Another blow for survivors of Sabra and Shatila, Belgian law amended yet again

News, June 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info

Nicholas Blanford
Special to The Daily Star, 6/28/03

Mohammed Abu Rudayna was only five years old in September 1982 when his father, uncle and cousin were lined up against the wall of their house at the Shatila refugee camp and shot dead. Now a silver-haired 27-year-old, Abu Rudayna has finally lost hope that Ariel Sharon, the man he considers responsible for the slaughter of his family, will ever stand trial in court on war crimes charges.
His quest for justice has been dealt a body blow by the decision of the Belgian government to amend a war crimes law under which Sharon and other suspected international war criminals could be tried.

The Belgian government says it is seeking to tighten the law to prevent “frivolous” law suits being filed against prominent world leaders. Belgian courts have received several suits in recent months charging British Prime Minister Tony Blair, US President George W. Bush and senior American military officials of war crimes.

But Chibli Mallat, a professor of international law and one of the lawyers seeking to prosecute Sharon, said the Belgian war crimes law has already been tightened so that poorly prepared and politically motivated lawsuits against world leaders cannot be heard. He believes the Belgian government effectively is being blackmailed by the Bush administration into changing the law to save Sharon from prosecution.
“It’s stifling the development of international criminal law just to save Sharon,” Mallat said.

Abu Rudayna is one of 28 Palestinian and Lebanese survivors of the 1982 massacre who filed a lawsuit against Sharon in Brussels in June 2001 under a 1993 law on universal jurisdiction, allowing suspected war criminals to be tried in Belgium regardless of the nationality of the accused and the victims and regardless of where the crime was committed.

Despite the legal moves of Sharon’s lawyers and strong political pressure from the Israeli government, the lawsuit continued to inch its way through the court system, having crucially won the backing of the Belgian prosecutor-general.
In February, the Belgian court ruled that although Sharon could not stand trial while serving as prime minister, his immunity would end once he leaves office. This month, the court confirmed that there was nothing preventing an immediate judicial investigation into Amos Yaron, a former brigadier general who was in charge of Israeli troops in Beirut in 1982 and is today the director-general of the Israeli Defense Ministry. Yaron was also named in the lawsuit with Sharon.
In April, the Belgian court tightened the law to allow suits filed in Belgium to be transferred to the relevant country so long as a fair trial could be guaranteed. That meant that lawsuits against Blair would be transferred to Britain and those against American officials would go to the US. In other words, the amendment spared Belgium the embarrassment of having to deal with lawsuits against officials from friendly nations.

The Belgian Ministry of Justice began proceedings to transfer the case to Israel two weeks ago. It’s unclear if Sharon’s lawyers requested that the case be transferred to an Israeli court, but the plaintiffs’ lawyers believe they will have little difficulty in arguing that the survivors of Sabra/Shatila would receive anything but a fair trial in Israel.

Enter US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
During a meeting two weeks ago at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Rumsfeld told his Belgian hosts that the war crimes law must be changed. He said that he would “actively oppose” any further spending on a new NATO headquarters until the law is amended. The US has agreed to pay 27 percent of the costs of the new $350 million NATO complex.

“Belgium needs to recognize that there are consequences to its actions,” Rumsfeld warned.

Yet the earlier amendment to the law in April had ensured that only genuinely warranted lawsuits could be heard in Belgium, while the more “frivolous” cases against the likes of Rumsfeld and his colleagues in Washington would go nowhere.

“It doesn’t make sense that Rumsfeld makes these comments after the American cases have stopped,” Mallat said. “They are hoping to bring in new conditions that would do away with the case against Sharon altogether.”
Human rights activists are also angered at the Bush administration’s interference.
Christopher Hall, a legal adviser with Amnesty International’s International Justice Project, said that of the 30 complaints filed under the Belgian law, only one had reached court so far “which demonstrates the careful screening that prosecutors and investigating judges have been making of the cases which indicates quite clearly that the old law worked perfectly well.”

He said that the US is in no position to complain about frivolous lawsuits.
“If you have sat even for a single day in any (US) federal court house and watched people traipse in to make complaints about the strangest things with multi-million dollar or multi-billion dollar claims, that’s exactly what the US is complaining about in Belgium,” he said.

Ultimately it would be the survivors of the massacre who stand to suffer.
“The hopes of those poor people have been up and down for two years so it would be cruel to change the law to prevent some justice being done,” Mallat said.

Abu Rudayna still lives in the stinking slums of Shatila. He keeps in his wallet a dog-eared photograph cut from a magazine article on the 1982 massacre. It is a ghastly family memento of his father and two relatives lying slumped against the wall of a single-story house, their bodies bloated from exposure to the merciless sun and their blackened swollen limbs entangled with other corpses. Standing above them a woman holds her arms above her head, a terrible look of despair and anguish on her face.

“I lost hope after (the attacks of) Sept. 11 that we would win the case,” he said.
“There are so many new developments around the world (since the suit was filed) where the world looks at us like we are terrorists and evil Muslims and the Israelis are innocent babies. I hope I’m wrong but the reality is obvious. Only God can give us our rights now.”

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

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