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#SabraAndShatila, never forget.
Back in the 1970s, for a year or two I taught English to a group of teenage girls in Shatila refugee camp. Most of them, I never found out what had happened to them & their families during the #SabraAndShatila massacre. >
In July 1983, I spent a month in Beirut in the summer, doing final research/interviews for my book "The Making of Modern Lebanon". There was a reign of Falangist/LF terror throughout the whole city then. I told friends who knew the situation in the camps I wanted to go & find >
out what had happened to the girls the year before. My friends warned me not to try, as the Falangist/LF/G2 terror in the camps was so intense that any visit to someone there by an outsider like me could put the person visited into great jeopardy. >
Then in '84-'85, the Amal movement launched its (strongly sectarian) war against the #SabraAndShatila camps, which was brutal & should also not be forgotten. >
I wasn't able to get back to Lebanon until 2004. By that time the topography of the camps had changed completely. The Amal attacks had reduced the camps' footprint considerably but natural increase of populatn had continued. So
what in the 1970s had been extensive alleys snaking btwn 1- and 2-story shacks was now a beyond-Dickensian, nearly solid block of 7- and 8-story breeze-block towers, alleys still snaking between them. >
Down in the alleys & lower floors of bldgs, there was zero ventilation, air very damp, everyone with chest problems. electric lines made a dense web btwn the buildings. The mosque I went to had been elevated one story off the ground becuz >
during the lengthy Camps War (Amal attacks), the residents hadn't been able to get outside to bury their dead so the entire area under the jacked-up mosque was the burial ground. People there told me >
that during the Camps War, the Amal militias were brutal. The area all around the camps is populated by v. low-income Shia. (Now the area is known as the Dahiyeh.) Shatila residents told me that during the Camps War, the only ppl in the area who gave them an y help at all >
were proto-Hizbullah, whose ppl gave them some minimal humanitarian, but never military, aid. Still it helped keep many of them alive. (The Hizb was also super-busy building its networks in the areas v. nearby where Israeli occupn remained till 1985.) >
This all just to say that the story of #SabraAndShatila is a very gripping & complex part of Palestinian (& Lebanese) history that someone should one day write...
