Amnesty calls on Lebanon to trace civil war missing

ON THE 36th anniversary of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, Amnesty International urged the Beirut authorities to investigate the disappearances of 17,415 people who are believed dead or imprisoned in Syria.

Malcolm Smart, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director, recommended the creation of “an independent commission of inquiry, one that includes among its members representatives of the families of the missing”.

Amnesty also called for collection from family members of DNA samples that could be compared with remains of those killed during the 1975-1990 war and Israel’s 1970s-1980s invasion and occupation.

The civil war erupted on April 13th, 1975, when a bus carrying Palestinian refugees was attacked on the outskirts of Beirut by gunmen of the right-wing Maronite Christian Phalange party which, mistakenly, blamed Palestinians for an attack on a church in the vicinity.

Those responsible were, in fact, members of the pan-Arab Greek Orthodox Syrian Social National Party. Clashes between Palestinian forces backed by the Druze militia and Phalangists escalated into an all-out civil conflict, drawing in other local forces and regional powers.

Syrian troops entered the country in 1976 as part of an Arab League peacekeeping force and withdrew in 2005 following the assassination of former premier Rafiq Hariri.

In a 12-page report entitled, Forgotten: Lebanon’s Missing People, Amnesty points out that Lebanon’s conflicts “resulted in mass displacements of people and transfers of individuals between groups and across borders. Thousands of people were unlawfully killed and thousands were victims of enforced disappearances, abductions and other abuses.”

Amnesty took the Lebanese state to task for failing to “undertake any truth, justice and reconciliation process” to discover the fate of the missing and for not bringing criminals to justice.