‘Israelis were in Shatila. The world knows’

FATIMA Helow was born an exile. Her life began in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972. Her mother had landed up in the UN camp following the mass expulsions of Arabs from the Palestinian city of Haifa by Jewish forces in 1948.

Helow’s parents still live in Shatila. She herself lived there until August of last year, when she was granted permission to come to Scotland as a business student. Although she has come here in order to find educational opportunities which would not be available to her in Lebanon, recent events in the West Bank, and in the refugee camp at Jenin in particular, have brought back bitter memories from her childhood.

At the age of 10 she was a witness to the infamous massacre of as many as 2,000 Palestinian civilians at Shatila and its twin camp of Sabra between September 16 and 18, 1982.

For her, recent events at Jenin compare directly with the massacre she witnessed in Beirut 20 years ago. "The same thing is going on now, and in the same hand," she says. "[Ariel] Sharon is the prime minister now, and he led the Israeli forces at Sabra and Shatila."

The Israelis angrily reject comparisons between the two events. Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Zvi Shtauber, says he resents the parallels being drawn. Jenin, he argues, was a battle against "terrorists", not civilians, while the Sabra and Shatila massacre was the act of the Phalange "Christian militia", not the Israelis.

Helow totally rejects Shtauber’s claim. "The Israelis were in Sabra and Shatila before the Phalange," she says. "I saw an Israeli tank in the main street [of the Shatila camp]... The whole world knows that the Israeli army was in Lebanon and in Beirut at that time."

The Israeli state’s own inquiry, the Kahan Commission, found that Sharon, who was then Israeli defence minister, bore "personal responsibility" for the massacre and was forced to resign.

She recalls how the first warning signs of the barbarism to come were met with disbelief among the camp residents. "The wife of a friend of my father rushed to my house with her two daughters. There was a lot of fresh blood on her clothing. She said that the Israelis and the Phalangists had killed her two sons-in-law. No one believed her. People in the camp said she was making up a story to incite us [against the Israelis]."

As the first accounts of atrocities were rejected, life, for the briefest of moments, returned to normal. Helow remembers being sent on errands. "My father asked me to go to the bakery for some bread," she says, "but it was closed. When I came back he asked me to go the hospital to ask for my brother."

As she made her way from her home to the hospital in the adjoining camp of Sabra, she made her first acquaintance with a Phalange militiaman. The brutal killings, many of which were committed using knives and swords, had begun. As she came to her aunt’s house, she found herself face-to-face with a Phalangist. "I saw a man carrying a dagger in his hand. He tried to kill me. I escaped through the small alleyways, because I knew the alleyways in the camp."

The reality of the unfolding events was becoming clear to the population of the camps. When Helow reached her brother, she remembers, her thoughts were still on food. "I told my brother, ‘We need bread.’ And he said, ‘It’s not time for bread now, you must leave the camp. Where is our father and family?’"

Returning to her home in Shatila, she still recalls Israeli and Phalange checkpoints in the streets in Shatila and a moment of great danger as she reached her house. "I remember checking the alleyway, and I saw something glint in the light from the other side. I turned to see what it was, and I saw a man carrying a big sword. He was leaving the camp. A lot of fresh blood was dropping on the ground from his sword. I stayed hiding until he left."

Like many Shatila residents, Helow’s mother took her children to seek sanctuary in the local mosque. "When we arrived at the mosque, we saw the Phalangists," she recollects. "They forced us from the mosque. They were wearing the uniform with the badge of the Phalange. They forced us to the main street, near the stadium, where the Israelis received us."

Helow’s account of the subsequent treatment of civilians at the hands of both the Phalange and the Israelis is contested by Israel. However, it is also remarkably similar to other eyewitness accounts from survivors of the massacre.

"We could differentiate between the Israeli army and the Phalangists by their accents and also by their uniforms," she says. "The Israelis were shouting at us in Hebrew for women and children to get away. In that street we saw a lot of dead and wounded people, men, women and children."

She is emphatic that the Israelis and the Phalange worked in partnership in committing the atrocities . "The Phalangists marched in front of us, but the Israelis marched behind," she remembers. "I saw in that street a man who was my neighbour, Abo Mohammad Eldoke, who was disabled," Helow recalls. "They forced him to walk with us, but he couldn’t, so they [the Israelis] shot him."

In the ensuing chaos, she herself could have become another grim statistic in the terrible death toll of Sabra and Shatila, had her father not rescued her and her family. "We managed to escape in a small car," she says. "We were 10 or 12 people in a small car. We escaped to the West of Beirut."

Her cousin Aida was not so fortunate. She was raped and killed in Shatila. Her entire immediate family were slaughtered . A week after the Phalange and the Israelis pulled out of the camps, Helow and her family returned to Shatila. "In a small alleyway I saw my cousin’s husband. They had killed him."

It is less than a year since she came to Scotland to study, but Fatima Helow already finds that much of her time is given to raising support for the Palestinians at public meetings around the country.

She fears that she will soon have to tell her audiences that the name of Jenin will go down in history alongside those of Sabra and Shatila as the scene of a brutal massacre of Palestinian civilians.