An international campaign has been launched to indict Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister and leader of the ultra-right-wing Likud bloc, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The campaign has been inaugurated with the opening of a worldwide petition calling for the indictment and the bringing to justice of Sharon as a principal in the first degree to murder, war crimes, grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and crimes against humanity.

The petition notes, in particular, Sharon's failure, while in charge of Israeli occupation troops in Lebanon, to prevent the massacre of between 700 and 3,000, Palestinian, Lebanese and other civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in September 1982.

It also notes that, three decades earlier, as a young military officer, Sharon led an Israeli elite commando force which carried out brutal raids against Palestinians, including the notorious massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya on 14 October 1953.

To sign the the petition (see below), please send an email to the Indict Sharon Now campaign. If you are signing as an individual, it would be helpful, but not necessary, if you could mention your city or country of residence, profession and organizational affiliation so that this information can be published along with your name. We will add your name, or your organization's name, to the list of signatories.

It is the campaign's goal that this initiative reflect the views of an international constituency, North and South, that remembers the gravity of Sharon's actions and is committed to seeking international justice in his case.

We encourage Israeli citizens and non-governmental organizations to sign the petition, join this campaign and raise inside Israel the issue of Sharon's impunity.

Please notify your local newspapers and other media about this campaign, and submit letters to editors and opinion pieces about Sharon and the importance of ending his impunity for massacres of innocent civilians (see background information below).

Once we have collected signatures, we will recommend other specific activities in your home countries designed to raise the profile of this campaign. We also will circulate to other signatories any suggestions for activities that you send to us at the Indict Sharon Now campaign.

Text of petition

We, the undersigned, believe that Ariel Sharon should be indicted and brought to justice. As an Israeli military officer and as minister of defence, Ariel Sharon was a principal in the first degree to murder, war crimes, grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and crimes against humanity, causing the death and injury of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

As Israel's minister of defence and architect of that country's brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Ariel Sharon's actions and failure to act facilitated the massacre of at least 700-800 - or, by some accounts, as many as 3,000 - Palestinian, Lebanese and other civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in September 1982.

Three decades earlier, as a young military officer, Ariel Sharon led an elite Israeli commando force, Unit 101, which carried out brutal raids against Palestinians. The massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya, on 14 October 1953, was perhaps the most notorious. Sharon's unit blew up 45 houses in the village, killing 69 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his recent book, The Iron Wall.

The judicial authorities in the state of Israel have never shouldered their legal responsibilities and thoroughly investigated and prosecuted Ariel Sharon for these massacres and other crimes. In our view, the failure of the Israeli legal system to act obligates the nations that are High Contracting Parties of the Geneva Conventions to hold Ariel Sharon accountable, irrespective of whether he is a private citizen of Israel, a cabinet minister or the head of government.

Article 146 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War states that each High Contracting Party "shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed", grave breaches of the Convention, "and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts. It may also, if it prefers, and in accordance with the provisions of its own legislation, hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party concerned, provided such High Contracting Party has made out a prima facie case."

Article 147 of the Convention states that the grave breaches noted in Article 146 include wilful killing; torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments; wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health; unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person; compelling a protected person to serve in the forces
of a hostile Power; wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention; the taking of hostages; and extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.

Recent developments in the emerging system of international justice, including the cases of Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic and the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, provide compelling precedents for ending the impunity that Ariel Sharon has thus far enjoyed. He should be indicted for the crimes for which he has been responsible as the first step in a process of accountability that will bring justice to his victims and their families.

[Sign here by sending an email to <IndictSharonNow@aol.com>, giving your name and, if possible, city or country of residence, profession and organizational affiliation]

Background information

The Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982

The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatila took place from 6:00 at night on 16 September 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on 18 September 1982, in an area under the control of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The perpetrators were members of the Phalange (Kata'eb, in Arabic) militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women) and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disembowelled before or after they were killed.

To cite only one post-massacre eyewitness account, that of US journalist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: "Mostly, I saw groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland-style with fusillades of machine-gun fire."

An official Israeli commission of inquiry, chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court, investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret to this day). The Kahan Commission found that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report stated in pertinent part:

"It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defence for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defence for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defence Minister was charged."

The commission also concluded: "[I]n his meeting with the Phalangist commanders, the Defence Minister made no attempt to point out to them the gravity of the danger that their men would commit acts of slaughter... Had it become clear to the Defence Minister that no real supervision could be exercised over the Phalangist force that entered the camps with the IDF's assent, his duty would have been to prevent their entry. The usefulness of the Phalangists' entry into the camps was wholly disproportionate to the damage their entry could cause if it were uncontrolled."

The commission further noted: "We shall remark here that it is ostensibly puzzling that the Defence Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister [Menachem Begin] privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps."

The Qibya massacre of 1953

The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote this about the massacre:

"Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, had been killed."

Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses. The UN observer who inspected the scene reached a different conclusion:

"One story was repeated time after time: the bullet-splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them."

The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States.

On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan). According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies had been still under the ruins. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighbouring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.

The US Department of State issued a statement on 18 October 1953 expressing its "deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives" in the Qibya attack as well as the conviction that those responsible "should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in the future". (Department of State Bulletin, 26 October 1953, page 552)

At a Security Council meeting on 20 October 1953, it was decided unanimously to examine recent violations of the General Armistice Agreements and the Qibya attack in particular. It was agreed that the council would invite and hear a report by its representative, Major-General Vagn Bennike, chief of staff of the UN Truce Supervision Organization, in order to obtain accurate information concerning the facts.

Major-General Bennike reported to the Security Council on 27 October 1953. He said that, following the receipt of a Jordanian complaint that a raid on the village of Qibya had been carried out by Israeli military forces during the night of 14/15 October between 9:30 p.m. and 4:30 a.m., a United Nations investigation team had departed from Jerusalem for Qibya early on the morning of 15 October. On reaching the village, the acting chairman of the Mixed Armistice Commission, Commander Hutchison, had found that between 30 and 40 buildings had been completely demolished. By the time the acting chairman left Qibya, 27 bodies had been dug from the rubble.

Witnesses had been unanimous in describing their experience as a night of terror, during which Israeli soldiers had moved about in their village blowing up buildings, firing into doorways and windows with automatic weapons, and throwing hand grenades. A number of unexploded hand grenades, marked with Hebrew letters indicating recent Israel manufacture, and three bags of TNT had been found in and about the village.

An emergency meeting of the Mixed Armistice Commission had been held in the afternoon of 15 October and a resolution, condemning the regular Israeli army for its attack on Qibya as a breach of Article III, paragraph 2.62 of the Israel-Jordan General Armistice Agreement, had been adopted by a majority vote. The chief of staff, Major-General Vagn Bennike, stated that he had discussed with the acting chairman of the Mixed Armistice Commission the reasons why he had supported the resolution condemning the Israeli army for having carried out the attack, and that, after listening to his explanations, he had asked him to state them in writing; the technical arguments given by Commander Hutchison in his memorandum appeared to the chief of staff to be convincing.

At a Security Council meeting on 16 November 1953, the representative of Jordan requested that the council condemn Israel for the Qibya massacre in the strongest term, and ask Israel to prosecute and punish all Israeli officials, military or civilian, responsible for the killings. The representative of Lebanon made a similar request.

Security Council Resolution 101, adopted on 24 November 1953 (with Lebanon and the USSR abstaining) found the retaliatory action at Qibya by Israeli forces a violation of the cease-fire provisions of Security Council Resolution 54 (1948) and inconsistent with the parties' obligations under the General Armistice Agreement between Israel and Jordan and the Charter of the UN, and expressed "the strongest censure of that action". The resolution also called on the governments of Israel and Jordan to prevent all acts of violence on either side of the demarcation line, but did not call on Israel to hold accountable and bring to justice those who carried out the massacre.

• Sharon's victory - what next?

• Ariel Sharon: a political profile

• Sabra and Shatila: crimes against humanity

• September 2001 and September 1982: two crimes against humanity