BRUSSELS, Nov 29: Four Belgian senators met on Thursday a survivor of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp massacres in a show of support for a Belgian law under which Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being sued for genocide.
The meeting came a day after a Belgian legal panel adjourned a hearing on whether the Belgian courts have jurisdiction in the case against Sharon, who was Israeli defence minister at the time of the massacres in Lebanon.
Wadha El-Sabek, meeting the senators in the presence of reporters, recounted in tears how she was separated from her husband and sons on Sept 17, 1982, in the refugee camp.
“The women were put in a sports center, where we were kept until evening,” she said. “Then we spent the night in a demolished building. The next day, I found one of my sons and my brother-in-law dead.”
The woman said she lost a total of 15 members of her family, including another son, during the massacres carried out by the Lebanese Christian militia after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
The four senators — Jean Cornil of the Socialist Party, Josy Dubie and Michiels Maertens of the Ecologist Party and Vincent Van Quickenborne of the regional Flemish party, Spirit — said they were forming a Sabra and Shatila committee.
“This committee is intended to provide information on the massacres ... and collect money for lawyers to represent people who have sued Ariel Sharon,” said Van Quickenbourne.
The suit against Sharon was brought under a 1993 Belgian law which allows war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide to be tried in Belgian courts, regardless of where the alleged crimes were committed, or the nationality or residence of the victims and accused.
The trial committal chamber of the Brussels Court of Appeals, which was to have ruled on jurisdiction on Wednesday, instead scheduled two further hearings, for Dec 26 and Jan 23.
The Israeli government, which has made clear the current suit could damage diplomatic relations with Belgium, sent a high-level government delegation for Wednesday’s hearing.—AFP
