The former host of The Fifth Estate takes us back to Beirut, Sept. 22, 1982
Giller Prize-winner and former host of The Fifth Estate Linden MacIntyre revisits the historical background to his new novel, The Only Café
BEIRUT, SEPTEMBER 22 , 1982 • It was such a simple gesture – Farouk, the driver, reached into the glove compartment and brought out three surgical masks, one for Sweeny, one for Axelson and one for me. He handed them around without explaining. “Where are we?” I asked. “Shatila camp,” he said.
I was dubious. It was quiet, the buildings around us seemed to be intact. There was no military presence, no people at all. Farouk pointed toward a laneway. “Through there,” he said. We stepped outside the car and reality began to flood the senses through the nostrils.
We had spent two days trying to get here and had been blocked at every turn. The world was beginning to react to what had happened, but the Israeli officer had told us two days before, “Nobody in, nobody out.” The following day, we had tried to enter with a team of UN investigators. The message was the same.
And now, without ado, and without permission, we were in. We had but to walk down that lane. “I will wait here,” Farouk said.
And then the sounds: machinery and sirens and chanting. The killing had ended four days earlier. Hundreds of bodies had already been disposed of in mass graves, now concealed beneath the garbage, identifiable only by the freshly turned earth. But there were hundreds more, people who had been cowering in their homes when they were slaughtered before the killers dynamited the little cinderblock structures the victims lived in.
We started filming, cautiously at first, but nobody paid attention. An imam told us there had been 4,000 victims. Improbable, I thought, even then. The Palestinian press had first told us 1,000. They then revised the total upward to 3,000. Meanwhile Israeli and Lebanese officials were saying 800. The propaganda struggle had begun, the moral tug-of-war.
Thirty-five years later we still don’t know precisely how many people died during the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps that started on the evening of September 16 and ended on the morning of the 18th. The most credible figure is 2,000 – mostly old men, children, women.
We filmed an excavation where I was told 20 people from a single family had been killed. The heat of the Mediterranean sun made the number easy to believe. It all comes back vividly. The stench. The bloated, blackened corpses; a single jawbone; the severed arm of an infant; Palestinian women chanting and dancing in grief bordering on hysteria; the Lebanese soldier chasing an old woman in black clothing and head- scarf, shouting and threatening with his rifle.
And the overwhelming realization – all the journalism in the world will not come close to communicating the reality that underlies the scene, the timelessness of consequences already flowing from what happened here.
My journey to Shatila camp started with a Telex – these were the days before e- mail, social media, instant and ubiquitous communication. The message was direct: get to Beirut as quickly as you can.
Along with a cameraman, Mike Sweeny, and a soundman, John Axelson, I had been i n Jordan documenting the lives of Palestinians who, at that point, had been living in refugee camps for more than 30 years, ever since their futile resistance to the creation of Is- rael in 1948. And now, according to this Telex, Bashir Gemayel, the newly elected president of Lebanon, had been assassinated; we were to report on it and its aftermath. Lebanon had been consumed by civil war for the previous seven years. There would be fallout.
On a map, it isn’t very far from Amman to Beirut. Drive through Syria or Israel. Geographically simple but politically fraught. Getting travel documents from Syria would take days. The Jordanians were even
THE FACES TOLD ME I WOULD NOT EVER UNDERSTAND WHAT I WAS SEEING
more unpleasant. Israel was shutting down for Rosh Hoshanna. Instead we flew to Cairo, and then booked seats on El Al to Tel Aviv. We reached the Cairo airport early for the 1: 30 a. m. flight. Porters at the airport, usually swarming to help a television crew with all their gear, just frowned and walked away from us when we told them our destination. Israel. We hauled our own gear through darkened corridors and up stairways to reach the national airline of the Zionist entity.
It was during a briefing in Jerusalem at the Palestinian press office on Saturday, the 18th, that we first heard the news that would, once again, dramatically alter our assignment in the Middle East. The press officer took a phone call. Frowned. Stood and retired to another room. He returned, grim and apologetic. Our meeting was over. He had just received word from Beirut – a terrible massacre of civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. As many as 1,000 dead.
There was immediate and natural linkage to the assassination of Gemayal, but it would soon become clear that the causes of the massacre were far more complicated than retaliation for another high- profile murder where political violence was now the norm. It’s unlikely that the Palestinians had anything to do with the death of the new president, who had many enemies – Israelis, Syrians, as well as opponents among his own Phalangist Christian allies. The Palestinian political and military apparatus was by then in disarray, its leadership and fighters in exile in North Africa. The Phalangist militia unit that carried out the killing had a longstanding blood-grievance against the refugees. The PLO and Syrian allies had massacred civilians in the town of Damour, where many of the killers came from, six years earlier.
On September 20, we arrived in Beirut with an Israeli military escort. The entire city was now under lockdown. The Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles and soldiers were everywhere. The media were now divided i nto two cultures – shell- shocked, visibly disgusted journalists who had managed to get access to the camp in the hours before the military closed it off, and the rest of us, trying desperately to get our own images and information to tell our audiences what we think had happened. We spent hours in Sabra and Shatila. But it really didn’t take that long to get the picture. Rather it was interpreting the picture and the history beneath the surface that would pose the greater challenge. Farouk was waiting where he said that he would be. He drove us to our hotel. We went to the hotel bar. I asked the bartender to fill a water glass with whiskey.
I took the whiskey to my room. Wrote. The next morning, I caught a shuttle run by NBC between Beirut and Herzliya, Israel. I stared out the window of the little airplane at the unrevealing countryside far below us. I thought a lot then, and would f or many years, about something I had seen inside the camp, an impression that didn’t make it into the script I had written. It was the expression on the faces of a small group of boys who were standing around at the scene of one excavation. I couldn’t quite describe it then, and even now, having thought about it for decades, I find it elusive.
The faces told me that I would not ever understand what I was seeing in that place. To understand it, you have to live it. And I never would. That’s what they seemed to be telling me.
But now that we are living in the future that I felt there, in September, 1982, I understand it better. Though still not fully, or with any confidence that this enigma will ever be resolved. And what, I asked myself, is the value of understanding if we are impotent?
What I saw in those young faces was the place where impotence and understanding meet – a dangerous intersection, creating oncoming peril. I saw rage.