I thank you, Mr. Taoutel (March 29 letter, “Sharon ignored Phalangist danger”), for attempting to bring to light anything I have left out about Sabra and Shatila in my March 28 letter to the editor.

I agree with you, Mr. Taoutel, that we must indeed tell the “whole story” and not just a part of it. I agree with you completely that, as the Kahan Commission declared, Sharon did not properly consider the danger of bloodshed and did not do enough to prevent it.

However, not doing enough to prevent bloodshed, while blameworthy, is quite different from purposefully conducting a massacre of civilians, of which Mr. Denner (March 23 column, “Sharon not the man to incite a peace process”) irresponsibly accused Sharon.

It is ridiculous to single out Israel for blame when this was just a continuation of the blood-soaked civil war in which Lebanon was embroiled for seven years before Israel was ever on the scene.

It is estimated that more than 95,000 people lost their lives during that war. The killings in the camps, which, according to www.bbc.com, numbered 800, not 2,000, came on top of numerous massacres which the various sides perpetrated against one another as if they were trading baseball cards.

When Israel entered Beirut, there was no agreement left to violate. The Habib agreements have been virtually ignored by the PLO, which in the months following Philip Habib’s cease-fire announcement, staged 270 terrorist actions in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and along the Lebanese and Jordanian borders.

Twenty-nine Israelis died and more than 300 were injured. The final straw came when 200 PLO gunmen were discovered to be hiding among the refugees in the camps, after the PLO promised to evacuate entirely from Lebanon. Israel had no choice but to attempt to defeat the remaining terrorists and entered West Beirut while the Phalangists — under strict orders not to harm civilians — were to enter the camps and filter out the PLO gunmen from the refugees.

Contrary to explicit Israeli orders, a massacre ensued after the battle between Phalangists and PLO forces.

It is worth mentioning that, at that time, Elie Hobeika was already maintaining contacts with Syria (he openly defected later), suggesting he may have orchestrated the massacres as a political provocation against his Israeli allies, a move not atypical of him.

Finally Mr. Taoutel, I respectfully disagree with your claim that Sharon intentionally targeted 7,000 civilians.

I have yet to see a single verifiable news source that proves your allegation to be true, and I stand by my statement that while Sharon is far from perfect, he has never intentionally targeted civilians.

And as long as we’re telling it like it is, just to be fair we should apply the same standard to everyone as we do to Israel.

As such, I would like to propose that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan be indicted for war crimes, human rights abuses, civilian massacres, etc., for failing to anticipate and prevent the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Vlad Pogre

Sophomore

Genetics