Israeli political leaders and foreign ministry officials expressed fury Thursday over reports that the BBC’s Panorama documentary program planned to run an investigative piece titled The Accused, in which the central question raised is whether Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should be tried for war crimes in connection with the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres during the Lebanon War, reported Haaretz newspaper.
Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit said Sunday's scheduled program was further proof of the BBC’s consistently "anti-Israel" and "pro-Palestinian" bias.
For his part, Gideon Meir, the foreign ministry’s deputy director of communications, accused the BBC of committing a media "crime."
The BBC’s problem, said Meir, was that Sharon’s policy of restraint in the face of ongoing Palestinian “violence” did not fall into the network’s predetermined "narrative."
After a national commission of inquiry into the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, Sharon was forced to stand down as defense minister.
Sharon is also blamed for provoking the current Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, with his visit to occupied east Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam, last September 28.
Egyptian lawyers recently followed in the footsteps of a Lebanese colleague and Arab activists in Belgium, announcing that they would file suit against Sharon for war crimes.
The Egyptian Bar Association decided to mount a mock trial of Sharon, charging him in absentia with "war crimes against the Palestinian people."
The group took the step as a result of what it called the weakness of the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague.
The lawyers' decision came only days after a Lebanese lawyer, Mei Al Hansa, turned to the Lebanese court with a suit accusing Sharon and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of military crimes against Lebanon.
In the action, sent to Lebanese Prosecutor General Adnan Addum, Hansa calls Sharon and Peres "butchers of the Lebanese people."
Since 1948, when the state of Israel was created, Hansa said these politicians had committed 73 crimes against Lebanon.
Sharon and Peres are accused of aggression in June 1982, when the Israeli forces seized half of Lebanon, in September 1982 of gunning down hundreds of innocents, including children, women and old people in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila, andof killing 105 civilians in an artillery pounding of the UN canteen base in the settlement of Qana in southern Lebanon in 1996, according to the report.
According to Lebanese law, capital punishment is due for these crimes.
In a conversation with journalists, the Lebanese prosecutor general was quoted as saying that the action had been registered by his office and would be taken into consideration.
Sharon is also being sued in a Belgian court, where he is charged with responsibility for the 1982 massacres of 800 to 2,000 Palestinian civilians in Lebanese refugee camps, the daily Le Soir reported on June 1.
The suit was filed under a unique 1993 law that allows Belgian courts to try people, regardless of their nationality, for genocide and other crimes against humanity committed abroad.
The newspaper said Belgian judicial authorities were studying whether the suit against Sharon was admissible under the terms of the law, which is currently being used to try four Rwandans in connection with the 1994 genocide in their central African country.
The plaintiffs in the suit against Sharon are a mix of Palestinians, Lebanese, Moroccans and Belgians grouped in an ad hoc committee.
They accuse Sharon of allowing Christian militias to slaughter the refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps located in an area of Lebanon controlled by the Israeli military following Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon when Sharon was defense minister.
An Israeli commission of enquiry in 1983 declared Sharon indirectly responsible for the killings, a finding that forced him to resign from his post.
In addition, the United Nations has officially classified the Sabra and Shatilla killings as acts of genocide, Eric David, international law professor at the Free University of Brussels, told Le Soir.
Last January, when he was campaigning for prime minister, Sharon expressed his regret for the "terrible tragedy" of the 1982 massacres, but refused to apologize.
"What it was," he said in a press interview, "was an act of killing carried out by Arab Christians against Arab Muslims." – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
