Message from Caoimhe Butterly

Wednesday May 22, 2002 11:27

by Nicholas McMurry - Cork Peace Alliance

Irish Peace Activist in Palestine

Caoimhe left Cork at the end of last year to go to Palestine and Iraq. She didn't get as far as Iraq. She entered Yassir Arafat's compound in Ramellah but later regretted it, as this mail makes clear. She should be returning to Ireland shortly

hola bambinas,

i recieved both of your e-mails-thanks for the votes of confidence, i miss you all. . i've written the following to explain where i stand regarding the p. a. and the events that led to entering the compound that night as it was an action that i now regret terribly and one that i feel can, symbolically, be misunderstood. i hope to be able to convey this to as many people as possible 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.