"I Cannot Think Too Much"

Among the first foreign newsmen to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila after September's massacre was TIME Correspondent Roberto Suro. Last week, after the Israeli commission published its findings, Suro paid a return visit. His report:

A few faded ribbons entangled with wilted leaves and a torn flag, once black but now faded to a blotchy purple, are the only mementos left at the mass grave site inside the entrance to Shatila camp. Children on their way home from school skip across the weed-covered burial ground, looking for bits of refuse that can serve as toys. They seem ignorant or uncaring of the fact that beneath their feet lie the bodies of some 200 of the estimated 700 people slaughtered during those 38 grim hours last fall.

The grave site goes untended, but for those who were present at the time of the massacre it still has an inescapable presence. "I always think of those days," says a middle-aged Palestinian man who lost his wife and five children in the killings. "But I cannot think too much." The man has a piece of shrapnel in his skull and another in his leg from the bombs that exploded during the siege of Beirut. He now tends a small clothing store with his sole surviving relative, his father. Says the son: "When I think of the killings, I am afraid that it could happen again. If I remember too much, I want to leave here. But where to go?"

Many of the physical wounds left on the camps by the siege and the slaughter remain unmended. In the final stages of the massacre, Phalangist militiamen ran bulldozers into homes with the dual aim of destroying shelters and burying victims in the rubble. On the main street running through Shatila, a demolished house is a tangle of rusting steel supports. Remnants of clothing are caught in the twisted red bars, so that the rubble looks like a nightmarish clothes closet. The second story of another house is exposed where a wall was ripped away. On the upper floor a drinking glass still sits on a ledge above a washbasin, exactly where it was left on that fateful Thursday.

Reconstruction in the camps lags far behind the rest of Beirut. Residents of Shatila can get water only from a single pipe sticking out of the ground on the main road outside the camp. At an intersection where some residents put up a defense against attacking militiamen, a bomb crater is filled with old auto tires and a rusted tank trap. Raw sewage oozes up to create a black slick on the muddy rain water that covers the street. The major exception to the aura of neglect is a small corner of Shatila that is under the care of a United Nations relief agency. Elsewhere, Norwegian and Austrian relief workers have supplied materials to residents for rebuilding their homes and opened a clinic and a kindergarten on the site of similar facilities formerly operated by one of the more militant Palestine Liberation Organization groups.

Before the massacre, Sabra and Shatila were hives of cottage industry. The clang of metal against metal still rings from some of the small automobile repair shops, but behind the din there is a kind of lethargy. Women and children abound, but there are few males of working age. Many of the men were killed in the massacre. The male Palestinian fighters who survived left the country in the evacuation following the Beirut siege. Since then, the Lebanese army and security forces have conducted roundups of suspected P.L.O. members, criminals and others believed to be in Lebanon illegally. The roundups have contributed to the fear and insecurity that still linger in the camps.

Publication of the Israeli commission report last week brought little joy or satisfaction to the residents of Sabra and Shatila. Said a Lebanese woman who lost several cousins and neighbors in the slaughter: "It is not enough for Israeli officials to lose their jobs. They should hang, or they should be made to die like dogs the way people were killed here." Others were less vengeful, but equally cynical. Said a young Palestinian woman who plans to leave Lebanon: "The Israeli judges did not tell half the truth. They just said enough to try to convince the world that they are honest people." But the feeling of most camp residents was probably reflected by a Lebanese mother who declared, "What do I care about the Israelis. It was Arab people, Lebanese, who came here to kill." The woman held out her hands, palms upward, and said in Arabic, "My hands are empty," meaning "I can do nothing about it." That described the fate of Sabra and Shatila last September, and it remains the fate of the camps today. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.