The Great War for Civilisation (180 page)

Bassam admits that Raafat found life very difficult. “She did not want to be away from us. She cried a lot. But she had no chance of education in Libya. In London, she had stomach upsets. It was psychological. She suffered a lot from hay fever.” But Raafat was to overcome her homesickness after four long years, winning a gold medal for her painting and for drama. The 1985 video of her graduation shows her pride in triumphing over loneliness, aware that she was to follow a career in painting at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. Her parents came to London in December of the same year, the last Christmas of Raafat's life. “We went that night to San Lorenzo's in Beauchamp Place but Kinda was too young to go out so Raafat asked to stay home with her sister,” their mother, Saniya, remembers. “It was as if that Christmas was very special to her.” Just over a month later, on 8 February 1986, Raafat wrote in her diary: “My life is changing. I'm slowly, at last, finding myself. It feels great to at last meet my real self. Freedom!!”

Bassam al-Ghossain played no part in politics but his collection of newspaper clippings shows the growing crisis over Libya. Ghadafi was accused of organising the bombing of a TWA passenger jet over Greece. President Reagan's administration announced that it had unequivocal proof that the Libyan embassy had arranged the bombing of a Berlin discothèque on 5 April 1986, in which an American serviceman and a Turkish woman were killed. The Berlin police were later to dispute the nature of this evidence—some Western journalists suggested Syria rather than Libya might have been behind the bombing—but by then Reagan was in the Gulf, calling Ghadafi “the Mad Dog of the Middle East” and promising unspecified retaliation.

“We thought about what all this meant, that there might be an attack, but we thought the Americans would only hit military targets,” Bassam says now. “It just didn't occur to us that they would hit civilians. The patio of our home was wall-to-wall with the French embassy.” Raafat was due home for the Easter holiday from her new art college and wrote an excited postcard, full of humour and maturity and affection—it was illustrated with a French painting of a black ladies' hat—from London. It was to be her last written message to her parents:

Dearest Mummy and Daddy,

I'm sending this card 'cause it has a touch of class just like you! I miss you
so
much! I can't wait, soon I'm going to be with you! How is my baby sister, send her all my love and kisses. How are my grandparents, send them also all my love and tell them that I miss them
a lot
. Well, I'll have to love you and leave you. Till the 23rd March—god willing—take care! Lots of love [from] your daughter that love [
sic
] you the most . . .

Raafat's Lebanese passport shows that she cleared Gatwick Airport immigration on the 23rd, exactly twenty-two days before the American crew of the F-111 that was to kill her took off from Lakenheath. She arrived in Tripoli with an attack of spring hay fever. Raafat was to return to London in the third week of April and was nearing the end of her holidays when, on 13 April, she spent the night at the home of the Ghandour family, Lebanese friends of long standing. There were already reports of a possible American bombing raid against Ghadafi's headquarters in Tripoli and against the offices of Libyan intelligence. Western journalists— myself among them—had gathered at the largest hotel in the city and noticed the hurried departure of a Soviet destroyer from the waterfront on the morning of 14 April. “Raafat was in her dressing gown at breakfast in the morning and all we talked about was the possible raid and what would be the targets and if the Americans would hit civilians,” Moutassim Ghandour remembers. “She kept roaming around this point. She felt that someone close would be killed. She was fully convinced that there was going to be a raid. I tried to talk politics with her. But she kept going round and round, talking about the planes that might come. She went on about this for three hours. I think that somehow she knew she was going to be killed that day.”

On the evening of the 14th, Raafat was so overcome with hay fever that Saniya called in the doctor. “He told her to sleep well and gave her antihistamine and nose drops,” her mother recalls. “She immediately said she felt better. We talked about the art college. And she said she was happy because she had kept herself for the man she would one day marry. She looked very beautiful, like a girl standing on the stage. Bassam and Kinda came in and we had a light meal—of cheese and tomatoes and a plate of sweets from the Syrian ambassador's wife. We let Raafat sleep in the TV room because there was a machine there that controls pollen. I went to bed in the girls' room and Kinda slept beside her father in our bed.” At almost the same moment the al-Ghossain family went to bed, twenty-four American F-111s from the U.S. 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath, were taking off for Libya. One of the aircraft was crewed by Captain Fernando Ribas-Dominicci of Puerto Rico and Captain Paul Lorence of San Francisco.

It was just after two in the morning that Saniya awoke with a start. “There was a tremendous roaring noise and I got out of bed and shouted: ‘Wake up, Bassam, the Americans are here!' I looked into the TV room and saw Raafat sleeping peacefully there and I thought I'd better not wake her up. I went back to bed.” Bassam woke again moments later. “I heard anti-aircraft fire and the next thing I knew my feet were buried in rubble. I couldn't move. Kinda was in the bed next to me. She was screaming. Her body was covered by a door. I held her hand to quieten her down. The door had protected her when the ceiling came down.”

Saniya reawoke to hear Bassam's voice shouting “as if from another planet—it was a voice I had never heard before. He was shouting ‘My God! My God!' and calling our names. I was choking on the smoke and dust. I stood up and it was all darkness. I couldn't see anything. I was walking on glass on my bare feet. I put my hand on the bedroom wall and found there was no door there. I asked Bassam what happened to Kinda. He said: ‘I am touching her. She is alive.' I went to Raafat's room and the side wall was down. I shouted her name many times. She didn't answer. A feeling came over me that Raafat had died. I shouted: ‘Bassam—Raafat has gone.' Then I walked out of the house to get help, on my bare feet. Tripoli was like a haunted city. I saw all the water of the city coming out of the pipes. I looked back at the wreckage of our home and there was nobody to be seen, it was as if it had been like this for a hundred years. Eventually, I found a young man who went to what was left of our home to help.” To Saniya's amazement—it registers on her face when she recalls the fact years later—the rescuer was a Palestinian who had survived the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre, the atrocity which had so horrified the homesick Raafat in London.

Badly cut and bruised, Bassam and Kinda were taken to hospital. Neither can remember the following hours. Saniya was taken to a friend's house. A 2,000-pound bomb had destroyed the home of the al-Ghossains' Libyan neighbours, killing all five of them. The blast had blown down the wall of the TV room onto Raafat. Moutassim Ghandour, the family's Lebanese friend, found a team of Libyan civil defence workers with a bulldozer at the neighbours' ruined house and pleaded with them to find Raafat. It was already mid-morning on 15 April. He later wrote a legal testimony of what he saw:

The bulldozer tried to lift the roof slab which was on top of the couch where “Fafo” had been lying and it was then that her face appeared for the first time, she was lying on her back with the head turned on the right cheek, she was intact, her hair undisturbed and a small streak of blood coming from the top side of her head, flowing down her left cheek. When she appeared, the bulldozer stopped and rescue workers got close to her to find out if she was still alive. I was led away about 10 metres, and then somebody screamed “Every soul will have the taste of death . . .” together with other verses relevant to death and martyrdom from the Holy Koran. At this stage I realised that “Fafo” was dead.

Kinda scarcely recalls the bombing and was too young to understand what Raafat's death meant. “I remember a door on top of me and a rock near my head and shouting ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!' My father had lots of blood on him. I couldn't move my legs.” Bassam was distraught. In the hours to come, he would hear journalists claim that his home had been hit not by an American bomb but by Libyan anti-aircraft missiles. The United States dismissed the death of at least thirty civilians in the raid on Tripoli as “collateral damage,” adding—in the Pentagon's words—that “only 1 or 2 per cent of the bombs impacted in civilian areas.” America's targets—including Ghadafi's headquarters and intelligence offices—had been hit, they claimed. A security office not far from the al-Ghossains” home had been touched, but the French embassy had suffered far worse damage and the al-Ghossain home was virtually destroyed. Not a word of regret came from Washington.

A U.S. official admitted that Ghadafi had been one of the targets of “Operation El Dorado Canyon”—this was the raid in which Ghadafi's adopted daughter had been killed—and a Pentagon report later stated that “in terms of equipment performance, the strike was a success.” A Pentagon official told
The Washington Post
that the air force F-111s from Britain had been included in the raid because their pilots wanted “a piece of the action.” This may have been true. “It was the greatest thrill of my life to have been involved,” one of the pilots later told the
Chicago Tribune
. “It is what we are trained for.” Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger later agreed that the Americans had killed the civilians and that an F-111 lost in the raid might have dropped the bombs that killed Raafat al-Ghossain and her neighbours when it was shot down. Captain Fernando Ribas-Dominicci and Captain Paul Lorence were flying the doomed plane. Over Tripoli, the former was heard shouting: “I'm hit!” and another, anonymous pilot was recorded replying: “Sorry about that.” The body of Ribas-Dominicci was later recovered from the Mediterranean by the Libyans and returned to the United States.

Bassam still carries a file of newspaper articles on the American raid.
The New
York Times
wrote that “even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on Libya . . . the United States has prosecuted [Ghadafi] carefully, proportionately—and justly.” Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres claimed that the Americans had been taking their revenge for the slaughter of 241 U.S. servicemen in the Beirut truck-bombing three years earlier. But Ghadafi had no more to do with that mass killing than Saddam Hussein was to have with the mass slaughter of 11 September 2001. Bassam al-Ghossain's file also includes a headline from
The Times
of London—“Raid destroyed terrorist nerve-centre.” Underneath, the by-line says: “From Robert Fisk, Tripoli.” My report did not mention “terrorists”—that had been a sub-editor's work in the headline, and it was only a little over two years later that
The Times
would censor my report on the Iranian Airbus slaughter—but Bassam al-Ghossain was unforgiving. “It gives the impression we are terrorists, it says that Raafat was a terrorist.”

At the mass funeral three days later, I noticed Raafat's coffin because—living in Lebanon—I had straight away caught sight of the Lebanese flag and the Palestinian flag lying on her casket. It had been Saniya's idea. I knew nothing of the family but had found Raafat's shocked and badly wounded mother. “We are Muslims but we have one God,” she had told me then. “We are one people. I hope Mr. Reagan understands that.” A stone was placed upon Raafat's grave which quoted the Koran: “Thou causest the night to pass into the day, and thou causest the day to pass into the night. And thou bringest forth the living from the dead, and thou bringest forth the dead from the living . . .”

Saniya wanted the flags of every Arab nation on the coffins of those killed in the American raid—“because it was their fault, because they did not unite and because, for this reason, Raafat was killed by all the Arab world.” A year later, eight-year-old Kinda would write a letter to her dead sister:

Dear Fafo,

I will see you one day. I miss you very much. I wish I was with you all the time. I love you. When you died, everything changed it was ever [
sic
] worse. I shout at my Mom and Dad . . . Please come back one day or I go to you. You come and take me in the night and take me to see you. And then bring me back. I just wish. I love you. Your sister Kinda.

Bassam refused to visit his daughter's grave. In 1994 he resigned from the nationalised Libyan oil company and returned to Beirut with his family, leaving Raafat's remains behind in Tripoli. “Once the soul leaves the body, it doesn't matter where the body is,” he remarked years later. “It says this in the Koran. I don't believe in visiting graves. I am a strong believer. I believe that one day you're going to meet that person again. Visiting a grave means that you're attached to a body and that is wrong.” Saniya is not so strict. “Raafat always wanted to be with us. Sometimes I feel ‘at least let our bones be together.' ” Nineteen years after her death, on a visit to Libya in 2005, Bassam did visit the cemetery where his daughter was buried and stood and wept before Raafat's grave.

But Bassam's anger never died, not least because Kinda suffered deeply from her sister's death. Still feeling leg pains from injuries to her spinal cord, it was nine more years before she realised Raafat was dead, when she at last visited her sister's grave in 1995. “I had to grow up without her, without having a big sister,” she says. “I have a lot of friends and they sometimes ask what it's like to be an only child, sometimes I tell them how Fafo died in the air raid . . .” Today, Kinda, a remarkably pretty young woman of twenty-six, teaches in the educational studies department at the Deutsche Schule in Beirut. Bassam, who believes in the law as he believes in justice, wrote to ex-President Reagan's daughter Patti, to ex-President Carter, to lawyers in Britain and America to seek redress. In the United States he was warned that any legal action for damages for Raafat's death might be treated as a “frivolous suit” in the courts. “If you don't follow up an injustice and let the world know what happened to you, then injustice wins,” he says. “I want the world to know what happened to our family . . . People say that it is a tragedy Kinda doesn't have an elder sister. But she
did
have a sister—and she was taken from us.”