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Sharon Sued in Belgium over Palestinian Massacres: paper
BRUSSELS, June 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being sued in a Belgian court, holding him responsible for the 1982 massacres of 800 to 2,000 Palestinian civilians in Lebanese refugee camps in cold blood, the daily Le Soir reported Saturday.
The suit was filed under a unique 1993 law that allows Belgian courts to try persons here, regardless of their nationality, for genocide and other crimes against humanity committed abroad.
Sharon was due to visit Brussels next week, but Israeli television reported the prime minister had cancelled the trip in the wake of a suicide bomb attack in Tel Aviv, which killed 18 people.
The newspaper said Belgian judicial authorities were studying whether the suit against him was admissible under terms of the law, which is currently being used to try four Rwandans in connection with the 1994 genocide in their central African country.
The plaintiffs in the suit against Sharon are a mix of Palestinians, Lebanese, Moroccans and Belgians grouped in an ad hoc committee.
They accuse Sharon of allowing Christian militias to slaughter between 800 and 2,000 Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps located in an area of Lebanon controlled by the Israeli military after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon when Sharon was defense minister.
An Israeli commission of enquiry in 1983 found Sharon indirectly responsible for the killings, a finding that forced him to resign his post.
And the United Nations has officially classified the Sabra and Shatila killings as acts of genocide, Eric David, international law professor at the Free University of Brussels, told Le Soir.
In Sabra and Shatila men, women and children were slaughtered, at a time when Sharon was Israel's minister of defense and architect of his country's bloody invasion of Lebanon.
He was also involved in another notorious massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya on October 14, 1953. Sharon's unit blew up 45 houses in the village, killing 69 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, according to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his recent book The Iron Wall.
Last January, when he was campaigning for prime minister, Sharon expressed his regrets for the "terrible tragedy" of the 1982 massacres, but refused to apologize.
"What it was," he said in a press interview, "was an act of killing carried out by Arab Christians against Arab Muslims."
Sharon provoked the current intifada or Palestinian uprising with his encroachment on east Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam, last September 28. Ever since more than 560 Palestinians have been killed; 91 Israeli Jews and 13 Arabs living under Israeli control have died.
Human rights activists started a campaign in January on the World Wide Web to indict Sharon for "atrocities against humanity." The unprecedented initiative, Indict Sharon Now, has ever since gathered thousand of signatures.
The organizers of the campaign said they were prompted to act by recent developments in other countries and the "emerging system of international justice."
They noted the cases of Chili's former military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic, and the perpetrators of Rwanda's genocide.
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