Bus Massacre - Controversy

Controversy

The chain of events that led to the Ain el-Rammaneh PLO driver incident and the subsequent “Bus massacre” in April 1975 have been the subject of intense speculation and passionate debate in Lebanon since the end of the Civil War in 1990. There are two conflicting versions of what happened that day, with the Phalangists describing it as an act of self-defense by insisting that the bus carried armed ALF guerrilla reinforcements firing weapons, hurrying along to avenge their dead driver. The Phalangists anticipated such a reaction by waiting in ambush, and in the ensuing shoot-out they claimed to have killed 14 Palestinian Fedayyn.

Although most PLO accounts refute this version of the events by describing the bus passengers as civilian families’ victims of an unprovoked attack and not fully armed guerrillas, Abd al-Rahim Ahmad of the ALF did confirm years later that some of them were off-duty members of his faction. Another high-rank PLO official, Abu Iyad, later suggested that the incident was not the responsibility of the Phalange, but rather a deliberate provocation engineered by the National Liberal Party (NLP), a predominately Christian conservative Party led by former President Camille Chamoun.

However, none of these versions was ever substantiated by plausible evidence, and many began to doubt that the Palestinian PFLP was really responsible for the earlier Church attack. Indeed, critics pointed to the all-too-obvious presence of civilian automobiles plastered with propaganda of that PLO faction and the tactic employed (a drive-by shooting), which did not fit well into the methods commonly used by the Palestinian guerrilla movements at the time.

Therefore the true identity of the moral authors behind it – and particularly that of their faction or Party – remained shrouded in mystery until the late 1990s. New evidence that then came to light seems to confirm that they were not Palestinian feday’ but actually members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party or SSNP, a rival Lebanese multi-confessional, pan-Syrian right-wing organization. The SSNP carried out the action in retaliation for the brutal clamp-down on their militants following their abortive coup attempt in the turn of 1961-62, orchestrated by the then Interior Minister Pierre Gemayel.

As for the SSNP gunmen involved in the April 1975 drive-by shooting, they were never apprehended and apparently disappeared without a trace. Some unconfirmed reports suggest that they were later killed in action.

The bus was found and exhibited in mid-2011.