Saturday, May 15, 2010

Assaad chaftari for the new york times
The Saturday Profile
10 Years After a Mea Culpa, No Hint of a

Bryan Denton for The New York Times
“At the end of the week I would go to church, after killing and torturing, to confess. But it was futile. I didn’t see killing Palestinians as a sin.” As’ad Shaftari
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: April 16, 2010
BEIRUT, Lebanon
THIRTY-FIVE years after the start of Lebanon’s long civil war, this divided country remains in a state of collective amnesia about its past. No major participant has publicly confronted or truly apologized for his or her role in the many atrocities committed during the bloody 15-year conflict.
No one, that is, except As’ad Shaftari. Ten years ago, Mr. Shaftari, a former intelligence officer in a feared Christian militia, published a searing, unconditional, and heartfelt apology for his war crimes, and has been repeating the message ever since, especially on the April anniversary of the war’s beginning.
He has received death threats, and some praise. But not a single person has followed suit.
On Tuesday, as politicians and civic groups once again commemorated the Beirut massacre that set off the war on April 13, 1975, Mr. Shaftari — a 55-year-old with a look of mournful sincerity on his face — stood at a lectern addressing a group of students at the American University of Beirut.
He told them how he had absorbed a message of communal hatred as a boy. He described how he had become a leading member of a Christian militia, ordering the torture, kidnapping and murder of his enemies.
“At the end of the week I would go to church, after killing and torturing, to confess,” Mr. Shaftari said. “But it was futile. I didn’t see killing Palestinians as a sin.”
It is difficult for outsiders to grasp how unusual this kind of talk is in Lebanon. Other countries have held truth commissions, or have encouraged former combatants to step forward in one way or another. Not Lebanon.
This country’s civil war sometimes seems never to have ended, with a cold hostility that occasionally flares up into open violence, as it did two years ago when the militant group Hezbollah and its allies clashed with their rivals in Beirut. Few Lebanese have ever confessed or forgiven — even for the killings committed within their own sectarian ranks.
Mr. Shaftari’s name and face still evoke terror among some older Muslims here. He was a top aide to Elie Hobeika, the Christian militia commander who directed the notorious massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982. By his own account, Mr. Shaftari ordered prisoners to be killed and tortured during the war years, and in some cases even shot people to death himself.
At the time, he says, he thought he was defending Lebanon. He had grown up in a conventional middle-class family in East Beirut, the son of a bank branch manager. At the time, Arab nationalism was on the rise and Christian-Muslim tensions were growing increasingly toxic.
HE often tells audiences that for him, the war did not start in 1975; it began when he was 5 years old, hearing vicious jokes about Muslims in the playground. He was a fourth-year engineering major at St. Joseph University in Beirut when he joined the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia, and quickly rose in the ranks.
Today, he is an engineer, with a gentle voice and large, sad eyes. His conversion began toward the end of the war, he says, when he encountered members of an international group called Moral Rearmament that preached peace through personal change.
The group, which has since changed its name to Initiatives of Change, shares roots with Alcoholics Anonymous, and Mr. Shaftari sometimes sounds like a recovered addict when he talks about his change of heart.
“It was building up inside me for many years,” he said, as he sat in his living room in a comfortable suburb in the hills overlooking Beirut. “Gradually, I came to feel I had done very bad things on a personal and national level.”
He had grown up a devout Christian, and like other militia members, he had defended his wartime activities by using religious language, with the support of priests. In his apology, he explicitly repudiated all of it, shocking many of his former comrades.
“I apologize because when I was defending what I thought was Christianity in Lebanon, I wasn’t practicing at all the true Christianity, which is about loving others,” he said in the apology, which was about 500 words in all and was initially published (in Arabic) by a news agency and several newspapers. The apology made clear that he believed that nothing — not the exigencies of war, any prior crimes by others, or any legal amnesty — could extenuate the wrongs he had done.
Afterward, Muslims embraced his statement warmly and gratefully, Mr. Shaftari said. On the Christian side, reactions were mixed.
“Some said, ‘You are a traitor, you don’t have the right to say that,’ he recalled. “Some said, ‘Why not wait for a Muslim to take the first step?’ But others, when they saw me in the street, began to cry. They would say, ‘I was in the war, but I could not express myself.’ ”
Still, the apology did not inspire others to do the same. In part, this had to do with Lebanon’s complex politics: it was not in anyone’s interest to stir up old wounds, and that included Syria, which occupied Lebanon militarily until 2005.
In 2008, the Christian militia leader Samir Geagea issued a kind of apology, saying he asked for forgiveness from God and those his faction had harmed. But he diluted his regret almost immediately, saying all the mistakes he had made were done in the course of “national duty” and that they had been unavoidable.
SOME have criticized Mr. Shaftari for not apologizing more specifically for the killings or other harm he was responsible for. Asked about this, Mr. Shaftari said he had decided to address the victims privately. In those cases where he knows the identity of people, he has approached them or their relatives to seek forgiveness, he said. He declined to say how they had reacted.
In the meantime, he has worked quietly over the years with a number of civic groups to raise awareness about the war, including the issue of the “disappeared” — those whose remains were never found. Gradually, those who had suspected him of political motives came to trust his sincerity.
“He is a tragic person, somehow,” said Lokman Slim, the co-director of a documentation and research center in Beirut who had interviewed Mr. Shaftari as part of a film about Lebanese attitudes toward the war. “He made this huge step forward, but he didn’t find followers.”
In recent years, there has been some progress, Mr. Slim and others say. Political figures have begun to talk publicly about the issue of those who disappeared during the war, including the Lebanese president, Michel Suleiman, who mentioned it in his inaugural address in June 2008. Last year, a group of families filed a suit against the government to obtain more information about mass graves.
On Tuesday, a group of lawmakers played a commemorative soccer match, a lighthearted effort to mark the occasion of the start of the war in 1975. The match was televised live, and promoted under the wishful slogan “We are all one team.” It may not amount to much, but it is more than the silence that reigned for so many years after the war’s end.
“It is becoming more and more important as a day,” Mr. Shaftari said. “We are not there yet. But there are some good signs.”

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