Two lawyers, a Lebanese and a Belgian, filed a law suit on Monday in a Belgian court charging Sharon with responsibility for the war crime of the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
Sharon then “Israeli” defense minister planned and implemented the 1982 invasion and ordered the subsequent siege of West Beirut in which daily air raids and artillery bombardments caused thousands of civilian casualties.
He also allowed Christian militias to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila to ferret out possible Palestinian guerrillas. Up to 2,000 Palestinians and Lebanese were slaughtered by the militiamen over a three-day period while the “Israeli” Army surrounded the camp. It is the Sabra and Shatila massacre for which Sharon is being sued.
Heads of state have long benefited from diplomatic immunity and the absence of legal mechanisms to indict them for crimes in office.
But when former Chilean dictator and senator for life Augusto Pinochet was arrested in 1998 by British police and summoned to court for “crimes of genocide and terrorism,” the world was stunned. Britain’s Law Lords created a legal precedent to bring dictators and accused war criminals to justice.
“The law in Europe has changed a lot with Pinochet’s arrest, Milosevic, the Rwanda criminal tribunals, and the wider definition of jurisdiction,” said Chibli Mallat, a Lebanese constitutional lawyer who, along with Belgian lawyer Michael Verhaeghe, is participating in the law suit.
Mallat, who teaches European Law at Universite Saint Joseph, said heads of state could be prosecuted under a 1993 Belgian law modified in 1999 which expanded the concept of jurisdiction in cases of crimes “universally recognized and not subject to the statute of limitations. Normally, an action is only considered criminal (and prosecutable) if it takes place on the national territory or if the victims are nationals,” he said.
In the case of the Sabra and Shatila massacres some of the victims or descendants of the victims may have acquired Belgian nationality. “But that is not the real issue,” Mallat said.
For Mallat, the case is part of a greater international effort to establish courts to bring heads and former heads of state accused of war crimes to justice.
The law suit, according to Mallat and Rosemary Sayigh an anthropologist and researcher who is also working on the case is strong in two ways: the first, it is being filed in a country that has discarded immunity for heads-of-state and has widened its definition of jurisdiction.
And secondly, for the first time there are Palestinian witnesses 30 in all willing to testify and whose affidavits have been remitted. “Finding witnesses wasn’t easy,” Sayigh said. “Our luck was to find someone from the camps who was professional and ready to work.”
That someone was Sana Hussein, a Palestinian refugee herself. She tracked down the survivors, took their testimonies and wrote the reports which, Mallat said, required more than registering the statements. They had to be standardized, accompanied by proper identification, and formulated in a convincing style.
In the past, journalists, medical personnel and “Israeli” soldiers were the ones to describe the terrible events of Sept. 15-18, 1982.
“Victims have been the forgotten voice,” Sayigh said.
Most witnesses were unable to speak out in the past for various reasons. Some still cannot. Sayigh described one woman who was unwilling to talk because she had lost her whole family: “She said that when she talked about it she felt ill for days.”
Mallat and Sayigh have been working on Palestinian issues for years. Sayigh came from England in 1953. She first worked as a journalist, married Youssef Sayigh, a prominent Palestinian professor and former economic advisor to Yasser Arafat. She has written two books on Palestinian issues, and started her second book, Too Many Enemies, immediately after the massacres.
On this specific law suit, she has been working with Mallat for four months “with a great sense of urgency because Sharon was scheduled to go to Belgium this month,” Mallat explained.
Sharon canceled his trip, which some interpreted as a result of the uncertainty caused by the law suit. But the official reason was Friday night’s deadly suicide martyrdom bomb outside a disco in Tel Aviv, killing 20 “Israelis”.
“We should expect a lot of empty talk now about the timing of the law suit, about Arafat, about Hamas … which is fine,” Mallat said. “But that doesn’t amount to much when it comes to Sharon’s personal responsibility (in the 1982 massacres).”
Mallat said the “Israeli” government’s investigation the Kahane Commission accused Sharon of “bearing personal responsibility” in the massacres and that the media had later distorted this into “indirect responsibility.”
“Irrespective of our political position,” he said, “there are acts that should disqualify a person from the political scene.”
Asked whether he really believes that “Israel” or the United States would ever allow a senior “Israeli” official to be indicted by a European court, Mallat seemed optimistic. “I don’t think we should despair that quickly, even of the US and “Israel” … We have a lot of people working on the case … and it’s a case that everyone, including “Israelis”, agree on.
“The key is legal, because the law has teeth,” he continued. “If we do it right, and if the professionalism continues, this can be an extraordinary thing for the Middle East … Our goal is a wider movement on the European front. I think legal systems should be tested.”