Robert Fisk: Some buried bones are best left undug

There are 17,000 Lebanese missing from the civil war. Are we to dig them all up?

By Robert Fisk

Published: 10 December 2005

My late friend Juan Carlos Gumucio used to claim that we were "mass graves correspondents". So often were we driving to southern Lebanon to witness the exhumation of yet more murdered Lebanese that it seemed quite an accurate description of our lives. Druze tipped down wells, Maronites with their throats slit in the Chouf and - once- an entire charnel house of skeletons which turned out, after the usual claims of Israeli atrocities, to be the last resting place not of Palestinians but of Philistines; it was Juan Carlos who spotted that the dead wore no wrist watches.

And now - many months since he killed himself in far-away Bolivia - I am reminded of my old mate once more. For we have more mass graves in Lebanon. Or, to be specific, at a small town called Aanjar. And therein lies the problem. For Aanjar is Armenian, and while it proudly hosts the last earthly remains of the heroes of Musa Dagh (hands up all readers who know what happened at Musa Dagh), it was one of the few places in Lebanon to be spared the carnage of the country's 1975-90 civil war.

Article Length: 905 words (approx.)