Inigo Gilmore in Beirut
Sunday October 30, 2005
The Observer
It was one of the most shocking massacres to scar the Middle East, the slaying of more than 2,000 Palestinians by Christian militiamen in the wretched Lebanese refugee camps.
Now a film has returned to the story of Sabra and Shatila. But for the first time it has told the story of the slaughter through the voices of the killers. In Massaker, six former Christian Phalange militiamen tell of their training by Israeli allies and recount the events of 16-18 September, 1982, when hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children were killed in the Beirut camps.
Although the identities of the men are disguised in the 90-minute documentary, they make no attempt to hide the gruesome details of the massacre, with some boasting about their killing skills with AK-47 assault rifles and butchers' knives.
Several parts of the film assault the viewers' senses, including one where a man describes how another militiaman, a butcher, took pleasure in carving up his victims. Another recalls how even the wails of old Palestinian women 'left them cold' as they systematically moved into the camps, tossed grenades into houses and sprayed rooms with gunfire, killing at close range.
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"Massaker"
Monika Borgmann, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen
Between September 16 and 18, 1982, for two nights and three days, the killers of Sabra and Shatila went about their heinous crimes. In the end, they had murdered between 1,000 and 3,000 Palestinian civilians, predominantly women, children and old people. The precise number of victims – both those killed and those missing – is not known to this very day. The perpetrators primarily originated from the ranks of the Forces Libanaises, Christian militia affiliated to Israel. The logistics for this massacre were provided by the Israeli Army, under the auspices of the former Minister of Defence and current Minister President, Ariel Sharon. In 1982, the massacre in the Lebanese Palestinian camps deeply shook the public throughout the world, but today it has been (almost) entirely forgotten. This is despite the fact that it is a role model for all the massacres that followed: for example that in Rwanda or those committed during the Yugoslavian wars. Again and again, the unanswered questions surface: what drives people to such excesses of brutality, and how are the perpetrators able to live on? Massaker is – both in contents and aesthetically – a psycho-political study of six perpetrators, who participated in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila both on orders and on their own personal initiative. The film intertwines the mental dispositions of the killers with their political environment and broaches the phenomenon of collective violence through their accounts.
SwissFilms