The Latest from Caoimhe Butterly

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday May 16, 2002 16:24 by Joe Sheehan jsheehan at subdimension dot com

Below is a section of an email that Caoimhe has requested to have made public to let people know her opinion on the current Palestine situation

Before returning to ireland{as soon as the migra catches up with me!)as the
last platform from which i'd ever wish to speak from is one condoning a
government who's complicity in the nightmare of the last few weeks becomes
more and more apparent.so,if you would do me the favour of forwarding this
to as many people as possible in ireland-indymedia,pal.solidarity groups,the
anarchists,the socialists,the folks in the north and anyone else you can
think of,i'll be mightily indebted to you all!

having spent the majority of my time here in palestine in refugee
camps,including during the febuary incursions into balata,tul'karem,and
jenin camps and having witnessed and supported wholeheartedly the emerging
leadership from the camps as the true representative voice of many
palestinians-with their adherance to the right of return and their ongoing
resistance to what is now more clearly a double occupation-that of the
israeli occupation forces and that of the palestinian authority,i hope to be
able to convey to people that the testimonies that we've being documenting
in jenin camp for the last month further serve to accentuate the
differences-in resilience,in
courage and beauty-between the players and those,ultimately,who were played
and-on a more personal basis-have served to prolong the long,painful process
of trying to forgive myself for not having been there while dear friends
were either bleeding to death or having their lives desecrated.the stories
we've collected,all of them of serious human rights violations and many of
them actual war crimes-such as executions,denial of access to medical
care(killing uniformed medical personnel,blocking ambulances),using
civilians as human shields,the illegal,undocumented removal of the
dead(among those,a few families insist,the bodies of women and children and
at least two fighters whose bodies were mutilated in front of
witnesses)bulldozing houses on top of people with little or no warning and
generally subjecting an almost entirely civilian,captive,population to 14
long days of torture,humiliation and terror.
when i entered the compound it was on the basis of a phone call
i recieved from a friend,from jenin,who had been shot inside and with the
fear that everyone inside would be massacred,which seemed like a real threat
at the time and continued to seem so for the next 3/4 days,until conditions
improved(in the sense that the israelis stopped shooting in the windows but
continued to shell the building)with both the arrival of the larger
international group and with the visit of,i later found out,the head of the
middle east c.i.a. bureau-a meeting that i expect had some trade-offs,of the
kind eventually witnessed in the eventual lifting of the siege around the
compound and the p.a.'s subsequent silence around jenin and the noticable
lack of pressure for an official,international inquiry and also seen with
the negotiations around the church of the nativity,which were taken over by
a representative of the p.a. as soon as the siege on the compound was
lifted,with the eventual exiling (which has long been done unofficially by
the israelis but having now been done once officially sets a damning
precedence)of activists who are as much a threat to the p.a. as to the
israelis.
i received a call on april 3 from a friend,maha,whose mother miriam was a
prominant activist in the last intifada and who had welcomed me with much
love into her home the week before when i had stayed at the camp and who
bled from head wounds over the course of 3 days and finally died on april
9,five days after her 18-year son,muneer,a truly gentle soul,died after his
younger brother,carrying his wounded brother to the hospital was repeatedly
shot at by soldiers,until he finally brought muneer home to die.
maha told me that the tanks were beginning to move towards jenin and that
although she was confident that the fighters in the camp could hold them
out,as they did in the febuary incursion,that she was afraid that the
intensity of the attack would be different and she asked me to be with
them,as i had promised i would,during this time.
the following days i found personally torturous-all foreigners,at this stage
who left the compound were arrested and deported and the outside
of the compound was surrounded by tanks,police,barbed wire and snipers.as
the days progressed and the news from jenin got worse and worse-telephone
lines had been cut and the only news that got out was from reports from the
surrounding villages,i tried every way i could to try to get out of the
compound without being deported to get up to jenin
-trying to convince any delegation that entered the compound to try to
smuggle me out,but it wasn't until april 15 that i finally decided that i
would rather die trying to get to jenin rather than live with the knowledge
that i didn't even try-so i made a run for it,past the snipers and tanks and
over walls and under barbed wire and wasn't killed and got to jenin,far too
late,and with the awful knowledge that maybe,just maybe,if i had been there
i could have carried even one of numerous friends who were killed there to
safety,or lessened in some way the brutality endured by one family.