Sharon - A New Pakistani Hero?

Your blogger must have been asleep when this came out a month ago but now having stumbled onto this piece of news, all I can say is that I was momentarily stunned speechless.


Here is an excerpt from an interview our Commando General gave to the German publication Der Spiegel (published on 28 May 2005).

SPIEGEL: Will Sharon succeed or will he be stopped by religious extremists?
Musharraf: He is a bold man, a great soldier, a courageous leader, but he needs to put more effort into building confidence between the two sides.

Just to jog your memories In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and arranged for their Phalangist mercenaries to massacre 3500 innocent civilians – unarmed men, women and children - in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Robert Fisk, that eminent journalist of our era, writing at the time said:

They must have been sent in here with Israeli permission. They must have been armed by the Israelis. Their handiwork had clearly been watched - closely observed - by the Israelis who were still watching us through their field-glasses.

The massacres even horrified the atrocity hardened Israelis and it led a to Government inquiry which found Ariel Sharon, then defense minister, ‘indirectly’ responsible for the killing of hundreds of men, women and children at Sabra and Shatila camps and he then was sacked from office.

Here are some of Fisk’s eye witness observations from that day for the strong hearted to read:

There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.

On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead

Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed into her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.

And Musharraf calls this man ‘a bold man, a great soldier, a courageous leader? ‘. Is his kursi so important that such bloodcurdling realities are of no longer of any relevance?
Musharraf
Pakistan