Message from Caoimhe Butterley from Jenin

Tuesday June 11, 2002 17:54

by Nicholas McMurry - Cork Peace Alliance

Update from Palestine from Irish Solidarity Peace Worker.

>Annie Higgins and Caoimhe Butterley report from Jenin
> -recorded by Adam Keller-
>
>[Last night we talked with two members of the International
>Solidarity group who
>managed to enter Jenin a few hours after the army invaded it last Wednesday -
>Annie Higgins, an American from Chicago, and Caoimhe Butterley of Ireland.
>You can call them at 972-(0)51-589761.]
>
>"(...) The main thing we can do is to help keep some basic medical
>services going.
>The army is halting ambulances for thorough searches even when we are
>present, but
>still it seems to make a difference when they encounter a person from a Western
>country.
>Just when the army got into the city center we were in the hospital
>and heard of a car
>being shot at by a tank, and the driver being wounded. I [Caoimhe]
>went with the
>ambulance. When we got near the scene, the ambulance itself came
>under fire. I got
>out, with my hands raised high in the air, and approached the
>soldiers, walking slowly.
>I tried neither to provoke them not to appear frightened or
>intimidated. I talked in a
>matter of fact manner and tried to reason with them. They said that
>the driver had not
>been wounded but had gotten away from the car. After some discussion
>they allowed me to come near the place. It seems they were telling the truth,
>the car was empty and there were no signs of blood. Later we found that the
>driver had found refuge in a nearby house. (...) Making contact with soldiers
>definitely helped later, when the ambulance went to pick up an elderly man from
>one of the villages, who had trouble with the pacemaker in his heart. Our
>presence and our urging the soldiers about the danger to the man's life helped
>to make searches shorter, and we got him to the hospital in time.
>
>But it does not always work. There were the four men who were shot at
>by a helicopter
>gunship and severely wounded while they were travelling in a car at Jaba
>village, a few kilometres utside Jenin. We are still not sure if they were
>specifically targeted or just had the worst of bad luck. Anyway in this case
>the soldiers were very suspicous and made long searches, with the result that
>one of the wounded died who might have been saved if we had got him to the
>hospital in time. The other three were afterwards arrested by the army and
>taken away(...)
>I had been spent some time in Jenin in March, and got to know some people quite
>well. I had not been here in April, when the big horrors happened. At that time
>I had been in Ramallah, besieged inside Arafat's compound. I am not sure it had
>been the right decision to concentrate all the internationals there. When I got
>back here in May I found that two of my friends had been killed, they both bled
>to death. I am haunted by the thought that if I had been here at the time,
>going with the ambulances as I am doing now, I might have saved them. (...)
>The behaviour of the army seems rather erratic. They go out of the city and in
>again, there does not seem to be any clear pattern. So far they did not carry
>out large-scale arrests, though the inhabitants are expecting it to happen soon
>and of course it makes the people very nervous and insecure. Sometimes the
>tanks are in one neighborhood, then in the next. Sometimes they enforce the
>curfew, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they shoot at people which they find in
>the street without announcing a curfew first. The people just never know what
>to expect.
>The people in the refugee camp observe the curfew less than those in Jenin
>proper, perhaps because they had been through so many terrible hardships
>already that they became totally fatalistic, perhaps just because despite the
>widespread destruction there are still in the refugee camp many narrow alleys
>which provide people some shelter from the tanks. (...) There is very much
>random shooting going on. The other day, I passed two tanks which were just
>shooting into the empty streets. Nobody was shooting at them and they did not
>seem to aim at anything in particular, just a few shots here and a few there
>completely at random. I managed to ask one of the soldiers why they were doing
>this. He said 'We are shooting at buildings, not at people'. When I remarked
>that there were people inside the buildings who could be hurt, he just said
>'You can be sure that we know what we are doing', and refused to talk further."
>
>===================================================
>The Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People
>64 Star Street, P.O.Box 24
>Beit Sahour - Palestine
>www.rapprochement.org
>=================================
>The center is a non-profit making NGO, started in 1988 during the first Intifada.
>PCR runs community service programs, youth empowerment and training programs.
>PCR is also very much involved in the non-violent resistance against the Israeli Occupation to Palestine.
>
>
>[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]