Thursday 18th April 1996 around 1400 hours the most tragic incident occurred at Fijibatt HQ in Qana / South Lebanon. After the Israeli invasion "Grapes of Wrath" by air, sea and land, paralyzing normal life in the south and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Refugees collected food rations provided by UNIFIL, some were washing their clothes other busy with small children. Youngsters were playing ball at the Compounds basket ball court. The camp was overcrowded. People were standing, sitting and laying all over. I stood in front of the camps main building smoking a cigarette, all was calm and no signs of eruption could be noted. Then I could hear it, the sound of mortars or katuyshas fired, at that stage I estimated about 200 m from the camp. I had at that time eight years experience with UNIFIL. That is why I went to the backside of the building as I expected retaliation. However, at most I expected "firing close." It was done like a reflex. You know the feeling when you are driving your car down a steep hill. You are catching yourself thinking - what if I lost the brakes now? What do I do to avoid a fatal accident? The same thing, when you are traveling in the field and are exposed to grave danger in an area of war such as South Lebanon. You are going through different theories hundreds if not thousands of times. When the real thing happens, it just snaps and you are acting on those reflexes. People without this experience would call me paranoid, to me it means the difference between life and death.

On my way to the nearest shelter I shouted at people to take cover. Most of the civilians apparently did not understand what I tried to tell them as I cannot speak the Arabic language well. Then I realized it would be too late for most of them. The first incoming shell slammed into the compound and it almost threw me inside the bunker from the air pressure caused by the impact. I was among the first people into that shelter. Four soldiers were already laying down at mattresses on the floor. Apparently they had interpreted the same signals as myself.

During the some twenty minutes we were receiving incoming rounds people rushed in. Very soon they overcrowded the room, we were standing up, the shelter became so full that the door could not be closed and people crouched by the entrance. Most of the people, women, children and some elderly men were bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Some in the head others from open stomachs and deep flesh wounds. There was absolutely now time for us to panic. Fijian soldiers were busy giving first aid to the wounded. Some needed only be taken into arms and be comforted.

Very soon the shelter floor became terribly slippery of blood, the smell of it made me feel sick but again this was not the right time for vomiting either. Civilians were crying and shouting, at one stage I had to raise my voice and shout in anger, working was difficult due to the circumstances. Mothers were crying asking for their children as families had been split. Nobody knew if their family members had managed to take shelter other places or if they were dieing outside. One woman tried in panic to run out of the shelter to find her missing children. I grabbed her and held her hard, she must have got blue bruises after my hands. Nevertheless, she had lost control and was angry. I am sure today if she had left the shelter she would have been blown into bits and pieces. Nevertheless, I will never forget the way she looked at me with so much hate in her eyes that it made me uncomfortable. I felt her there and then blamed me for not letting her rescue her children. I still do not know if they survived or not. I might have reacted the way she did if the situation was turned around and I was in her place.

When the operation room gave order to leave shelters and I came out, the sight that met me was at least one hundred times worse than I expected. Nearly every building had been pockmarked with shrapnel. There were dead people everywhere, heads, arms and feet had been separated from the bodies. People with their intestines spilling onto the ground. Children were thrown all over, a woman was hanging in a tree another was hanging from the roof. The worsts were not the dead people. All the dieing ones were struggling trying to hang onto life was worse. Civilian ambulances and two UNIFIL helicopters arrived and began ferrying casualties to Tyre.

An hour after the shelling almost all of the injured was on their way to hospital. I still wake up at nights sweating. Like the buildings of the battalion headquarters, I am also still carrying the scars of my experience. I don't want to think about what happened anymore. I am trying to forget about it. No pictures, no videotapes, nothing. I want to leave it all behind me. I am one of the unfortunates who experienced this massacre and yet I am one of the fortunate peacekeepers who survived, it is said that you never lived before you almost died, and that you look a bit different on life after such an experience. For me, I can confirm both sayings. Sometimes I ask myself, Why am I doing this? I could have been in my own safe and quiet home country not being frequently at risk. I guess it has become a lifestyle more than anything.

Most of the civilians killed and injured were women and children. Destruction of the compound was devastating. The view of our compound was so horrifying I find it difficult to write it down, our camp had been turned into a furnace comparable to a crematoria, an act that later has been described as a surgical strike in some quarters.

On this day I had human blood in my hair and on my hands, my clothes were wet to my skin of the same blood. I shall not be more detailed in what I saw there after the smoke went, it might stop you in further reading of this article. I can only say that the mixture of smelling blood, urine, burned human flesh and burned gun powder together with the impact of shelling and hundreds of screaming people in shock is the worst of my experiences during my career with the United Nations. One never believes to be exposed for incidents of this dimension even in the field of war.

For UNIFIL that has been in southern Lebanon since 1978 in a futile mission to secure Israel's withdrawal, it was the bloodiest but far from the first attack by forces. Over the years, more than 200 UN soldiers have been killed and 300 wounded in southern Lebanon, some by Lebanese guerrillas others by accidents and others by shelling.

There is a total of 8 shelters in the camp which has a capacity of 200 people. At that moment there was 150 soldiers and about 800 civilians. It was impossible to shelter them all. If the civilians had combat training, I believe the number of dead and injured could have been reduced dramatically. Soldiers threw them self flat down and remained laying down. Civilians were standing up and running in panic.

If what happened here had taken place in a western nation, would it have been called ethnic cleansing? Is there any political difference in shelling a UNIFIL compound in South Lebanon and shelling the United Nations Head Quarters in New York ? We are all serving under the same flag.

At the hospitals in Tyr men and women wept with grief and the young screamed with agony and rage as the children were brought in, two or three little bodies packed into each bag. Red Cross workers carried in the big orange bags, put them on the hospital floor and unzipped them. They felt for a pulse in each child and when they were sure they were dead, they zipped them up again. The floors were slick with blood. On the floor of an operating room a young man laid dying, apparently forgotten, his shirt torn off and his jeans open.

Amid the chaos, doctors worked wherever they could find space. On beds, benches, tables and in operating rooms. Scores of injured laid in hallways and corridors as the wards overflowed.

Ten year old Mariam Haidar, her face ripped by shrapnel, said she saw her sister die as Israeli shells exploded. ``I looked at my sister and I saw blood coming out of her mouth, then the building started collapsing on us, '' she said.

Outside, in the streets of this ancient city just 14 miles north of Israel's border, crowds of women wailed and screamed as the dead, wounded and dying were brought in by cars and ambulances. Bloodied and shocked, they flooded into Tyre's Najem (Star) Hospital. I heard people scream Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest). A woman fainted so I reached over to check her head and her brains fell out into my hands said a young man. Every hospital in Tyre issued calls for blood donors and doctors. When the morgues overflowed, truckloads of corpses were sent up the coast road to Sidon.

From the sea two warships shelled the coastal strip at Saadiyat, some 22 km south of Beirut, about halfway between the capital and the southern city of Sidon. The warships were shelling the coastal highway. Israel had repeatedly warned motorists not to drive south from Beirut along the coastal highway. This of course prevented doctors, ambulances and rescue personnel in rushing to Tyr in order to assist the overloaded medical team there.

In the village of Qana outside the base, home to some 4,000 people before the Israeli offensive, only about 25 people could be found on Friday. A mass funeral in the village for victims of the shelling was planned for Saturday.

With Israel's warplanes overhead and its artillery still rumbling in the distance on Friday, U.N. soldiers numbed by the carnage cleared up the pieces of more than 100 Lebanese refugees blown apart by Israeli shells. Blood was smeared across the ground and the makeshift shelters where Lebanese, driven from their homes by Israel's offensive against Hizbollah guerrillas. We saw dead people, we could not count, '' said a Fijian corporal who exhibited more shock than anger. ``I did not carry any complete bodies I carried only pieces.'' U.N. soldiers cleared rubble and burned pieces of the shattered shelter and lumps of human flesh where the refugees were ripped apart by shrapnel from Israeli 155mm shells.

Sylvana Foa, Spokesman the Secretary General said there were ``no excuses for the shelling'' of the U.N. position, which Israel called a mistake. ``I don't think that you can say, 'gee, I'm sorry that this happened.' Something really horrible happened, and to say it was an accident, that it was an equipment failure, that it was a tragic mistake it's just not enough of an excuse for what happened.

When you are playing with big guns, there has to be more responsibility involved,'' she said. Asked why U.N. troops did not prevent Hizbollah guerrillas from firing from positions close to U.N. installations, as occurred shortly before Thursday's Israeli shelling, she said there had been four confrontations that week alone between U.N. troops and guerrillas in which three peacekeepers were wounded. Monday, a Fijian was shot in the chest when he confronted ``armed elements about to fire rockets at Israel,'' Foa said, while Wednesday two Nepalese were wounded by a grenade thrown over the wall of their compound in retaliation for an attempt by their battalion to stop a similar rocket launching. Thursday, a grenade was thrown at a Nepalese battalion convoy by guerrillas angry at what they considered to be U.N. interference.

Over the past few days, General Wosniak had repeatedly and strongly objected to Israeli commanders on the increasing number of air and artillery attacks close to UNIFIL positions. In addition, Israelis had been informed on the precise locations of all UNIFIL positions as well as all humanitarian convoys.

Several of the incidents that occurred close to UNIFIL positions had been termed as "accidental" and blamed on equipment failure. There are currently 4,568 troops serving in UNIFIL who are from: Fiji, Finland, France, Ghana, Ireland, Italy, Nepal, Norway and Poland, Ms. Foa added.

Now, was this an act of war, or was it the outcome of a terrorist attack where humans were cold blooded slaughtered? The question remains what was the Israeli's intentions? What did really happen? That question will probably never be fully answered. The truth probably lies in a combination of all of the known evidence. The real facts of the circumstances in Qana may remain somewhere hidden, or may have never been adequately recorded in the ongoing battle and the infamous "fog of war."

Regardless of the real answers or reasons that the Qana UN base was struck by Israeli artillery We must hope that the end result was an error in judgement and sincerely hope that the Israeli Forces would take a different course if they were faced with a similar situation in the future.