, the Syrian soldiers and all sorts of other people on the roads in the southern suburbs of Beirut soon found out that the driver of the battered old ambulance was also a doctor. ‘They knew I would stop at various checkpoints to treat people for their skin diseases, coughs and colds, diarrhoea and vomiting, aches and pains. The ambulance always had a generous supply of ‘checkpoint medicines’, and sometimes I would make an extra trip arid return with more. (To get to Shatila camp, for instance, I had to drive past all the Amal checkpoints, which meant driving past the families of the Amal men. To start with the soldiers would make me halt and threaten me with their rocket launchers, but after a while they brought their children or wives to see me for medical advice. Then the Syrian soldiers did the same too.)
If the weather was not too hot, I wore a large Hezbollah scarf round my head. This signalled to everyone that I was a believer in God, and not a loose foreigner. It stopped curious male strangers wanting to know my name, and whether I was married or looking for a boyfriend. Nobody dared to look at me.
The stretch of road from Kola to Mar Elias camp was always bad for traffic Jams. So it saved time to drive along the hack streets on the wrong side of the road. If the army stopped me for driving on the wrong side. I would just say: ‘Maa bariff, ana ajnabiya.’ (I don’t know, I am a foreigner.)
Mar Elias camp was a sort of headquarters for me, as the four tons of medicines and surgical equipment was stored in the PRCS warehouse there. My ambulance was small, and Major Waleed would never allow me to load it up fully. There was still a siege, and Amal would only allow small quantities of medicines to be brought into the camp each time. In fact, they were very cross that the Syrians had allowed me to drive things in and out of the camps at all, and had threatened to fire on the ambulance when I passed Amal areas. But believed my life was in the hands of God, and tried not to be fearful. I also trusted that the Syrians would probably take action if I was killed on errands they had authorised. In fact, when the security situation around the camps was had, and fighting had broken out, Major Waleed’s men would often stop me from going near the camps. When things calmed down, they would then instruct me to go ahead.
Once the ambulance was loaded with medical supplies from Mar Elias. I would leave for the camps, either for Shatila or Bourj. Sometimes when the ambulance carried oxygen cylinders I was really worried, as one bullet fired into them would explode the whole outfit. Fortunately no one had tried that yet. At the camp checkpoint, I would stop, get down and show my permit to the Syrian officer. Then each box of medicine had to be carried down from the ambulance, opened and searched. The doors of the ambulance would he tapped, the wheels and seats inspected. The camp women would then come out, and carry the boxes of medicines, intravenous fluids and surgical supplies on their backs to the hospital. Palestinian women had to carry these by hand as under the ceasefire and provision of rations agreement, only what a woman could physically carry was allowed into the camps. This was a most inefficient way of doing things, and I sometimes spent up to two or three hours at the camp checkpoints. But it was a tremendous improvement over a total siege, and we were thankful for any way of getting things done.
Life in the besieged camps was still miserable. While the city of Beirut lit up at night with electric lights, the Palestinian refugee camps remained discreetly dark. Children often tripped over rubble and twisted cables in the darkness, and broke their little ankles. There was no electricity. Even dry cell batteries and accumulators were kept out of the camps. The electric generators in the camps were old and overworked and they slowly packed up, making life even more difficult. The Palestinians had managed to tap or ‘siphon’ electricity from the homes of Amal families living near the camps. They never told me how or when this was done, but a frequent request was for me to obtain permission for x metres of cable to enter the camp, so that they could wire up the clinics and hospitals to the electricity of Amal.
Once, I really put my foot in it. There had been a changeover of Syrian troops, and Alberto took the new lieutenant to have a look at Haifa Hospital. Being new, he was flabbergasted at the terrible conditions there, and asked if he could do anything to help. The hospital administrator asked him if the generator could be taken out to be repaired. With electricity, the hospital would at least be lit up, and people could clean and wash the walls. The Syrian lieutenant said he could not authorise that, hut suddenly had the bright idea of letting Haifa Hospital ‘siphon’ off electricity from the Syrian station about half a kilometre down the road. I was asked to procure a kilometre of 25-cm diameter composite cable, comprising four individual cable bundles, for the hospital to use to tap electricity from the Syrian station.
Major Waleed got back from Damascus just in time to scupper the whole exercise. We were all hauled up for a real telling off from him. Haifa Hospital continued in darkness for some time. The major’s anger worried me, for he could easily suspend my permit to drive the ambulance and transport medical supplies into the camps. So far, he had allowed me to do many things for the Palestinians which he considered ‘humanitarian’.
Major Waleed asked me several times if I was trying to help ‘pro-Arafat’ Palestinians. The Syrian Government was opposed to the PLO head, Yasser Arafat. But I said I was here to help all Palestinians. Indeed, I told him, if I was prepared to treat Amal people – who had attacked the camps – it should be clear that I was not about to discriminate in favour of those Palestinians who supported Arafat. That was an internal problem of the Syrians and Palestinians, in which I had no power or even right to interfere. That reply was perfectly satisfactory to the Syrian Intelligence.
Eventually the Syrians granted us permission to take the Haifa Hospital generator out of the camp for repairs. The truth was that the generator was beyond repair. The Syrians knew that I was taking it out to dump it, and that a new one would be brought into the camp, but they were so sick of me pestering them day and night they agreed to let us take it out.
Kazeem Hassan Bedawi, a friend who was also the administrator of the Palestine Red Crescent outside the camp, was told by Dr Osman to help me with the generator. Kazeem is tall and light-complexioned, with brown eyes. A statistician by training, his services to the PRCS were greatly valued. Kazeem and I first met in 1985, in Haifa Hospital over lunch. While we were eating, he suddenly took off his shirt, and showed me the scar on his abdomen. Alison, who had just arrived in Haifa Hospital and was still settling in, was stunned to see me trying to examine him with my mouth stuffed full of food. In 1987, Kazeem had been transferred from Haifa Hospital to work in Mar Elias camp, which was not besieged.
We went out early to hire a forklift to take the old generator out of Haifa Hospital. We then returned with the new one. We had finished unloading it from the forklift and we were about to leave the Hospital, when someone came with a message saying that Major Waleed wanted to see us. We started towards his office, on the outskirts of the camp. A couple of Syrian intelligence officers intercepted us round the corner from Haifa Hospital and abducted Kazeem. They took him away. The two of us had been so pleased at being able to replace the generator that we both forgot that Kazeem was a male Palestinian, and should not go anywhere near the Syrian intelligence. We had not realised this was a trap. I have not seen Kazeem since that day. I learnt from his friend that he was beaten up, accused of being an Arafat supporter and carted off to jail in the Syrian capital, Damascus. His Lebanese wife was SIX months pregnant at the time, and she has since given birth to their first child.
This incident shook me to the core, and I was unable to function at all for a few days. But then a Palestinian lawyer I knew had a few words with me. She told me I must stop thinking of Kazeem and get on with supplying the camps. Somewhat younger than Um Walid, and a very strong personality, my lawyer friend looked at me sitting there miserably and said, ‘Swee, I know how you feel. But you must stop yourself from feeling bad. The Syrians did this, first because they wanted Kazeem anyway, and second because they want to intimidate you so that you will stop working for our people. To work with us Palestinians, you have to be able to contract to this small.’ She held her thumb and index finger together. ‘And at times you have to be this big,’ and she stretched out her arms to their full span. She gave me a big hug, and continued, ‘There is a lot of work only you can do, and you must carry on.’
Of course she was right, and I pulled myself together and continued loading up the battered ambulance with food and medicines for the camps, putting that dreadful incident behind me. But sometimes when I walked past Kazeem’s office in Mar Elias camp, his words echoed in my mind: ‘Can you wait for me till I come back from Waleed Hassanato’s office’?’
I went up to the office of the Syrian military intelligence several times to demand an explanation. There was none.
Another job I did not particularly enjoy was arranging for wounded Palestinians to go abroad for specialist treatment. First, few Palestinians in the camps had travel documents; they carried only refugee identity cards with their names, places and dates of birth. The identity card had to be submitted to the Lebanese authorities so that proper travel documents could be drawn up. The procedure was lengthy and complicated, unless it was speeded up by bribing officials.
Once the travel document had been obtained, the next problem was obtaining visas. Most Western countries have reservations about granting visas to Lebanese Palestinians, and only do so if they receive instructions from hospitals or specialist centres, together with financial guarantees. As the postal system had broken down in Lebanon, even a simple letter of recommendation had to be sent by courier.
Once the visas had been fixed up, then someone – me, for example would have to call in at the Syrian Intelligence with copies of the clinical case reports and photocopies of the travel documents with the visas. The Syrians would then make sure that the patients applying to leave the camp for treatment overseas were not on their list of people wanted for pro-Arafat activities. This would usually take a few days, and if the patient was ‘in the clear, permission would he granted.
If the patient was on the wrong side politically, I would be called to the Syrian Intelligence office and told not to help Arafat supporters escape. Most times, I would be let off lightly, as I was a foreigner, and ill-informed about Palestinian factional politics. Sometimes, the Syrian intelligence officer would be so astounded by my ignorance that he would tell me: ‘Look, Doctora Swee, we all want to facilitate your efforts to help the wounded. But we notice that you’re playing into the hands of Arafat supporters, and this is a very bad thing.’ I would usually listen attentively to a long lecture, via my driver-interpreter, and then apologise profusely at the end for being naive.
Occasionally, after a long lecture, the Syrians would grant permission for even Arafat supporters to leave the camp. For instance, Major Waleed once allowed four bilateral amputees from Bourj el-Brajneh camp to leave for treatment in Europe. He explained that although they were all Arafat supporters, they were not a threat to the security situation since they had no legs. On humanitarian grounds, he allowed them to leave.
Once written permission was received from the intelligence, air tickets had to be arranged. The families were informed, and then the International Red Cross was notified, so that its delegation could come into the camps and transport the wounded to the airport. Only when the plane actually took off could I be sure my patients had left safely. Until then there was always the possibility that they would be kidnapped or arrested at one of the checkpoints on the airport road.
Only when the MEA plane had gone would I heave a sigh of relief and head back for the camps, accompanied by crying relatives of the departed patients. The rest of the family would usually have no travel documents or visas, let alone the financial means to join the wounded person abroad. It often occurred to me that they would not see each other for a long time.
Bilal Chebib and Samir Ibrahim el-Madany were two boys paralysed by snipers in December 1986. Bilal was from Bourj el-Brajneh and a patient of Dr Pauline Cutting’s. Samir was a Lebanese boy. It was the policy of MAP to be nonsectarian and to try to help both Palestinians and Lebanese equally, if possible. The Spinal Centre in Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Britain offered to treat these two kids. Pauline contacted me from London late in April 1987 and asked me to send the boys, as the arrangements in Britain were ready.
But much as I hurried things up in Beirut, the boys and I were unable to leave before 4 June 1987. Although the boys were both under ten cars of age, I still had to go through all the bureaucratic procedures. As they were both paralysed from the waist down, I had to fly back with them myself. We were booked to fly on 2 June. But Beirut International Airport shut down that day because of the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rashid Karami.
Our London MAP office sent me a long telex complaining about the inconvenience I had caused everyone by delaying the trip. When I received the telex, I tore it up out of frustration. With the assassination of Rashid Karami, another civil war might break out. Everyone was on full alert, including the Syrians. I certainly could not help the airport being closed down. Fortunately everything calmed down after forty-eight hours, and I left with the boys on 4 June. The only hiccup on that day was that I forgot to inform the Red Cross of our travel arrangements. I had to drive our battered old ambulance with the boys and their wheelchairs to Beirut International Airport.
We arrived at Heathrow in the evening, and I was relieved to be able to hand the boys over to Pauline.
I returned to Beirut once more. Summer passed, and the camps continued in semi-siege. Palestinian men inside the camps were still not allowed to leave the camps without special permission. If they were outside, they could not return without special permission. Officials of the Red Crescent were threatened and harassed. One day, six plain-clothed, armed men charged into Um Walid’s office in Akka Hospital. They locked the door and threatened her with their guns. One of them said, ‘Um Walid, we know you, you are an Arafat supporter.’ In her office hung a huge portrait of Yasser Arafat – probably the only such portrait hanging openly in Beirut.
She replied, ‘I am a Palestinian. If I do not support Arafat, who is the head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, who else can I support? You are Syrians – you support your President, Hafez al-Assad. If you are prepared to support
Arafat, then perhaps I will consider supporting your Assad.’
The gunmen left her alone. A few weeks later, she was arrested and her office equipment confiscated. Because she was the head of the PRCS in Lebanon, they could not torture her physically. But they picked on Dr Amir Hamawi, the well-loved Lebanese doctor who was once in charge of Gaza Hospital. They brought him in and they beat him before her eyes. But she did not flinch and told them they ought to be ashamed of themselves for torturing a doctor. She was released and returned to her office in Akka Hospital the next day to continue her work for the PRCS in Lebanon. Her arrest did not shake her one bit.
As September approached, morale in the camps plunged even lower than before. The Palestinians of Shatila camp began to hold demonstrations against the siege. It had now lasted more than two years, and people could not take it any more. When the Syrians had imposed the ceasefire a few months before, hopes were boosted. The camp folks thought that they could pick up the threads of their lives once again. But no such luck. The schools remained closed. Amal forbade them to rebuild their homes, and prohibited the transport of building materials into the camps. Two years of attacks and siege had destroyed social institutions like schools for the children, work for the men, home life for the women, and had turned the camps into prisons whose life had congealed into a frozen immobility.
In the camps there was no future, no hope, no security, no laughter. Things must have been terribly hard for the Palestinians to admit to me, ‘We feel as though we have nothing left to give.’
Every day saw more cases of depression and mental stress. One day, a Palestinian doctor came in and punched the hospital wall again and again with his clenched fist, then he shouted, ‘Why do they let us go on like this? We want to know how long it will take for someone to die in this way.’ Like others, he had not left the camp for two and a half years. He had worked through four camp wars, and was a survivor of the 1982 Israeli invasion and Sabra-Shatila massacres. He lost his family in the Tel al-Zaatar massacres.
Shahaada, a lively and attractive Palestinian nurse, was one of my new friends in 1987. She brought her little nephew to see me one day. The poor child had lost both parents in the 1982 massacres. He kept waking up with fear in the middle of the night dreaming of his mother, crying that he could not remember what his parents looked like, except that his mother was fair and beautiful. Shahaada tried hard to compensate for her nephew’s loss by being a surrogate mother.
Some days later I heard that they had taken Shahaada too, so the little boy had lost his last relation. Yet when I drove the nurses of Shatila Hospital to buy food for the hospital, I never failed to marvel at their resilience and far-sightedness. For instance, tins of canned beans ordered for the hospital might be labelled: ‘DATE OF EXPIRY – 1989’. Then the girls would object and refuse to accept the beans, saying they would only settle for food which would last five years. Two years was not enough: mentally they had already dug in for yet another siege. There was not the slightest sign of surrender, and they were bracing themselves for further endurance.
Chapter 29
September 1987 was the fifth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The camp situation remained grim, and as the Lebanese winter approached, we all experienced the same misery as before.
The MAP team had expanded to include volunteers from Malaysia. Dr Alijah Gordon, a Malaysian resident of American origin, had launched a nationwide campaign for volunteers in Malaysia. Through her tireless efforts, the Malaysian people were able to channel their support for the Palestinians in Lebanon by sending medical aid and volunteers. Within a couple of weeks of launching the appeal, Alijah had recruited and sent four medical volunteers to work with us in the camps. There was now no shortage of foreign medics volunteering to come to the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. By this stage, over seventy people from ten different countries had been recruited by MAP. The Western media had given the sufferings of the Palestinians a lot of coverage too. Both Pauline Cutting and Susan Wighton had been honoured by Queen Elizabeth with British awards for their work with the Palestinians and for sticking it out during the siege.
Susan Wighton in the Samir el-Khatib Clinic, also called ‘Suzy’s clinic.
But for the Palestinians in the Beirut camps, everything had ground to a halt. They still had no water, no electricity, no building materials to patch up the large shell holes. People had no future, no security; children had no schools to go to, men no freedom to venture out. If the camp homes were not repaired and rebuilt, the winter would be a disaster for those in the camp. For those who fled the dreadful situation to find shelter in empty warehouses, garages, staircases or on the roadside in Lebanon, the winter spelt utter gloom. Women who tried to smuggle in bits of cement and building materials with their food parcels were arrested. It was a deadlock – the Syrians were unable to force the Amal to allow building materials into the camp. I thought of driving sacks of cement labelled as flour into Shatila camp, hut when I saw two Palestinian girls with the same notion being made to eat bits of cement at the checkpoint, I gave that idea up.
Susan Wighton returned to Bourj el-Brajneh camp. Despite threats to her life, and advice to the contrary, she came back to continue her preventive medical programme work in the camp. Susan’s return was very important to the depressed morale of the camp people. She took her medal from the Queen and placed it in the mosque in Bourj elBrajneh camp. She said, ‘That’s where it should belong.’
In early September, I planned to leave for Europe, to raise some publicity for the camps around the fifth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Before leaving, I wrote an appeal:
The survivors of Sabra and Shatila, 5 years after the Israeli Invasion appeal to you for your help. These two refugee camps once held 80,000 Palestinians. Since 1982, following the Israeli Invasion, the Massacre, and the last two years of attacks on the camps, Sabra camp had been demolished, and Shatila reduced to rubble. In addition to those killed, wounded or missing, thousands have fled.
In 1987, 30,000 Palestinians now live in what is left of Shatila and its vicinity. They are now homeless, living either by the roadside or squatting in the ruin and rubble of what is left of Shatila camp. Shortages of water, electricity, medicines, even food and the fear of new attacks on the camp have made life totally unbearable.
Now these people have to face the cold, wet and hitter Lebanese winter with no homes, no warmth and no future. This is the International Year of Shelter for the homeless…
My writing was interrupted by a voice: ‘Doctora Swee…’
That brought me back to the real world – I was in a hospital which had been hit by two hundred and forty-eight shells during the last attack. Its wards were ventilated and lit by gaping shell holes. The hospital had no water, no electricity and it flooded when it rained.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
I turned round, and saw an eight-year-old girl lying in bed, having her dressings changed by a Palestinian nurse. Her legs were severely burnt and practically all the skin on the shins had disappeared. She had been waiting weeks to be taken to Europe for specialist treatment. When she called me, I thought she wanted to know if the arrangements were going ahead.
This 11-year-old should be at school, not learning to defend his home and people – Shatila, 1985.
How wrong I was! She only wanted to kiss me. As I bent over her bed and held her head in my arms, I saw how beautiful she was. Instead of looking at the terrible burns on her legs, I looked at her beautiful, dark eyes and her curly black hair. Despite all her suffering her face remained wonderfully loving and human. She was a child of Shatila camp.
‘You come and see me tomorrow?’
‘Maybe, God willing,’ I said.
I knew that was a lie. Tomorrow I would be off to Europe to do some lobbying, perhaps in a posh conference room with large glass windows and polished tables, talking to comfortable politicians and budget-makers who would explain how and why they could not help. Yet I would have to try. After five years, I had become thick-skinned and persistent.
I never did say good-bye. In the Palestinian refugee camps, life, death and separation are all so mixed up that we never said good-bye. People live in hope of a better tomorrow. The expression which sums it up is: ‘We are waiting. Next year in Jerusalem.’
While I was back in Europe, trying to organise publicity for the camps, I met Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He came to address a conference of 240 non-governmental organisations in Geneva. The participants in the conference were afterwards invited to a reception held by the PLO. Like everyone else I went to the reception. During the reception, which was packed with representatives of European NGOs, Yasser Arafat awarded some people the Order of the Star of Palestine, the highest award given by the PLO. I did not know exactly how to react when my name was suddenly called out – the Chairman of the PLO wanted to award it to me! How could I receive such an award when so many Palestinians I knew were more worthy of it than I was, when so many other friends of the Palestinians were giving more than I could ever dream of giving? I did not move. When my name was called out the third time, I had to go up to the Chairman to save embarrassment all round.
I felt highly honoured, yet humble, and said to him, ‘Like the Palestinians, I also come from a movement with no individual heroes or heroines. This honour which you are giving me should go to the heroic Palestinian people who are now under siege in the refugee camps of Lebanon, the martyrs of Palestine, to Nahla, Nabila and Nidal, and the many others who laid down their lives for their struggle. And to those who are suffering in the prisons of the Israelis, and to the children who will write the new chapter of Palestine history, to the friends of the Palestinians all over the world who continue to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians under the most difficult circumstances. And to the people of Shatila, who have no roofs over their heads in the coming Lebanese winter, who have stayed strong despite attacks and massacres. Thank you for honouring me, but I know to whom the honour should really go, those whose actions continue to inspire us daily, and I can only receive it since they are not here to receive it in their personal capacities today…’ I found it difficult to continue, but the Chairman put his arms around me, and kissed me.
That evening I thought about how the Palestinians always tried to thank their friends, even though there was really no need. Nor was there any need to bestow awards or honours. Their confidence and trust in me was more than I could ask for. And by giving me the Star of Palestine, the Chairman had actually given me honorary Palestinian status. I wondered if he knew he had given the award to an exile from another country, from Singapore.
While I was in Europe, trying to organise publicity for the camps, I kept in close touch with the situation there. The temperature plunged in October. Then came November: the rain started to pour and the camps were flooded. Partially bombed buildings collapsed on children and injured them. The skies were grey, and the mood in the camps even greyer.
It was cold and wet all the time. Not a single building in Shatila camp was watertight. Torrents of rainwater poured in through shell holes and the rain dripped steadily from the smaller bullet holes. Everywhere I went in Europe I tried to impress upon people the right of the Palestinians to have a roof over their heads.
The hospital was by far the least destroyed of all the buildings in Shatila, yet Dr Kiran, one of the volunteer anaesthetists from MAP who worked in Shatila, slept on a wet floor with his mattress dripping with water. Media attention faded. It was not news any more. Away from the cameras and the tape-recorders, hidden from the news reporters, the Palestinians continued to suffer in silence, forgotten and forsaken by a world without conscience.
Once again I returned to Beirut, having failed to marshal enough international support to bring about the reconstruction of the camps. Like everyone else in the camps, I became very depressed.
Then something happened. On a gloomy, wet December day, when the floodwater in Shatila was up to mid-calf, we got news that the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank had risen up against the Israeli Army. It was 9 December 1987. The news bulletin said that Palestinians in the occupied territories were demonstrating against the Israeli occupation, and little children were throwing stones at well-armed Israeli soldiers. This news was a breath of fresh air in the depressing Beirut camps. Suddenly, everyone in Shatila was talking about the
Uprising in the Occupied Territories’.
Not long before, I had watched children in the camp drawing dead bodies on the walls with some gentian violet – a skin antiseptic lotion – which they had taken from Susan Wighton’s clinic. The pictures were their testimony of a stolen childhood. But now all the children gathered around listening eagerly to the adults talk about the uprising in the occupied territories. They made ‘V’ signs in the alleyways at anyone who passed by.
I had always suspected that Palestinians in exile and Palestinians under occupation were two parts of one divided body, longing to be reunited; that a victory for one would inspire the other. Now I had my proof. The exiles around me in the camps of Lebanon were uplifted and inspired by what was taking place in the occupied territories. They heard of the growth of the resistance of their brothers and sisters living under occupation. They rejoiced.
It was twenty years since Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians living under Israeli occupation had lived in utter misery and wretchedness for two decades. But now they were standing up and telling the occupiers that they were not taking it any more.
Like many Palestinians in the camps of Lebanon, I could not visit the Israeli-occupied territories. But I wanted to know about them, and I listened to people who had visited or came from those areas, and learnt what life under Israeli occupation meant. I asked a Palestinian friend from the Gaza Strip what it had been like there. For her, life was difficult. On top of harsh living conditions – had, crowded housing, poor sanitation and poverty – there were also the oppressive conditions imposed by the occupying authorities. There were curfews, arrests, restrictions of movement, threats by the Israeli Army to close down camps, and the arbitrary demolition of people’s homes. She was engaged to a Palestinian abroad, hut was refused permission to leave Gaza to marry him. Now and then the Israelis would call her up for interrogation – sometimes just to mock her or threaten her, sometimes making her hope she would be allowed to leave, for the enjoyment of watching her disappointment when she was told that it was all a mistake.
One day she received a message from the Israelis to call in to get her exit permit. She thought it was the usual false alarm, and so she was totally unprepared when she arrived only to be told to leave occupied Gaza by land across the Sinai desert into Egypt. She was told she could not return to her family in Gaza ever again. My friend told me she had to leave on the spot, before her exit permit was withdrawn by the Israeli authorities. After four years of waiting, she had to go in such a hurry that there was not even time to say goodbye to all her friends and family. It was a one-way ticket from the occupied lands to exile with her husband.
The best land was taken over by the Israelis. From another friend I heard how Palestinians in the West Bank who tried to hold on to ancestral lands were squeezed out by all sorts of pressure. Some people’s homes were demolished, while others were sealed by the Army, and evicted families were forced to live in tents. To dry out the farms and olive groves of the Palestinians, the Israelis sank very deep wells which drained away all the subsoil water, diverting it to irrigate the playgrounds and gardens of the newly-arrived settlers from the United States and Europe. It was illegal for any Palestinian to sink a well, and they were forced to pay the Israelis for the water stolen from them.
Each morning at about four o’clock, able-bodied Palestinian males would assemble at various centres to await selection. Israeli owners of factories, construction projects and farms would arrive to select their Palestinian labourers for the day, taking away the Arabs they had chosen like slave owners in medieval times walking away with their chosen slaves. Slave owners were stuck with their slaves, but the Israelis would return their workers at the end of the day after having extracted their labour from them. Over 100,000 workers would be selected each day. So the Palestinians, robbed of their homes and lands, were now reduced to daily wage slaves in what could have been their own land. What of decency, of morality, of godliness? What of God’s commandment to the tribes of Israel in the Old Testament, concerning their relations with those outside the tribe: But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.’ (Leviticus XIX, 34) This was not honoured in the Israel of the twentieth century.
The whole idea of Palestine was outlawed. People caught in possession of items in the colours of the Palestine flag would be jailed, never mind if they supported the PLO. Children as young as three or four years old had been arrested for being anti-Israeli. Most Palestinians who had been arrested and had spent time in Israeli prisons, would tell similar stories of the free use of torture by the Israelis in prison. Many of them, including children, were also sexually assaulted by their Israeli interrogators. My friends could have gone on describing the crimes committed by the Israelis against the Palestinian people.
When I tried to comprehend how the Palestinians coped with all this brutality, I was told of an Arabic word which was part of the daily vocabulary of the Palestinians living under occupation – ‘sumud’. It meant steadfastness, endurance. For me it came across most clearly in the translation of this song, which expressed the feelings of the Palestinians when they were beaten, when their homes were blown up by the Israelis, when their lands were confiscated, when they were deported and threatened with death:
I Am Enduring
I am enduring, steadfastly, I am enduring
In my homeland, I am enduring
If they snatch away my bread, I am enduring
If they murder my children, I am enduring If they blow up my house, O my house
In the shadow of your walls, I am enduring.
With pride, I am enduring
With a stick, a knife, I am enduring
With a flag in my hand, I am enduring; And if they cut off my hand and the flag With the other hand, I am enduring.
With my field and my garden, I am enduring
With determination in my beliefs, I am enduring
With my nails and my teeth, I am enduring;
And if wounds in my body should multiply With my wounds and my blood, I am enduring.
This was a song which was sung by Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, by people who had to face the most well-equipped army in the world with only their bodies and stones. But after December 1987, televisions in homes all over Western Europe and the USA showed scenes of little Palestinian children braving Israeli tanks and armoured cars with their stones. David and Goliath had come to mind during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but this really was the story of David with his stones and the mighty Goliath all over again. The more the Israeli army tried to smash the uprising, the more concerted became the resistance. Nasty scenes of Israeli soldiers beating up Palestinians and deliberately breaking their limbs, of pregnant Palestinian women being kicked by soldiers, of the liberal use of tear-gas against antioccupation demonstrators and of live ammunition being used against unarmed Palestinians shocked the civilised West – twenty years after the process first started.
Liberal Israelis expressed concern at the level of violence in the occupied territories – they were afraid that their army recruits might become brutalised by beating up Palestinian women and children. Just like beating up animals, it brutalised those who did it repeatedly.
Until quite recently, I shared the widespread belief that the super-efficient Israeli Army did not inflict extreme brutality: I thought it was incapable of doing this. In early 1983, when I first returned to London after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, I was interviewed by the editor of a Saudi magazine. He was a very quiet man, and listened very carefully to everything I said. At the end of the interview, he asked me, ‘Do you ever cry when you think of the
Palestinians?’
‘By God, you bet I do,’ I said. ‘If I do not even do that, I am an animal.’
‘I know that, doctor,’ he said. ‘Thank you for being our friend.’ And then he rolled up his shirt sleeve, and there on his arm was a large ugly scar from an old machine-gun wound. ‘I was ten when this happened,’ he said. The Israelis came to my home in the West Bank.’
There were no television cameras on the West Bank then, and so atrocities were perpetrated unnoticed. It had taken twenty years for the Western media to publicise the case of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It took the massive uprising which started in 1987 to expose the true face of the occupation.
Chapter 30
It was a long, unpleasant winter. One morning, I woke up in the clinic in Bourj el-Brajneh. When I opened my eyes, I looked into the smiling face of Dolly Fong. ‘Good Morning, Swee. Did you sleep well?’ She greeted me with a cup of coffee. It was a typical Sunday: there would be no routine work, but if the camp was attacked, then the clinic would become a resuscitation centre for the wounded. Except for the times when Susan Wighton came back, Dolly was the only foreigner in this clinic, and had held the place together since July 1987. The camp people always referred to this clinic as Suzy’s clinic, or Dolly’s clinic, after their two devoted foreign medical volunteers. But its proper name was the Samir alKhatib Clinic. The PRCS built this clinic in 1985, and named it after a doctor of theirs killed by the Israelis.
Dolly Fong with her patients in the Samir elKhatib Clinic, often called ‘Dolly’s clinic’ – Bourj el-Brajneh.
Dolly Fong was one of the eleven medical volunteers sent by the Malaysian people to work in Lebanon. For me, the Malaysian volunteers were very special. They were hardworking and undemanding, and they instinctively felt with and for the Palestinians. Most of them had given up jobs or business opportunities to work in Lebanon.
There was Mathina Gulam Mydin, a Malaysian nurse working in the south with both the Palestinians and Lebanese Shi’ites. I can remember the night when she received news that her grandmother had died. Mathina was very close to her grandmother and had been scared that she would never see her again once she left for Lebanon. Her fears proved wellfounded, but she was not bitter at having lost the opportunity to say goodbye to her grandmother, and she behaved positively. Very few of us knew that she sat up the whole night crying, because she continued work the next day as though nothing had happened.
Then there was Tengku Mustapha Tengku Mansoor, a Malaysian pharmacist who was also a prince. But some prince he was – he had never accepted any of the money which came with his birth. He had worked and earned his own keep, as well as providing for his wife and kids, and his fifteen cats. When he heard of the need for medical personnel in Lebanon, Tengku left his family and dispensary and came. The camp people loved him. I remember vividly those nights when he was on duty. Until one or two in the morning, his Palestinian friends would call through the broken windows of Haifa
Hospital, ‘Mustapha, Amir Mustapha, please come and have coffee with us.’ Amir was the Arabic word for prince.
The others, nurse Pok Lui, Dr Naidu, Dr Hor, nurse Hamidah, nurse Hadji Rosnah, Dr Yussef and paramedics Buddit and Ahmed, were all people with hearts of gold. It was good for the Palestinians to see people from the Third World who had responded out of solidarity, free from the paternalism that European volunteers sometimes showed.
For me, it was not simply a matter of being extremely proud. I was born on the beautiful Malaysian island of Penang. A crystal-clear rapid, Ayer Itam, flowed down from near our home to join the large, lazy river which drained into the sea. Grandfather’s garden was filled with large gardenia bushes, tall fruit trees and red and blue flowering plants whose name I never learnt. My younger brother and I loved the tamarind trees best. The mango, jackfruit, rambutan and starfruit trees were absolutely forbidden to us kids, but we were allowed every liberty with the tamarind. Its fruits were always too sour to eat, and handfuls of them were surrendered to the grownups to be used for cooking at the end of the day. That was my childhood home: a tropical paradise. For eleven years I had lived in exile away from South East Asia: I could not even visit my grandfather’s house in Penang. Now the Palestinians had brought the Malaysian people back to me, in a wonderful way.
After I had my coffee, Dolly Fong looked at me. I knew she wanted to say something, but like most Malaysian girls of Chinese origin, she was naturally shy. I was kept guessing for a minute or two. Finally it came out: ‘I wonder if you have time to prune the roses on the rooftop? You have lived in England for so many years, and if you could do it like how the English do their rose gardens, would you mind?’ What an assignment in the middle of besieged Bourj el-Brajneh! The clinic had become Dolly’s home. She and Susan had planted all sorts of flowers on the rooftop. We called it the ‘rooftop’, but it was not exactly a rooftop. It was the upper floor of the clinic – blown apart by shells. The roof was demolished and two walls were missing. Thank God nobody had ever died when the clinic was hit by incoming shells. Now it was to have a roof garden. Like the Palestinians, Dolly and Suzy were determined to turn the bits of concrete into a home, and the shell-damaged top floor into a garden.
As I was clipping away at the rose plant, I thought of Rashidiyeh camp in south Lebanon and of how, during the siege and bombardment, the Palestinians had built a hospital. At first I did not believe it possible, but when I sneaked into Rashidiyeh camp, I saw the newly-built hospital. The bricks and cement had been brought into the camp just before the siege started. The siege of Rashidiyeh was as nasty as in the Beirut camps, but still the people of Rashidiyeh had managed to build themselves a hospital while the camp was being attacked and besieged. So a rose garden for the Samir alKhatib Clinic was not mad at all – it was entirely reasonable.
In January 1988, more than two and a half years after Amal’s first attacks on the refugee camps, Nabih Berri, their leader, announced the lifting of the siege from all the camps. He said this was to express ‘solidarity’ with the uprising in the occupied territories. More than two thousand Palestinians had been killed in the Amal attacks on the camps, but they had been unable to crush the Palestinians. International pressure had forced the Syrians to call a ceasefire. No Arab leader could marshal popular support from his people by taking an overt anti-Palestinian stance. The Arab masses saw the Palestinians as the heroes, and the cause of Palestine as sacred, and were taking to the streets to demonstrate their solidarity. The Lebanese people, as always, wanted to support the Palestinians. The people of Syria wanted to support the uprising. The popularity of the Palestine cause, and the courage of the Palestinians in the occupied territories had forced Berri, the leader of Amal, to remove the checkpoints from the camps!
That same month, I flew back to London. This time Beirut airport was open, though the flight was delayed for six hours. Back in London, I was just in time to see Mike Holmes and Susan Rae off at Heathrow Airport. Susan was the fundraiser for the MAP office in Scotland. Both of them were on their way to the occupied territories, and this was Mike’s first trip to the Middle East. Nearly a hundred Palestinians had been killed since the beginning of the uprising, six weeks before, and hundreds more had been wounded. Mike was taking out a cash grant to help some of the injured people pay their hospital fees. Each time a Palestinian needed hospital admission, the Israelis charged a fee of more than a thousand US dollars as initial deposit. Palestinians unable to pay did not get treated. When I looked at Mike’s brand new passport, I laughed. ‘How are you going to convince the Israelis you’re a bona fide tourist, and not a supporter of the Palestinians going specially because of the uprising?’ I asked, knowing that Mike was constitutionally incapable of lying.
It was also funny watching Susan and Mike check in at London’s Heathrow Airport with a whole lot of Israelis and Christian pilgrims who were boarding the flight for Tel Aviv. As I was waving them off, I shouted, ‘Kiss Jerusalem for me
‘A few Israelis turned round and stared at me – they must have wondered what on earth this Chinese woman had to do with Jerusalem.
They were met by Susan Wighton at Tel Aviv airport. Suzy, who had worked in the occupied territories before, was very worried about her Palestinian friends when she heard of the brutality of the Israeli soldiers and the killings of Palestinians, and so she went ahead of the other two to visit people.
Unable to visit the occupied territories, I waited desperately for Mike to get back to hear about events there. The news bulletins in London showed Israeli atrocities against the Palestinian demonstrators, but I wanted to know the spirit of the people in the uprising. If I could not be with them, I wanted to feel with them.
At the back of my mind were many questions. How long would the Palestinians under occupation be able to sustain the uprising? How long could they stand being beaten up, being imprisoned and being hungry? If the general strike there continued, how were they going to live? Who was going to bring milk to the Palestinian children? Were these people as strong and steadfast as the people of Shatila camp? What could we do to support them?
As I was eager to hear Mike’s report of his trip, I arranged to meet him in MAP’s London office. Mike shared his office with the telex and because he was MAP’s publicity officer his phone rang a lot. He also had an open-door policy and so volunteers wandered in and out of his office.
One tip I picked up from the journalists who had interviewed me was to use a tape recorder, so I brought one along with me. We settled down in his office and switched the recorder on. Mike told me his first day in the occupied territories was a ‘baptism of fire’. He told me that he had learnt more about Israeli occupation and Palestinian courage from experiences in those twenty-four hours, than in his whole life. Susan Rae and he arrived at Tel Aviv Airport at 5 AM, 17 January 1988. By 9 AM, they were driving towards the ancient city of Nablus, which took its name from the time when Napoleon invaded. The people of that city resisted, and hence it became ‘the city Napoleon could not take’.
On their way they almost drove into a demonstration by the Palestinians, with Israeli soldiers firing into the crowd. As he told me about this, Mike gave a shudder. He said that for a moment he thought they were going to get caught in the demonstration and risk being beaten up, shot at and arrested like everyone else. Fortunately the demonstration drifted away in the opposite direction, followed by the Israeli soldiers, and the party continued on their way to Nablus. ‘How did you find Nablus?’ I asked.
‘I had my first whiff of tear gas there, and I must say it wasn’t very pleasant. But the Palestinians really weren’t afraid at all,’ Mike said. ‘When we got to Nablus, Israeli soldiers were firing tear gas into the homes of Palestinians. It wasn’t just CS gas, it was new versions – CS 515, CS 560, worse than the original CS gas.’ He showed me a photograph of a tear-gas canister. ‘Look, this was made in Pennsylvania,’ he said. ‘Look at the date on it. It says 1988. Even if it came out of the factory on New Year’s day, it took less than three weeks to get to Israel and be fired at Palestinian demonstrators.’ Mike got visibly upset and stopped to light a cigarette before continuing.
‘Soon after we got there, Palestinians came out to see us, and one thing they showed us was their personal collections of rubber bullets. People think rubber bullets are pretty harmless. But they’re not that harmless at all. While we were there, a four-year-old boy was shot in the head with a rubber bullet. He became unconscious, and one pupil started to dilate. Palestinian doctors said that the rubber bullet had caused internal bleeding into the brain, and he had to be transferred to the Hadassah Hospital for brain surgery.’ This was the hospital Paul Morris, Ellen Siegel and I visited in 1982, after testifying to the Israeli Kahan Commission. I knew it was an excellent hospital, and I asked Mike what the outcome was.
‘I don’t know if the boy survived. It takes at least an hour to get from Nablus to the Hadassah. If I’d a fragile head, which was bleeding internally, the last thing I’d want would be to be driven along a bad road for an hour. And a lot of time was wasted between the referring Palestinian doctor and the admitting Israeli doctor over the telephone. Instead of asking for the patient to be sent quickly, the doctor at the Hadassah kept insisting on the child’s folks bringing 1,200 Israeli shekels as initial deposit, otherwise the kid would be sent back.’
This ‘cash on delivery’ style of dealing with the wounded made Mike furious, especially since the little boy had been wounded by Israeli soldiers.
Just then Clare Moran, one of our most efficient and reliable workers, came in, and started typing at sixty words per minute on the typewriter in Mike’s office. We gave up, and went to sit on the table by the coffee machine at the bottom of the staircase, hoping to get some peace and quiet. ‘We were still at Nablus,’ continued Mike, ‘and were invited to visit the office of the General Federation of Trade Unions. They’d a list of names of all the people wounded so far, and wanted to know if MAP could help with their treatment. There was one point when we were talking, that I could have sworn the wall of the building moved towards me. I was stunned, but the Palestinians laughed – it was only Israeli aeroplanes breaking the sound barrier. They do this all the time to intimidate the Palestinians.’ Mike started to laugh. He was still a bit embarrassed at not having been able to tell the difference between a bomb exploding and planes breaking the sound barrier.
‘Then we went to another home, but unfortunately Israeli soldiers spotted us. They knew we were foreigners and they wanted to get hold of us. Then a whole lot of Palestinian kids motioned us into a house, and the owner locked the soldiers out. But the soldiers stood outside, banging on the door, and talking on their walkie-talkies. After about ten minutes, the soldiers left and the kids knocked on the door and told us it was safe to leave. The kids had gone round the back of the house, and started to throw stones at the Israeli soldiers, who then went after the kids, and forgot about us! We were saved by Palestinian kids! They were really magic. They were everywhere, and not afraid of anything.’
‘So you have fallen for the Palestinian kids, Mike?’ I asked.
‘How could I not? They saved our bacon,’ he said with a smile. He then went on. ‘We visited Palestinian families, many of them living in absolute squalor. One man said to us,
“Look at these miserable conditions. I brought a family into this world for Palestine. Look at my sons and daughters – their bodies were bruised and broken by the beatings of the Israelis. But when the bandages came off, they went out again to demonstrate against the occupiers. I am so proud of them.” And when we spoke to the children, they said the same thing about their parents.’
At that point we were joined by three students who had volunteered to help with our new ambulance appeal. One of them, a young woman I loved very much, who was delighted to see me back from Lebanon, rushed up to me, knocking over Mike’s coffee and putting the tape recorder out of action. The poor girl was very embarrassed, but soon we were all roaring with laughter. Mike and I adjourned to the room where the photocopier was, and he continued his colourful description of the occupied territories, while I took notes in long hand. ‘We visited Ballata camp,’ he said. ‘There we saw how the lives of the people were made absolutely miserable by the occupation. There were open sewers, and the smell was awful. One thing the television cannot get across to viewers is the stench. They’re not allowed to have covered sewers under the law of the occupation. But there’s no hatred against the ordinary Israeli. We met the father of a man who’d been deported a couple of weeks ago, and whose wife and daughter had been beaten up. He said they didn’t hate the British or the Americans, they didn’t even hate the Jews. He said, “They’re not our enemies. Our enemies are the soldiers and the occupation. Remove them, and we’ll live in peace as we did before.” He was so broad-shouldered!’
This was what I knew to be the case. Over the years, the Palestinians had been portrayed as a bitter people prone to hatred. Like Mike, I found the reverse. Most of the Palestinians I knew were ready to forgive and forget. Sometimes when I went on and on about the Sabra and Shatila massacre, my Palestinian friends would ask me to put it behind me, and get on with life, but I found a great quote for them in Yad Vashem in Israel. It said: ‘Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption.’ I urged them to learn from Jewish wisdom.
Sometimes, when Mike talked about the Palestinians who had moved him, he would say something like, ‘You know, when I heard him say that, I felt a lump in my throat.’ I would dutifully make a note in the margin – ‘lump in the throat’ – to remind me when I got down to transcribing the notes that Mike was on the verge of crying at that point.
‘This anxious Palestinian mother had to go to the Israeli Security to ask for the release of her nine-year-old son, who’d been captured for throwing stones. Not so long ago, the boy’s father was detained by the Israelis, and he was still on the wanted list. So the boy’s father couldn’t go to claim his son, and had to send his wife instead. She was a teacher. The Israelis told her, “You’re a teacher. You mustn’t teach your nine-year-old son to hate.” She replied, “A nine-year-old should never hate anyone. The occupation taught him to hate the soldiers, I did not teach him that. Remove the occupation, and let my son learn to love your people.”
‘Palestinian kids appeared all over the place, making victory signs with their wee hands. The kids knew no fear. The Israelis arrested a three-year-old boy for throwing stones, and they threatened him: “You’re only three and shouldn’t know how to throw stones at us. Someone must have taught you. Tell us who taught you, or else…” The little boy replied, “My brother.” That was it. Fully-armed Israeli soldiers picked up the toddler and stormed into his home looking for his brother. They found him in a corner playing – he was only one year older than his baby brother!’
As Mike got really carried away, his Scottish accent became stronger and stronger. Sometimes I had to stop him and ask him to repeat what he said. At this he would throw up his hands in despair, call me a ‘bloody foreigner’ and start all over again.
The party then went down to Gaza and visited the hospital and some clinics there. It was difficult for Mike properly to assess the medical needs there, as he was not a medical person, but he tried to make a mental note of the kind of injuries he came across. The casualties of the uprising seemed phenomenal. Most of them could not get proper treatment. The deliberate policy of breaking the limbs of the Palestinians meant that victims would be crippled for a long time. A fractured limb takes a good few months to mend, and then an equally long time to be rehabilitated to full functional status. As an orthopaedic or bone surgeon, I know that there is no way to hurry the process of bone healing. If all four limb bones are broken, then the injured person will be quite useless for up to a year. Meanwhile, if he was the sole breadwinner, his family would starve.
‘The Shifa Hospital in Gaza City was packed with wounded Palestinians,’ Mike told me. ‘The whole place was a heap of bruised and bashed up people. People with broken arms, broken legs, crushed chests and tummies. A seventeenyear-old who was on his way to visit his aunt got shot in one leg, and was brought in pursued by Israeli soldiers hurling tear gas at him. As though that wasn’t enough, they came into the hospital and smashed up his other leg. As he was put into bed, he shouted: “I don’t like the Israeli soldiers. They should leave Palestine and give the Palestinians their rights!” He was laid down next to a forty-five-year-old Palestinian who had both his testicles crushed by the Israelis. Next to the fortyfive-year-old was his thirteen-year-old-son, both of whose arms were broken by soldiers.
‘One thing a lot of people told us was this: “If Shatila could resist three years of continuous attacks and siege, we too can resist the occupation.”’
And he produced a clipping from a local English- language paper. There, in bold type, was just what he had just told me. To me, this was most telling – it linked the struggle of those in exile with those living under occupation. Were these people as strong and steadfast as the people of Shatila camp? I now had the answer. The momentum of the uprising was founded on the steadfastness of the Palestinians in Lebanon. Shatila had journeyed from exile to home, from Beirut to Jerusalem.
Chapter 31
If I were writing a romantic story about the Palestinians and wanted a good ending, this chapter would not be necessary. It would be so much more satisfying emotionally for both the reader and myself just to end with the uprising which has captured the imagination of the world. Unfortunately, this is not possible. The tragedy of the Palestinians in Lebanon continues, and as their friends, we continue to live in their broken lives and homes. There are half a million Palestinians in Lebanon, whose misery you will now understand. The uprising gave them dignity and a new meaning to life, but as 1988 unfolded, the same forlorn situation persisted. The siege was reimposed once the media attention faded. The MAP medical volunteers in Lebanon continued working quietly in the refugee camps and the shelters. They too began to ask me: ‘How much longer?’
Spring returned to Lebanon. It was April 1988, and I returned to Beirut again, for the sixth time. This was to be a short trip, mainly to assess the situation, so that MAP could work out where our limited resources would best be deployed. I also wanted to see our volunteers and talk to them. Many of them had stayed for a long time in the wretched conditions of the camps, enduring through air raids, shelling and homelessness with the Palestinians through the long winter.
The wretched misery suffered during the winter of 198788 could only really he understood by those who lived in those camps. The walls were full of large shell holes, roughly covered with small pieces of polythene. Rain and cold winds came through. The last wooden doors and window shutters were burnt during the depth of the previous winter, when people ran out of fuel and firewood. A year had passed but repair and reconstruction of broken homes was totally forbidden. So the windows still had no shutters. Nevertheless, another year had passed.
On this trip I did a fair amount of travelling, covering the Beka’a valley, Beirut and south Lebanon. The largest camp in the Beka’a was Bar Elias, controlled by the Syrians. Most of the Palestinians came here from south Lebanon or from Beirut, mainly after the 1982 invasion and the camp wars of 1985 to 1988. Some of us visited the head of the PRCS there to discuss how MAP could best support them, and I was impressed by how well run the hospital was, despite the lack of facilities and equipment. There were about 100,000 homeless Palestinians living in shelters around the camp, in degrading conditions. Just up the road was Anjar, the detention centre run by the Syrian Intelligence where Palestinian detainees were interrogated and tortured before they were carted off to Syria.
Spring meant that the bitter rains had ceased, and the sun warmed the mountains and beaches once again. But back in Beirut, when Rita Montanas, a seventy-five-year-old German public health worker, who was the latest recruit to join MAP, started her daily routine of distributing milk to the refugees living in shelters all over the ravaged city, there was nothing to remind us of the beauty of spring – apart perhaps from
Rita’s radiant smile.
There was still no rebuilding allowed in the devastated camps: the blockade of construction materials continued, and the people remained homeless. The International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, 1987, had come and gone. Apart from various resolutions at international conferences, there was nothing to show for it. Resolutions stating that everyone had the right to a home meant nothing to people whose only choice was between the rubble of their camps and the wretched refugee shelters outside the camps in the streets of Beirut.
The people in the shelters called Rita ‘Mama Halib’. Halib means milk in Arabic. They changed her name to ‘Mama Rita’ when they realised that she brought more than milk for their children. She brought them clothes, books, medicines and most of all, she brought much-needed friendship into those grim and God-forsaken shelters. I knew that God had given Rita her warm heart and smile to bring a bit of happiness into the squalor of the shelters and she also had the gift of patience – to carry on working as long as she could be of service to others. Leila Shahid, my Palestinian friend, once said to me: ‘Sometimes when I look at the friends we Palestinians have, I begin to believe that God understands that we suffer too much. At very dark moments, we were given very special friends.’
‘Mama Rita’ and Swee distributing milk to children in the refugee sheltres of West Beirut.
1988.
The shelters were very humiliating: the ultimate insult to the Palestinians. They had converted tents to houses, they had turned camps into exile townships. Now their towns were destroyed, their identity was crushed, and they were forced to squat in these shelters. Each shelter was partitioned by black drapes into small spaces for individual families. A floor area of fifty feet by fifty feet would easily hold a few hundred people in shelters. In these darkly lit squats, there was never enough light to see, but one could smell the overcrowding. An oppressive atmosphere was created by the overproduction of carbon dioxide, the damp, and the depression. I thought of a book by my friend Rosemary Sayigh. It was called
Palestinians, from Peasants to Revolutionaries. These shelters made me think, sadly, of writing another book: Palestinians, from Revolutionaries to Refugees. In these squats, Palestine seemed so far away. Here struggle seemed to cease, and with it life as well.
But I was wrong. The helplessness was more apparent than real. Once the checkpoints were removed, people from the shelters returned to live in the destroyed camps! They made a choice between being refugees with no identity and being prisoners with dignity in the ruin and rubble of the Palestinian camps. The people in the shelters had not forgotten they were Palestinians. It was the start of transforming refugees to exiles all over again. So the population of Shatila, Bourj el-Brajneh and Rashidiyeh increased again. Shops started opening, children asked to go to school. Women began to produce Palestinian embroidery – all over again.
The PRCS picked up the pieces in the camps. They set about repairing their hospitals and clinics all over again.
Shatila Hospital and Haifa Hospital were both being refurbished.
I wanted to visit Rashidiyeh hospital and the MAP team working there. Øyvind and I took an ambulance-load of supplies and drove south to Rashidiyeh camp. Our route was along the same bumpy road down which Ellen Siegel, Paul Morris and I had been driven by the Israeli Defence Force on our way to Jerusalem in 1982. On our right, the waves of the Mediterranean Sea lapped lazily along the coast. To our left, the fields and orchards had recovered from the assault of 1982. Now there were stretches of green, dotted by oranges and tangerines. The fragrance of lemon blossoms and jasmine flowers filled the air. The fields were covered with bright yellow daisies. Located near Sour, Rashidiyeh was about three hours’ drive from Beirut, provided the many checkpoints were not unduly troublesome.
The checkpoints had changed hands since 1982, but they were still there. From Beirut to the River Awali, just north of Saida, the checkpoints were now Syrian. From the Awali to just south of Saida, the checkpoints were controlled by Sunni Lebanese belonging to the Nasserite party of Moustapha Saad. From there all the way to Sour, the checkpoints were controlled by Amal. Further south would be Unifil and then the Israeli-occupied areas.
There were other camps near Sour as well as Rashidiyeh.
The smaller camps were Qasmieh, Al-Bas and Bourj elShemali. Although these camps were not under siege, the Palestinians living in them had no peace, as there were regular kidnappings and occasional murders.
Rashidiyeh camp is a mere seventeen kilometres from the border of Israel, or ‘Occupied Palestine’, as the people in the camp call it. Unlike Shatila camp, it is spacious. People are able to grow vegetables, fruits and flowers inside the camp. One boundary is the Mediterranean Sea, with stretches of sandy beach. The other boundary is provided by orchards planted with oranges and lemons. It was thanks to its orange trees and numerous plants that Rashidiyeh did not starve to death during the siege.
Like Ain al-Helweh camp in Saida, Rashidiyeh was demolished by the Israelis in 1982; like Ain al-Helweh, it was rebuilt. It was badly shelled by Amal during the recent camp war of October 1986 to April 1987, and its entrances were still guarded by Amal gunmen. The people of Rashidiyeh had already started picking up the pieces. The rubble from the blown-up homes was collected and used as building blocks to repair the damaged areas. Men, women and children were busy working in the fields. Vegetables were growing. Little shops opened. In this camp, you could use a bicycle instead of walking because the distances were fairly large. Most of the original Rashidiyeh was built on higher ground, but there was a newer part of the camp towards the beach, with rows of onestorey brick houses which had been heavily shelled and destroyed. Beyond that area was the soft sandy beach of the Mediterranean coast. In the past, it was possible to fish, swim and sunbathe here, but the war had destroyed that source of food and recreation. It was covered by snipers round the clock.
Dr Salah, the PRCS director in Rashidiyeh, was busy helping to paint the hospital, which was nearly ready. Like other male Palestinians, Dr Salah had been under siege for a very long time. Because the siege of Rashidiyeh was so sudden and unexpected, Dr Salah found himself the only doctor in a besieged camp of seventeen thousand people throughout the whole of the last war. He treated the wounded, tended the sick, took charge of building the hospital during the siege, and looked after the medical needs of the camp. He looked extremely tired, but was kind and patient. He had earned the respect of all in the camps, including the MAP volunteers.
The MAP volunteers were Dr Kiran Gargesh and Susan Bernard, a theatre sister. Kiran is an Indian anaesthetist who first joined MAP in 1986. The PRCS desperately needed someone to set up anaesthetic services in the newly-built hospital in Ain al-Helweh camp. I remember our first meeting very well. A gentle, vegetarian doctor arrived at the London MAP office to see me. He had a terrible cold, and so did I. But ill as I was, something told me that he possessed a quality of selflessness which so many of us lacked. He left for Lebanon in 1986, and had since then worked tirelessly and quietly, not only as an anaesthetist, but also as a teacher of anaesthetics. He had worked in Ain al-Helweh camp, Shatila and now Rashidiyeh.
Dr Kiran Gargesh teaching anaesthetic technicians in Rashidiyeh.
Kiran and Susan had managed to get into Rashidiyeh during one of the few days when the siege was partially lifted. They wanted to help the PRCS set up an operating theatre in the camp. Susan had set off from the MAP office to come to Lebanon for a three-month stint, but finding it difficult to leave, had chosen to stay on in Rashidiyeh. She was now busy setting up the operating theatre. Kiran had once again started to train anaesthetic technicians for the PRCS in Rashidiyeh. I sat through one of his classes and enjoyed every minute of it.
It was good to talk to Kiran again. He is absolutely stable mentally, and it was very reassuring for me to know that even mentally stable individuals could fall helplessly in love with Palestinians. I often wondered if I was crazy – that was the only way I could explain my obsession with the Palestinians. In the summer of 1987, I was going back to Beirut with four new Malaysian medical volunteers. We went via Cyprus, and stayed in a hotel while waiting for a flight into Beirut. The hotel manager recognised me, and he started on at me: ‘You’re not going back to Lebanon again, are you? And with all these new medical volunteers. Why do you keep doing this? You know they’re all crazy in Lebanon, and it’s so dangerous.’
The Malaysians looked at me – they had already been briefed of the dangers they were likely to face in Lebanon. After a short silence, I replied, ‘Yes, I know they’re all crazy.
But we’re crazy too.’
The manager burst out laughing, and ordered drinks for all of us. As long as doctors and nurses from all over the world selflessly continue to offer their lives and skills to the people in Lebanon, I will continue to be inspired by this madness. But Kiran was always so balanced – always a doctor, full of faith in life, and love for the Palestinians. No matter how depressing conditions had become, like during the siege, or throughout the Israeli air raids, during which some of his dearest friends died, he remained quietly confident. Perhaps it is his Indian philosophy, I do not know, but I am grateful for his calm temperament.
We were entertained in style by the Palestinians in Rashidiyeh. The PRCS and the women’s union got together and gave us dinner. Representatives of the popular committee of the camp also joined the dinner. We spoke of the uprising, the need for a Palestinian homeland, the future of Palestinians in Lebanon. The food was wonderful, and had been grown in the camp. Deep fried eggplants, delicious salads, freshly baked Arabic pitta bread, rice cooked with garlic, cardomoms, almonds and fresh lemon. To go with it was mint tea and Arabic coffee. There were also Arabic sweets and puddings to finish with, but I did not try them, as I do not like sweets. We went on till the small hours, and then parted. Rashidiyeh had no electricity, and I had to use a torch. However Kiran and Susan had learnt to move with great agility in the darkness. We returned to the medical volunteers’ flat in Rashidiyeh. This was the upstairs of a building which had been hit by shells, and there were bullet holes in the walls. But it was decent accommodation under the circumstances. Susan made us more coffee – this time ‘Nescafé’. It had become quite chilly, and we washed with really cold water scooped out with plastic buckets from a well nearby. Lighting was from a little kerosene lamp. The stove was a gadget Susan got from Sweden. It was hard work to make a cup of coffee, as Susan had to spend a good half hour pumping away to build up enough pressure for the paraffin to ignite. But their outfit was homely, and we sat talking till we could no longer keep our eyes open. I have learnt that such rare moments are precious, and it seems like a crime to have to sleep.
The sniping and shelling in Rashidiyeh had taken its toll. There was a large new graveyard where all those who lost their lives during the last attacks were buried. Moreover, this was one of the camps harassed by the Israeli air force, sometimes merely breaking the sound barrier to intimidate its inhabitants, sometimes actually dropping bombs. It was badly damaged during recent attacks, but its people remained stoic. Rashidiyeh stood firm. The Israelis had bombed Rashidiyeh camp on many occasions – but each time the camp was rebuilt. The children of Rashidiyeh stood and posed for me victoriously – like their counterparts in Shatila.
Anniversaries of massacres and wars succeeded each other: the Palestinian calendar was full of such events. We remembered and mourned friends. At about 7 AM on 16 April 1988, I was at the NORWAC flat in Hamra, having returned from the refugee camps the night before, and was about to leave for Bourj el-Brajneh. A Palestinian friend arrived at the flat just before I set off. ‘Did you hear the news?’ he asked me.
‘What news?’ I asked. I had not listened to the BBC that morning.
He said, ‘It is much better you hear from me now before you go about the day. Abu Jihad has been assassinated.’
I did not know whether to believe it or not. I had never met the Palestinian leader Abu Jihad, but I had met his wife Um Jihad at a meeting in an international conference in Geneva. We switched on the radio, and listened to the news. Gunmen had broken into Abu Jihad’s home in Tunis, and had murdered him and three other people in front of his wife and his three-year-old son. The murderers even videoed the killing. The thought of his family having to live with that made me sick.
Everyone in Lebanon was stunned – the PRCS, the people both inside and outside the camps, Palestinians and Lebanese alike. People were emotionally paralysed for the first couple of days.
The Israelis alleged that Abu Jihad was the leader of the uprising in the occupied territories. The Palestinians accused Israel of killing him to put an end to the uprising. To the Palestinians in Lebanon, whose morale had been lifted by the events in the occupied territories since the end of 1987, the death of Abu Jihad was a crushing blow. I went to see Um Walid on the day the news of the assassination broke. It was the first time the two of us sat together for more than an hour without talking. She just cried, and I watched her quietly. Like the other Palestinians trapped in semi-siege in the camps of Lebanon, she could not even attend his funeral. Where would he be buried? No one knew at that stage. Abu Jihad remained an exile in life and death. The people in Bourj el-Brajneh camp borrowed the large table from the Samir al-Khatib Clinic and draped it with a Palestine flag, and held a memorial service. Speeches and prayers were broadcast through the mosque loudspeaker.
The more I spoke to Palestinians, the more clearly one message emerged. The Israelis thought there was only one Abu Jihad. But the Palestinians told me: ‘In the refugee camps of Lebanon and among the massive uprising in the occupied territories we are all Abu Jihads.’
The people in the occupied territories responded to the murder by escalating the uprising. More were killed, wounded and arrested by the Israelis, but more stood up against them. Palestinians in Shatila told me that MAP must give priority to the uprising. They wanted all aid to go to the occupied territories even at the expense of Shatila. It was very painful for me to hear that from Shatila, as I knew how badly they were suffering and how much they needed all our support. I knew how much they needed the rebuilding of their destroyed homes. Their morale was low, as the siege had still not been lifted, three years after it started, and nearly six months after Bern announced that it was being lifted. But the last bit of strength they had they wanted to give to the uprising.
Then another dimension seemed to open up. Syria allowed Abu Jihad’s body to be buried there. Dozens of bus-loads of people left Beirut for Syria to attend his funeral. Did this mean the beginning of a new dialogue between the Syrians .and the Palestinians? In less than a month’s time, my friend Kazeem Hassan Beddawi would have spent a whole year in prison in Syria. I had often thought of visiting his wife and their baby boy, but had not done so – for fear that she blamed me for his arrest. Kazeem was not the only Palestinian imprisoned: there were at least two thousand Palestinians held as political prisoners by the Syrian security. Would they be free at last? But hopes had been shattered before, and I have learnt of necessity to accept the disappointments.
Israeli bomber planes were breaking the sound barrier in south Lebanon. Villages in the south, as well as the Palestinian refugee camps, were attacked. In May 1988, two thousand Israeli troops crossed into southern Lebanon. People in Lebanon told me: ‘The Israelis failed to stifle the uprising in the occupied territories, so they take it out on us by threatening to invade Lebanon again.’
It was a multi-pronged attack on the Palestinians in Lebanon. Saida and the south were bombed by Israeli aeroplanes, and shelled from the sea by Israeli gunboats. The Beirut camps were attacked from the mountains, not by the Israelis, but by anti-PLO forces. Shatila and Bourj el-Brajneh were shelled incessantly from the month of May 1988. Both camps were flattened; homes and hospitals demolished.
Shatila finally collapsed on 27 June 1988, followed by Bourj el-Brajneh a few days later. I got the news of the fall of Shatila in London, having just returned from a fund- raising trip in the Gulf countries. People all over the Gulf wanted to support the uprising and build hospitals and clinics to mend the wounds of the Palestinians. What can I say? Each time I think of Shatila, I still cry. It was nearly six years since I first met the people of Sabra and Shatila. My understanding of the Palestinians began with them. It was they who taught a naive woman surgeon the meaning of justice. It was they who inspired me to struggle incessantly for a better world. Each time I felt like giving up, they would strengthen me with their example.
The memories of the 1982 Israeli invasion, the days following the evacuation of the PLO, when I shared with them their hopes in rebuilding their lives, only to be shattered by the massacres; the following years of siege on the camps, each time a new wound, gaping, deep and bleeding which a surgeon could not mend – these were now part of my daily consciousness. Sometimes I wondered why living was so painful. Sometimes I wondered why I was not buried in the mass graves, the rubble, along with everyone else in 1982. At other times, I wondered if, had I been shot dead in 1987 trying to get things into the camps, I could have been put beside my friends in Shatila mosque.
But these were just empty musings. I was alive, and I knew that as long as I kept living there was much to be done. Living or dying, I just wanted to be true to the Palestinians. Now, with Shatila gone, the light had gone out. It had defended itself to the last person. The Israelis had failed to destroy Shatila; for three years Amal under the leadership of Nabih Berri tried, and failed as well. But after six years, the recent onslaught by Syrian-backed factions finally flattened whatever was left of this little patch two hundred yards square. When the camp was overrun, there were eight people who refused to surrender. Among them was Amni, the head of the General Union of Palestinian Women in Shatila. She was one of those in Shatila who told me to hold fast on the uprising.
The fall of Shatila was a blow to us all. But that would not stifle the uprising and the demand for a Palestinian homeland. In 1982, I had witnessed the crucifixion of Palestinians in Beirut. From 1985 to 1988, I had witnessed their resurrection. I had seen their indestructible spirit in defending their dignity in their besieged camps in Lebanon. Today, they have carried their struggle for existence back to their ancestral homeland. I was no longer frightened or pessimistic. I remembered Amni telling the people of the Gaza Strip that Shatila was fighting for Gaza. The people of Gaza replied that they were fighting for the people of Shatila. After laying the foundation for the uprising, Shatila was demolished. But the physical survival of Shatila is not the point. Shatila lives in the hearts of every one of us. One day, we will rebuild it on the soil of the Palestinian homeland. Till that day, we shall honour the martyrs of Shatila with our continued support for the people in the uprising.
How long would the Palestinians under occupation be able to sustain the uprising? That question does not matter now. What matters is that it has started.
A new generation of Palestinians has grown up in the occupied territories and in the camps of Lebanon under the most dreadful conditions. They have forgotten the meaning of fear. They have chosen to die standing, rather than live on their knees. One song to emerge from the struggle in the occupied territories is by Mustafa al-Kurd and is called Stone and Onion’. With a stone to confront the Israeli military, and an onion to lessen the effect of tear gas, the Palestinian demonstrators have conquered fear. The song goes:
The fear is dead which dwelled in our hearts
Which killed the hopes and blocked the paths
Which put the lights out
The fear is dead and I buried it with my own hands
Fear was the monster which oppressed us
Which was cruel to us
Which broke the jar and spilled the oil
The fear is dead and I buried it with my own hands.
They have a dream. And I share their dream: the dream of a world just visible through the smouldering ruins of the refugee camps and the tear gas – a world where an eleven- year-old boy need not learn to use a Kalashnikov or rocketlauncher to defend his family – a world of peace, justice and security, where I will never have to tell a child, ‘Go to school,’ only to learn that the school has been bombed, or tell a girl, ‘Go help your mother get the dinner ready,’ only to have her return to tell me her mother and family have been murdered – a world where we do not have to fear being buried alive in collapsing rubble, where I will not have to patch up broken bodies only to see them being blown up again, or hold the broken body of a child in my arms and ask, ‘Why?’ or hear people ask, ‘How much longer?’ – a world where there are no prisons, no torture, no pain, no hunger and no refugee identity cards, where I can put my head down in my own home and listen to my mother’s songs as I close my eyes at the end of the day. That place is our dream, our Jerusalem.
Shatila in 1987, the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless.
POSTSCRIPT
Reflections on the 25th anniversary of the Sabra-Shatila massacre, 2007
Reflections on the 25th anniversary of the Sabra-Shatila massacre, 2007
The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel has an engraving on the wall, saying: “Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret to redemption”. Having worked and lived with those in exile and under occupation, I know Palestinians never allow themselves to forget the pain, death and suffering they have endured over the decades.
Every September, survivors and witnesses commemorate the massacre of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila camps. It is now a quarter of a century later and many of us have since died while the rest are a lot older.
Sabra’s Palestinian refugee camp no longer exists, while Shatila is a shell of its former self. The initial international outcry has long faded and the current media focus has shifted from those in exile to those living under occupation in Gaza and West Bank.
For those in exile, they see the prospect of ever returning home torn apart by the turmoil in the Occupied Territories. Gaza starves and is under military siege for months in an effort by Israel to topple a democratically-elected Palestinian government. The West Bank is cut up into pieces by a long serpentine Wall suffocating it like a boa constrictor. In 2006, Lebanon was savagely attacked by Israel in its war against Hizbullah. At least a million cluster bombs litter the southern half of the country. These were wickedly left at the moment ceasefire talks were being negotiated. Unless cleared, no one can return to the land to rebuild their homes and livelihood.
I mourn all who perished. On a personal level, I especially mourn the passing of Dr Fathi Arafat, brother of the late President Yasser Arafat. Both brothers died within days of each other, not knowing the fate of each. With their passing, Palestinians entered a new uncertain phase in their history. Dr Fathi was the founder of the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The PRCS served as a ministry of health with hospitals and clinics and treated all in need in the Lebanon. Dr Fathi had been my mentor and friend. Always an optimist, he had been inspiring to work with, and like my friends of the PRCS, I miss him.
Factionalism, military siege, starvation, arrests, bombs both conventional and unconventional, deportation and massacres are not new. They are weapons regularly deployed since 1948 to intimidate, terrorise and demoralise the Palestinians. Those who use these tactics aimed to crush them into giving up their aspiration to nationhood and to surrender their claim to membership of the human family.
But I remain optimistic and have reason to be so. Since I began my journey with the Palestinians in 1982, I have learnt that all the above repressive measures have failed to wipe the Palestinians out. I have seen strength and resilience in the face of untold hardships and persecution. I still have with me my picture of destitute Palestinian children of Shatila camp standing amid the ruin and rubble. They survived the massacre but lost their parents and homes. We thought all was lost. But they raised their hands making the victory sign and said to me: “We are not afraid, let Israel come”. I have returned many times to the camp but never been able to find those children again. They must have perished since. But they live forever in my heart. Whenever the situation becomes unbearable, I revisit this picture for strength. With each tragedy, the Palestinians’ resolve strengthens. Having been witness to this I can reassure my Palestinian friends in Occupied Palestine that they will overcome, because I have seen how the Palestinians in Lebanon overcame.
I have always felt it a great privilege and honour to be able to be a part of these events. It is a special gift from God that I am given the honour to join them on their journey in pursuit of justice. From Beirut to Jerusalem is my testimony of this journey. It is also my prayer for the Palestinians in exile that they too will make the journey one day. From exile they will surely return home
On 18 September 1982, the last day of the massacre, I emerged from the basement operating theatre of Gaza Hospital in Sabra and Shatila camp. I had been operating for 72 hours to save a handful of people only to see piles of mutilated bodies in the camp alleys. I emerged from the hospital to see the body of an old man whose eyes were dug out. A terrified mother tried to hand me her baby to keep in safety. She failed in her attempt – and both were killed. The world was initially outraged, but forgot very quickly. The survivors of that massacre lived on through yet more violent events.
On that morning I felt trampled on and life became meaningless. As a doctor, I could do nothing to save the dead. As a human being my whole world had collapsed. Where was God, where was world conscience? I was alive, yet I felt dead.
I recall how I first came to Sabra and Shatila a bigoted, self-righteous fundamentalist Christian. I believed in the goodness of the Western “Christian” countries and the righteousness of Israel. I thought I knew the Bible, and God was on our side. My favourite stories in the Old Testament at that time were how Joshua captured Jericho and the story of David and Goliath. I rejoiced in the military triumph of Israel. Just like my Christian friends, I celebrated the great Israeli military victory of the Six Day war of 1967, with the subjugation of Gaza and West Bank. I greeted the Foundation Day of the State of Israel as a day to rejoice.
On that morning in Sabra and Shatila God destroyed that self-righteousness. I was made to confront the broken bodies in the camp alleys. Through them I met the crucified Christ. Sin was no longer an intellectual business. In a split second the sins of hatred, of murder, of militarism, of greed, of anger, of cruelty were all translated into wounds inflicted on the bodies of the victims. The Palestinians were collectively crucified. I felt crucified with them and would have remained so until I remembered as a Christian that crucifixion was not the end. Deep in my Christian consciousness crucifixion is only the prelude to resurrection.
Jesus was crucified 2,000 years ago. Both Jesus and the massacred Palestinians were innocent and did not deserve to be tortured and killed. But there is one difference. Jesus chose to suffer and die for our sins, to take on the punishment which we deserved. He is our Messiah. The will of God is always justice and that would mean the perpetrators of crimes have to be punished. Jesus had borne the punishment for us. We are all therefore on a level-playing field before God our judge and redeemer. And I am just as guilty as those who committed the massacre. To some, war crimes are sins committed by others; and so they are. But that morning in the full glare of the blazing Beirut sun, I understood. Palestinians could only have died because collectively we have condoned it. Like the crucifixion, some Christians blame the Jewish leaders in Jesus’ time; others blame Pontius Pilate and the Romans. Others blame the crowd which shouted: “Crucify Him”. But He was crucified on our behalf. In the same way I ask myself again and again – who has got the Palestinians’ blood on their hands?
After going through much soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that I, too, had blood on my hands. Up to that time I was bigoted and prejudiced. I cannot excuse myself by claiming ignorance. For the weeks preceding the massacre, I was too prejudiced to believe the stories told to me by the camp people. I rejoiced in the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut and failed to see the pain of the Palestinian families being split up. I was naïve to trust the Western countries which guaranteed the safety of those left behind. I was selfrighteous, still thinking of Palestinians as terrorists. I cannot blame others if I who had eaten with them, stayed in their homes, enjoyed their kindness and hospitality, refused to understand until they were murdered. My prejudice had blinded me.
When I saw those broken bodies, I was stunned and emotionally numb. I asked God to forgive me and remembered praying, “Lord Jesus, I have spent more than 30 years denying the Palestinian people their existence. I have hated Arabs. I was blinded by prejudice. Please forgive me. Please let me make amends. Grant that I may spend the next 30 years serving the Palestinians and help me be their friend”. I repented. God forgave me, and the Palestinians embraced me. Suddenly I am no longer the living dead. God had breathed into my withered soul and filled my heart with love for Him and for the Palestinians. He has brought me back to life. Step by step He brought me back to His side.
Many of my Zionist Christian friends have since shunned me. They refuse to talk to me for I have fallen for the “Philistines”. But I am no longer intimidated by all this. I have seen a different face of God – that of love, compassion and grace. I believe He will heal the broken bodies of the Palestinian people and give them strength to carry their burden. Just as He raised Jesus on the third day, He will bring salvation to the Palestinian people. From their crucifixion will come their resurrection!
For a long time after the massacres I could not bring myself round to read the Old Testament, thinking it was full of prejudiced passages supporting Israel. I finally plucked up courage to read it and feared it would be the last time before giving it up. I was pleasantly surprised. I went no further than the first book Genesis when I found out how God, after driving Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, followed them out. I learnt God never abandoned them. He made clothes of animal skins for them to keep them warm. I broke down when I read how God saved Ishmael and his mother Hagar in the desert. Abraham was ordered by his jealous wife, Sarah, the mother of Isaac, to abandon them in the desert to die. Hagar placed Ishmael under a bush when their water ran out. She went into the desert and cried out to God. God heard her and a fountain was opened for them to drink. He promised Ishmael would be a father of many nations. Palestinians are the children of Ishmael and the children of Abraham.
So on this 25th anniversary of the massacre I would want you, my dear friends, to open your hearts so that God can fill you with His love and compassion. May He also grant you the honour of joining the Palestinians in their journey from “Beirut to Jerusalem”. As we journey on, may we always have faith that God who made us is compassionate and just and there will be room in His heart for all His children, and His grace and justice will always sustain us as we submit ourselves to Him. May we be able to be like the grieving old grandmother from Shatila, who lost 27 loved ones that morning. Yet she could still say: “the will of God be done”. She still called God holy and committed her dead children to His care. May we draw strength from our faith that He will heal the deep wounds. He will restore the broken lives. He will bring His justice, He will pour His grace and love on His children, He will mend the broken hearts, He will bring peace to the tormented souls. He will wipe away all tears. And bring us home, to the city He has built and bears His name. Al Quds... Next year in Jerusalem.
Dr Ang Swee Chai
September 2007
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