Spurred by international efforts to bring war criminals round the world to book and the more recent hunt for Yugoslavia's Serbian leaders, Lebanon has launched investigations into an Israeli massacre that shocked the world nearly 19 years ago.

Lebanon's chief military prosecutor has begun inquiring into the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, south of Beirut, in which, according to latest estimates, 2,800 people died or disappeared.

The new inquiry follows a suit filed on June 27 by Lebanese lawyer May Khansa against the then Israeli defense minister and current Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, charging him with war crimes for his role in the massacre.

This is the latest of three suits filed in June against Sharon. The two others were submitted on June 12 and 18 to examining magistrates in Belgium.

In 1993 Belgium enacted a law providing for criminal jurisdiction of Belgian courts over breaches of the Geneva Conventions in cases of internal armed conflict, regardless of who committed the crimes and where they were committed. In 2001, a trial started against four Rwandans accused of genocide in their country in 1994 and two of them were convicted in early June.

The Egyptian Bar Association has also begun trying Sharon in absentia.

The recent attempts to arrest and bring to trial Serbian political and military leaders before the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, culminating in early-July's appearance before the tribunal of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, appears to have given an impetus to try Sharon.

The current suits have been bolstered by a recent British television documentary titled 'The Accused'.

Experts quoted in the film, made by the British Broadcasting Corporation, said Sharon should be indicted for the murder of least 800 civilians. Latest estimates, based on Lebanese complaints before Belgian courts, set the number of dead and disappeared at 2,800.

Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, told the filmmakers: "Sharon's specific command responsibility arises from the fact that it was he [who] gave the directions and orders" that led to the massacre.

Morris Draper, United States special envoy to the Middle East at the time, told the program that when Sharon ordered his army into West Beirut, he was in breach of an agreement with the United States that his troops would not enter this sector of the city.

Draper revealed the Israeli army command informed him ahead of time that it would not only violate the agreement but also deploy militiamen from Israel's local ally, the right-wing Maronite Christian Phalange.

Draper's response to Sharon's claim that the actions of the Phalange could not be predicted was "complete and utter nonsense."

Draper is right. Two examples suffice: In 1976 the Phalange massacred 1,500 Lebanese Muslims at the Qarantina and Maslakh quarters in East Beirut and hundreds of Palestinians at the Tel Zaatar refugee camp.

Furthermore, Phalange bloodlust had been exacerbated by the assassination on September 14 of the party chief Bashir Gemayel.

About 150 Phalangists were introduced by the Israeli army into the Sabra-Shatila camps on the evening of September 16, reports at the time revealed.

Sharon announced publicly that the object was to flush out 2,000 PLO fighters who he claimed stayed behind when the bulk of the forces were evacuated at the end of August.

However, no military man of Sharon's experience would have deployed so few Phalangists to round up and capture so many Palestinians 'fighters'.

While Israeli troops sealed off the camps and illuminated the streets with flares, Phalange militiamen began to torture, massacre and mutilate old men, women and children.

One of the survivors who filed a lawsuit in Belgium, Suad Srour, then 14, told the BBC that she was raped, shot and struck on the head by the militiamen who killed most members of her family.

My own investigations revealed that Israeli officers and men at the scene knew full well what was happening.

The Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv was informed at 11.10 p.m. on September 16 that 300 people had been killed but nothing was done to halt the slaughter. Time magazine wrote on October 4 that Sharon had planned for "many months" to use Phalangists to purge the camps. Sharon discussed the cleansing action with Gemayel on September 12, two days before the Phalangist leader's assassination.

Ten days after the massacre, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that Israeli intelligence had concluded the killing "was not the result of an explosion of [Phalangist] anger and a desire for vengeance [for the killing of Bashir]... as claimed by the Israeli authorities."

The real aim, Ha'aretz said, was the "expulsion of the whole Palestinian population of Lebanon, beginning with Beirut.

"[The aim was] to create panic, to provoke an exodus, en masse, of Palestinians towards Syria and to convince all Palestinians in Lebanon that they were no longer safe in that country."

Jonathan Frankel, an associate professor at the Hebrew University, wrote in The Jerusalem Post on June 27, nearly three months before the massacre: "Ariel Sharon... has never sought to keep secret his grand strategy... Lebanon should be cleared of foreign [PLO and Syrian] forces and re-established as a [pro-Israel] Christian-dominated state. The PLO should be effectively destroyed; the occupied territories [West Bank and Gaza] annexed to Israel; the Arab population there granted a highly limited form of internal autonomy; and Jewish settlements vastly expanded.

"Finally, the Palestinians should be encouraged to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom and convert Jordan into their own national state," which could serve as a refuge for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians pushed across the frontier by Israel.

Sharon's 'Peace for Galilee' operation ended up costing 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian lives and wounding 30,000 people.

Michael Jansen is a freelance journalist and author of the book The Battle for Beirut: Why Israel Invaded Lebanon.

Courtesy Gemini News Service