Refugee Voices

Massacre: One of Many

When the massacre of Sabra and Shatila was committed I was not yet born. I got to know it through my questions about the miserable life we lead in the camp, in Shatila. I am a fourteen-year-old girl now. I, like all children in Shatila, never enjoyed my childhood, we never felt secure, we never smiled except a refugee smile which lasts for few seconds and is all the time just drawn on our faces and does not stem from our hearts. I grew up in Shatila and my parents told me about Shatila's wound, a wound that will stay in my heart forever, they told me about the massacre. I knew from the stories told by the survivors that thousands of our people were massacred in the cruelest ways and in cold blood. Darkness overshadowed Shatila for three days; three days of death, torture, fear and horror. We were told that Israel with its allies in Lebanon committed the massacre. That is how Ariel Sharon became familiar to me.

Ariel Sharon is still in power and Israel is still occupying our land and continuing its history of massacres against us. It first occupied our grandparents land and kicked them out. They became refugees but they never gave up the dream of return. Horrified by this dream, Israel followed us to our refugee camp and slaughtered us again. But what does massacre mean? Does it only mean killing many numbers of innocent people?
As I grew up I got to know that massacre does not only mean killing people in one shot. In that way, Shatila, the known massacre, is only one of many massacres committed against us daily. We as youth live everyday the massacre of our fading dreams: problems at schools and dropouts in high numbers, isn't that a massacre. Illegal departure from the country to the unknown just to escape the unbearable conditions here isn't that a massacre. Deprivation of our civil rights to become dehumanized numbers in the records of the United Nations, isn't that a massacre. And isn't being refugees for fifty-two years a real massacre to our hearts.

As I grew up I got to realize also that only return will protect us from all these massacres committed daily against us. Just return to Palestine will make us live safely forever. Just return will bring us back our lost feelings of our humanity. I and other refugees, younger and older than me living in Shatila or anywhere in the world, are still waiting at the doors of Return and crying out stop massacring us outside and inside Palestine everyday.

Mona Zaaroura, Shatila camp (Lebanon)