Reality Bites for PR Men at Qana
By Robert Fisk
The Independent - 4/22/1996
Qana, Southern Lebanon
--
Herve de Charette's face was as white as death. The French Foreign
Minister, neatly clad in blue suit and tie, had gingerly walked through
the scene of last week's massacre at the UN's compound, nodding
diplomatically as the UN's Fijian commander described the 12 minutes in
which Israeli shells slaughtered up to 120 refugees, the sliced-up corpses
that his soldiers were forced to pick up, the difficulty in identifying
parts of the children who had been torn to pieces. Mr de Charette
listened with distaste. But then he was confronted by a survivor.
Fawzaya Zrir, a small, frail woman in a scarf, simply walked up to the
French Foreign Minister and began talking to him with an odd mixture of
affection and anger. "For us, France is our mother and God is our
father," she said in a flight of rhetoric that might have been written by
the Quai d'Orsay public relations men, who beamed happily at this
fortunate encounter.
Then things began to go wrong. "We have lived through hell," Mrs Zrir
continued. "The people were chopped into pieces by the Israeli bombs.
They bleed, these people. You should have seen the heads."
At the French foreign minister's right, a Lebanese softly translated the
woman's dreadful words. The PR men began to look uneasy. "We have lived
here 40 years and now we are treated like animals," the woman cried. "Do
you know what the dogs did at night after the killings? They were hungry
and I saw them in the ruins eating fingers and pieces of our people."
Mr de Charette stared at her as if he had seen a ghost. This had clearly
not been part of the programme, a schedule that was supposed to have
whisked the foreign minister from a light lunch at UN headquarters in
Naqqoura to a photo-opportunity on the roof of the wrecked UN battalion
HQ, a three-minutes press conference to give the impression of openness
and a swift drive back to the coast and a helicopter to Beirut -
everything, in fact, that would enhance France's much-trumpeted love for
Lebanon. Reality had very definitely not been part of the programme.
A UN soldier was quite blunt about it. "This place is going to be turned
into one of those awful pilgrimage sites for the great and the good," he
muttered. "Boutros-Ghali sent his emissaries today to express their
horror. But they'll do no more than they did after Srebrenica. They'll
tut-tut and shrug it off. and they wont even have the guts to condemn
Israel even now - for this wickedness."
And indeed, the UN Secretary-General did send General Frank Van Kappen of
the Netherlands army - not, perhaps, a happy choice after the Dutch army's
disgrace at Srebrenica and he duly marched round the site of the worst
carnage, asking how many rounds landed, where the Katyusha missiles were
fired from and whether he could be shown this site to discover if any
Israeli shells bad fallen there.
He would be meeting with General Amnon lipkin Shahak, the Israeli chief of
staff, he said. Yes, he would be asking to meet the soldiers who fired the
fatal artillery rounds - "fat chance of that," another UN soldier said as
he listened to all this - and with that, Van Kappen, an immense figure in
his steel flak jacket and huge helmet clanked out of the compound with a
colonel from the Royal Engineers.
Mr de Charette was even more gentle of spirit. What had happened on
Thursday was 'unfortunate", an event for which France wished to show its
sympathy for the Lebanese. So how did it rank in the scale of civilian
atrocities? How did it rank, for example, beside the Sarajevo market
massacre?
"Frankly," the Foreign Minister replied sharply, "I have not had an
opportunity to make categories of unhappiness we have to work to do is to
make it impossible for this to happen in the future in Lebanon." And so
say all of us. Did he believe Israel had given sufficient explanation of
the massacre? "I hear there is an inquiry we have to await the result."
The problem, however is that neither America nor Europe are going to
condemn a country which pounded refugees of Qana with 155mm shells for 12
minutes; and such condemnation is about the only palliative that the
Lebanese might accept for the moment. And you can see their point. On the
coast road back to Beirut last night there were burning cars, civilians
deliberately targeted by Israeli warships north of Sidon, three of whom
had been badly wounded. Had this being a Syrian warship shelling Israeli
civilians on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road, of course, Mr Clinton himself would
have deplored -rightly- an act of "international terrorism". But not a
word of criticism about this scandalous targeting of Lebanese civilians
was uttered by the foreign ministers of America, Russia, France and Italy
as they sought to bring an end to an apparently unstoppable war.
