Word: shatila
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Among the first foreign newsmen to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila after September's massacre was TIME Correspondent Roberto Suro. Last week, after the Israeli commission published its findings, Suro paid a return visit. His report...
...faded ribbons entangled with wilted leaves and a torn flag, once black but now faded to a blotchy purple, are the only mementos left at the mass grave site inside the entrance to Shatila camp. Children on their way home from school skip across the weed-covered burial ground, looking for bits of refuse that can serve as toys. They seem ignorant or uncaring of the fact that beneath their feet lie the bodies of some 200 of the estimated 700 people slaughtered during those 38 grim hours last fall...
Many of the physical wounds left on the camps by the siege and the slaughter remain unmended. In the final stages of the massacre, Phalangist militiamen ran bulldozers into homes with the dual aim of destroying shelters and burying victims in the rubble. On the main street running through Shatila, a demolished house is a tangle of rusting steel supports. Remnants of clothing are caught in the twisted red bars, so that the rubble looks like a nightmarish clothes closet. The second story of another house is exposed where a wall was ripped away. On the upper floor a drinking...
Reconstruction in the camps lags far behind the rest of Beirut. Residents of Shatila can get water only from a single pipe sticking out of the ground on the main road outside the camp. At an intersection where some residents put up a defense against attacking militiamen, a bomb crater is filled with old auto tires and a rusted tank trap. Raw sewage oozes up to create a black slick on the muddy rain water that covers the street. The major exception to the aura of neglect is a small corner of Shatila that is under the care...
Before the massacre, Sabra and Shatila were hives of cottage industry. The clang of metal against metal still rings from some of the small automobile repair shops, but behind the din there is a kind of lethargy. Women and children abound, but there are few males of working age. Many of the men were killed in the massacre. The male Palestinian fighters who survived left the country in the evacuation following the Beirut siege. Since then, the Lebanese army and security forces have conducted roundups of suspected P.L.O. members, criminals and others believed to be in Lebanon illegally. The roundups...