JERUSALEM, June 24 -- Nearly two decades after an official Israeli investigation found Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Palestinian refugees in Beirut, new calls are being issued to try him for war crimes.
No new information has surfaced regarding the role of Sharon, now Israel's prime minister, who as defense minister in 1982 led the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and was forced to resign because of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Sharon, who is to meet President Bush in Washington on Monday, is riding high in public opinion polls in Israel and enjoys considerable U.S. support.
Still, the spotlight has been cast anew on Sharon and the massacre by "The Accused," a lengthy documentary broadcast last week by the BBC. A number of prominent figures, including a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East, suggest in the film that Sharon should or could be convicted for war crimes.
The day after the documentary was aired June 17, Palestinian survivors of the massacre asked a Belgian court to indict Sharon based on a law allowing trials in Belgium for war crimes regardless of where they occurred. On Friday, New York-based Human Rights Watch called for a criminal investigation of Sharon.
"I have been waiting for this moment so long," said Suad Srour Mereh, one of the 28 people who filed the case in Belgium. "It was the most horrible moment, which I won't ever forget." Mereh, who was 14 at the time, said she was raped, shot in the spine and left for dead among the bodies of her slain family members; she remains paralyzed.
The furor over a 19-year-old atrocity has reopened a bitter episode in Sharon's past at a particularly sensitive time. After nine months of renewed violence in the Middle East, Israel and the Palestinians are engaged in a public relations battle for international sympathy, and many Israelis see the rehashing of Sharon's role in the massacre as evidence of anti-Israel bias and even anti-Semitism.
Sharon has refused to comment on the BBC documentary. Israel's Foreign Ministry condemned it as "distorted, unfair and intentionally hostile," and some officials threatened to take unspecified action against the BBC's news bureau in Jerusalem.
"There's anti-Semitism, there's deception, there's malice -- all put in one show with a sinister intent," said Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon.
Even Israeli critics of Sharon have questioned the documentary. It was aired for "political reasons -- this is my only interpretation," said Zeev Schiff, a veteran defense correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who was among the first journalists to break the news of the massacre and the details of Sharon's role. "If I were the [BBC] editor I'd call the [producer] and say, 'Very nice, but what's new?' "
The BBC denied any taint of anti-Semitism. It insisted that Sharon's election as prime minister in March, as well as the new international focus on war crimes prosecutions, justified the fresh look at the Sabra and Shatila killings.
"The investigation of human rights abuses and the notion of accountability for such abuse is recognized by all civilized states as a fundamental moral and legal obligation," Fergal Keane, the producer of the documentary, wrote on the BBC Web site. "With questions now being asked in France over the behavior of its generals in Algeria, a former U.S. presidential candidate forced to explain his actions in the Vietnam War, not to mention the case of General Pinochet [in Chile] . . . the debate over war crimes has never been more relevant."
No one has ever been indicted, tried or convicted for the September 1982 killings in Beirut. At least 700 Palestinian refugees were slaughtered at the camps; some estimates run to more than 2,000. Among the dead were women, children and the elderly, some of whom were tortured, disfigured or raped before they were mowed down with machine-gun fire.
The killings were carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied with, and in some cases trained by, Israel. The militiamen, known as Phalangists, had been at war with the Palestinians in Lebanon for years, and detested them. Their passion had been stoked by the assassination of their leader, Bashir Jemayel, the newly elected Christian president of Lebanon.
Soon after the Israeli army took control of West Beirut, Sharon, who had overall command of forces in Beirut, authorized the Phalangists to enter the camps in search of Palestinian guerrillas. The militiamen found few guerrillas, but in a rampage that lasted nearly three days, they killed civilians by the hundreds.
Sharon maintained that he "never imagined" the Phalangists would go on such a killing spree. But the official Israeli commission of inquiry said that knowing the Phalangists' violent history and the tensions brought about by Jemayel's assassination, Sharon should have realized the probability of a massacre if the militiamen entered the camps. The commission also said Sharon and other Israeli military figures failed to react quickly and decisively to halt the massacre after the first reports of killings.
The commission cited Sharon for "grave mistakes" and recommended that he resign as defense minister or be dismissed. After at first refusing, he resigned.
Some of the officers under Sharon's command were also disciplined but later went on to successful careers. Brig. Gen. Amos Yaron, now director general of Israel's Defense Ministry, was division commander in Beirut. The commission found him seriously at fault for doing little to halt the killings and he was relieved of his post in 1983. While Yaron acknowledged at the time that he did "badly" and had been "oblivious" to terrible events in an area under Israeli control, Sharon has remained unrepentant.
Morris Draper, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East at the time, makes the point emphatically in the documentary that Sharon should have anticipated and prevented the massacre. "You'd have to be appallingly ignorant" not to expect a bloodbath, he says. "I mean, I suppose if you came down from the moon that day, you might not predict it."
Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who was chief prosecutor of the U.N. war crime tribunals from 1994 to 1996, says in the documentary that, in general, military commanders are "more responsible" for civilian deaths than are the people who pull the trigger.
Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton who was vice chairman of an international commission that investigated Israel's invasion of Lebanon, told the BBC, "There is no question in my mind that [Sharon] is indictable for the kind of knowledge that he either had or should have had."
The BBC said its Web site had been "inundated" by responses, and after a few days announced it had stopped posting them. Israelis and other defenders of Sharon protested that the BBC unfairly persecuted Sharon, and noted there is no move to prosecute the Phalangist leaders who were on the scene when the massacre took place, including Elie Hobeika, who until recently was a cabinet minister in Lebanon.
