War History [Cafe Liban.net]

The Syrians liquidated the Sayah family in the village of Bsous.
    Coletter Sayah, aged 18, awoke one morning to the noise of Syrian airplanes. The Sayah family hastened to take shelter in a ground floor room. Shortly before 8 AM, Colette heard the first bursts of an automatic and the rumble of tanks in the village streets.

    Outside, men were shouting: "Out! Out! You dogs, you!"
One by one, the members of the Sayah family left their shelter. In the street, in the house, there were many tens of Syrian soldiers. They took away Colette, her mother and her aunts into an adjoining building under construction. They'd barely arrived there when they heard a series of shots.

    The Syrians had just killed all the men of the family. The father and a cousin with a bullet in their heads, one of the brothers was shot through his heart. Another brother was still breathing. Colette asked them to call an ambulance, but the Syrians preferred that the boy die. He will die in his sister's arms. Emile and Joseph, the two uncles, were executed in a staircase. The corpses will lie in the middle of the road until evening, surrounded by a humming cloud of flies and bees.

The massacre of Dahr al Wahch.
The people of the village of Dahr alWahch saw Syrian soldiers push a column of Lebanese prisoners who were walking in their shorts towards some unknown destination. A nun, a nurse at the governmental hospital of Baabda, saw the arrival of corpses and of the Red Cross ambulances. "I counted between 75 and 80, she explained. Most of them had a bullet in the back of their heads or in their mouth. The corpses still carried the mark of cords around their wrists." The rigidity of the corpses fixed their crossed arms behind their backs. They were naked, wearing only shorts. Some ten of them had their eyes gouged out, another ten had an arm or leg cut off. All had been shot in their heads. There can be no doubt about their execution.

The Hirawi government announced that there had been no massacres.

The Rights of Man in Syria
[torture "made in Syria"]

All the world organizations that struggle to defend the Rights of Man have published documents about torture in Syria. The following is a document published in Geneva in May 1984 by the "Swiss Association for the Defense of the Liberties of Political Prisoners in Syria." This document, entitled "The Rights of Man in Syria" refers to the treatments reserved for political prisoners held by the Damascus secret services:

1. The prisoner is stripped naked.
2. His whole body is shaved.
3. Cigarette butts are extinguished over the more sensitive places of his body
4. They burn his scalp.
5. They pull out his nails.
6. They tie his genitals with a nylon thread that they secure to a nail on the wall after transfixing the prisoner to a ring fixed on the opposite wall. Then,
one of the tormentors strikes the taut nylon thread repeatedly with a stick.
7. They flog the soles of a prisoner's feet with lashes of a whip, a cane, or a plastic pipe, a minimum of two hundred lashes a time.
8. Then, stretch out the prisoner inside a container of cold water.
9. They invert the prisoner into a car tire's rim and then strike him all over [the process: they insert a leg into the middle of the tire, followed by the head and the arms in such a manner that the prisoner is bent over and immobilized in the form of a U inside the tire's circle].
10. They hang the prisoner by his feet with his head down.
11. They force the prisoner to remain standing during several days while preventing him from sitting down or falling asleep by ordering him to raise his arms fully stretched and very straight.
12. They force the prisoner to stand for long periods of time on one foot, administering blows each time he lowers his raised foot.
13. They force the prisoners to run while carrying heavy loads and sustaining blows until utterly exhausted or in a faint.
14. Pour all of a sudden boiling water over the prisoners.
15. They force the prisoner to sit on a stake.
16. They force the prisoner to sit on the neck of a bottle.
17. They subject the prisoner to electric shock by using an alternative electric current and tying the wires to the more sensitive parts of the body, especially to the genitals.
18. They force pump water or air into the prisoner.
19. They force sexual intercourse with the prisoner.
20. They tear out chunks of the prisoner's flesh from various parts of his body with the help of pliers.
21. They rope the prisoner to a car and drive it full speed until death occurs or till the victims' bodies are torn apart and then the victim's bodies are
desecrated by gouging an eye or cutting an ear, the tongue, the fingers and in some cases the genitals, and by sticking them into the victim's mouth.
22. They force the prisoner to run around a large room surrounded by torturers who strike him with diverse instruments of torture.
23. Force the prisoner to drink his own urine.
24. They throw the prisoner into a basin of electrified water.
25. They tie the prisoner's genitals to prevent him from urinating after forcing him to drink diuretic liquids.

"Massacre after the surrender" in Beirut
by Robert Fisk
[Robert Fisk saw the bodies of General Aoun's soldiers allegedly murdered by the Syrians]

    "WE HAD TO CUT the ropes from their hands after their bodies were brought here," the nurse said with a voice of suppressed rage. "Most of the soldiers were found by the Red Cross in the forest. There are 80 corpses here. This did not happen during the fighting."

    She led the way down the steps of Baabda Hospital to a feud fly-infested basement and there, on the floor and stacked inside glass refrigerators, were dozens of young men, most shot in the face or chest, many dressed only in underpants.

    Most of the bodies -- some of them in a state of advanced decomposition because there has been no electricity to work the hospital's freezer system -- were still in the uniform of the Lebanese army. Most had wounds under their chins or on their faces. Blood had long congealed on the heads of the almost naked men.

    "See what the Syrians did?" The nurse was screaming her words now. "They took some of these men from their homes. They had surrendered. They made them undress. Then they murdered them." Among the dead, several had grossly deformed head where bullets had hit their faces possibly at very close range. I counted 32 bodies but others lay in an inner corridor.

    Because wars create rumor as well as fact -- and because this is Lebanon -- the full story of how these men died may never be known. According to the Christian Maronite nurse, all the bodies had been found in the area of the three villages that lay before the advance of the Syrian army into General Michel Aoun's enclave last Saturday -- Deir Wahash, Saaba and Kfarshima.

    According to the hospital, the killings took place on Sunday morning. They insisted that the Syrians were to blame although pro-Syrian Christian militiamen were also present in the villages at the time. Nor will any attempt be made to conduct post-mortem examinations. Some of the bodies may have had other wounds -- perhaps caused by the original Syrian bombardment -- although the nurse who tore the plastic wrapping from the cadavers pointed only to bullet wounds.

    Certainly, enough proof is emerging in East Beirut that some sinister and terrible things may have happened over the weekend when the Syrians, supporting President Elias Hirawi's government and army, ended General Aoun's rule in East Beirut. I was touring the area of Baabda because i had already been told -- in West Beirut -- that Lebanese army survivors were recounting stories of a mass killing.

    According to this first report, 80 Lebanese Christian soldiers had been forced to undress after being captured by Syrians, and 30 had been machine-gunned to death when Lebanese troops loyal to president Hirawi's government arrived and saved the lives of the remaining 50 men. This would perhaps account for the bodies clad only in pants in the Baabda mortuary. None of the corpses carried personal identification.

    Christians in East Beirut also claim that civilians were murdered in the village of Deir Wahash -- one man told me that a family of 10 had been killed. The hospital nurse said that members of three families, including several children, had been shot dead in the local church. There was no way yesterday of discovering if this was true.

    Christian fears are expressed with circumspection. "I don't know why Aoun ran away," the female owner of a half-gutted supermarket said. "But now my husband and I just want to leave our country, to get a visa to anywhere. Who will protect us?"

    In theory, this will be the job of President Hirawi's Lebanese army whose Syrian tanks, newly decorated with tiny Lebanese flags, stand guard at the East-West Beirut crossing point at Galerie Semaan. When I approached one crew, they admitted the vehicles belonged to the Syrian army.

    Outside Baabda mortuary yesterday, a young soldier sat with his head on his hands, weeping. He feared his soldier brother might be in the charnel-house below. "I hate you," the nurse whispered to me as I left, "I hate you all -- Americans, French, British... I hate you all."

MURDER OF A NATION,
BIRTH OF A NATION
[written By A Lebanese Freedom Fighter]

    Killing one person in a jungle is an unforgivable crime, and killing a whole nation is a question of national interests. That is the case of the Syrian-murdered nation of Lebanon as presented on the United States foreign policy agenda.
The US officials in the Bush, then subsequent administrations, have supported the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in exchange of, initially the Syrian support for the Liberation of Kuwait, then later for other regional dark services that the Syrian dictatorship has provided. These US officials have been accessories, if not principals, to the murder of Lebanon.
The Israeli officials who sanctioned the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in exchange of Assad's elimination of all active Palestinian guerilla factions in Lebanon, then the planned settlement of large number of Palestinians in Lebanon, are also accessories, if not principals, to the murder of Lebanon.

    Everywhere we look in the world in the last 50 years, acts of invasions and brutality have gone unpunished; the Chinese communist invasion of Tibet, the Syrian dictatorship's invasion and ethnic cleansing of Lebanon, the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Recent history suggests that it takes an armed struggle culminating in a major genocide to get the attention of the world towards an injustice, as was also the case in Bosnia and Kosovo. Are these the options that the world powers would like the Lebanese to pursue? Armed Struggle and genocide? Are you telling us that in order to get justice we must carry arms and blow up Syrians anywhere they stand in our country and theirs? East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo were not even full nations, yet they obtained their freedoms and the withdrawal of the foreign occupation troops form their land. The Palestinians are getting their state. Lebanon on the other hand, a founding member of the Arab League, a full member of the United Nations, a signatory on many international treaties, a nation with 30 years of independent history and diplomatic relations, has been invaded and occupied by a brutal Syrian dictatorship from the middle ages. The world watched passively and tacitly acknowledges the fact that Lebanon today, is a Syrian-occupied land with puppet regimes deserving no respect and serving only the interests of the Syrian dictatorship.

    Yes, the Truth is that after years of bombardment, sabotage, assassinations, and terrorism, Syria finally invaded Lebanon on October 13, 1990 and has since maintained an occupation force of 40,000 troops along with thousands more secret service operatives. On October 13, 1990, hundreds of Lebanese soldiers and civilians were massacred by the invading Syrian troops in cold blood and after the cease-fire was declared. Lebanese soldiers corpses that were checked into hospitals, had their hands tied behind their back and a revolver shot into the back their heads. Since then, a Dark Age descended upon our land. Thousands of our people have been arrested, tortured, and killed by the Syrian-imposed occupation regimes of Hariri and Lahoud and the Syrian secret services. This world that claims democracy and human rights is nothing but a ferocious beast that promotes lies, falsehood, and the interests of International Mafias. We enter the 21st century with great cynicism but also with a renewed determination to regain our Freedom and live Free under the sun.

    We shall never be silent. We reject the Syrian and Israeli occupations of Lebanon. We refuse to be a commodity on the table, a minor change, a bargaining chip. We refuse to be committed to the Syrian Gulag! We reject the US and the world's silence over the brutalities of these two occupations. We hold the United States of America, France, the Vatican, the European community, and the International community responsible for the continuing occupation and assimilation of Lebanon by Syria. We hold the people of the world responsible. We except they awaken, inform themselves, and demand from their governments a change in policy that will re-establish the rule of international law and punish the Syrian dictatorship for its continuing occupation of Lebanon. We shall teach our children for generations to come about the crimes of the barbaric regime of Hafez Assad.

    October 13 is our day of national mourning, a day of Remembrance and Atonement, our Yom Kippor, our Holocaust, but also a day of our re-Birth. It is the day, when our constitutional government of His Excellency Prime Minister Michel Aoun was overthrown by the foreign Syrian invasion supported by International Mafias and the dark world powers. The day when the last bastion of Free Lebanon had fallen. It is the modern day when Cain murdered his brother Able. It is also the day when we achieved victory by standing firm on our convictions and refusal to sign away our homeland. We went down valiantly in battle, but we did not surrender. We safeguarded the right of all Lebanese for independence, freedom, and human rights. We have lost a battle but we are winning the war. The first and foremost lasting victory is that we have captured the hearts, minds, and souls of our people. Our cause is just and humane. We are the beautiful dream that shall never die, and we are ready to become the nightmare of the world until it acts to right the wrongs committed against our people.

    For all our fallen martyrs and for all the living, we renew our Covenant for a Free Lebanon. The struggle shall continue for a hundred years if we must. We proclaim our right to use any mean to liberate our land, and we exclude no historically legitimate method that any other oppressed people have used. We promise our people that we shall liberate Lebanon. We shall not rest until the Light of Freedom has penetrated all the dark alleys of the Middle East. We shall create a born-again nation with a human face. A Free people with equality, compassion, and opportunity for all. A democratic state voted by the people, bound by just laws equally applied to everyone. A Humanistic society where every individual is cherished regardless of social, economic, ethnic, religious, or cultural origins.

We the people of Lebanon do ordain our Independence, our Sovereignty, our Freedom, and 6000 years of history.

Long Live Michel Aoun
Long Live Free Lebanon

"Almighty God, you and only you can forgive them, not us."

    On the 13th of October 1990, the presidential Palace of Baabda was infested by the virus of treachery and shame. Unfortunately, the invasion of the Mecca of Lebanon could not have happened without the help of a foreign occupying army which went astray by invading Lebanon rather than liberating the Golan heights.

    Nevertheless, nobody said they wanted to liberate the Golan? Needless to say, Lebanon is tentamount to a mine of gold to them; its geopolitical and economical importance is tremendous to a third world country like Syria. As far as the resulting loss of honour is concerned, the executioner of Damascus has always bragged about the things he lacked most. [refer to Machiavelli: Le Prince].

    On the other hand, regarding the local collaborators, the trash bins of history are full of ugly dummies like them. They are waste products that seek to glorify their shameful misachievements by any means even at the detriment of their country. Usually, people like these are not so proud of their misbehaviour especially because they know from previous figures in history that the future generations will convert their funerariums into "urinariums" for stray dogs. Except our national "HEROES" of course; those belong to a special species for which being ignominious and mean are matters of pride. Anyway they will only be referred to as minute black stains in the glorious history of the Great Lebanon. To these we say:

Gentlemen, you have sold Lebanon, but you won't be able to sell the Lebanese people.
Gentlemen, the people of Lebanon is not asleep and very soon you will be requested answers.
Gentlemen, the wind will not always blow to the best interest of Syria and at that moment you will pay dearly for your hypocrite treachery.
Gentlemen, as long as there is one man who believes in the ideas of General Aoun, you will be swept and thrown in the garbages of history.
And last but not least gentlemen, as long as the shadow of General Aoun is here, I advise you never to rest upon your so called crown... of shame of course!

..a resistant known as SPIDER.

Soldiers of the Lebanese army are prisoners of the Syrian army
and deported to Syrian prisons.