Janet Lee Stevens

Janet Lee Stevens (December 1, 1950 – April 18, 1983) was an American journalist, human rights advocate, translator, and scholar of popular Arabic theater.

Janet Lee Stevens was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on December 1, 1950, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.

She graduated from Northside High School.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s she contributed articles to the journal MERIP Reports under her own name and pseudonymously as June Disney.

In the early 1970s she researched cases of political prisoners in Tunisia under the regime of Habib Bourguiba.

A colleague later attributed the release of several Tunisian prisoners to her efforts.

While living in Tunis in the 1970s, Stevens also participated in an activist, leftist theater group.

This group performed Arabic plays in private homes, streets, and markets for popular audiences.

She attended Stetson University and earned a bachelor's degree in International Studies in 1972.

She moved to Philadelphia to study Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and started the PhD program in 1973 in the department of Oriental Studies (known from 1984 as the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and from 2005 as the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations).

She won a fellowship to study Arabic at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo in the 1974–75 academic year.

Around this time she also held a Fulbright scholarship.

Today, at the University of Pennsylvania, the Janet Lee Stevens Memorial Fund – whose early recipients in the 1980s included the literary critic Edward Said – continues to give grants to scholars whose work promotes Arab-American understanding.

She lived in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and chronicled the experiences of Palestinian refugees before and after the Sabra and Shatila Massacre of September 16–18, 1982.

She moved to Beirut in 1982, during the Lebanese Civil War, and worked as a free-lance journalist and translator in association with several newspapers, including the Lebanese English-medium Monday Morning (Beirut); the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun (Osaka); the Arabic Lebanese weekly al-Kifah al-Arabi (Beirut); The New York Guardian; the International Herald Tribune; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

At the time of her death she was finishing a PhD dissertation at Penn on popular Arabic theater, under the supervision of the Arabic literary scholar and translator, Roger Allen.

As a longtime human rights activist, associated with Amnesty International and other organizations, Stevens advocated for prisoners of conscience.

While living in Beirut in 1982 and 1983, Stevens frequently visited the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and became an advocate for the Palestinian residents, who were mostly refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and their descendants.

Writing under the pseudonym June Disney, she published, for example, an article on the Israeli use of cluster bombs and other advanced explosives in the war in Lebanon, and the injuries that Palestinians (including children) in the Burj al-Barajneh camp sometimes sustained when they encountered them or picked them up.

During this time she also volunteered at two of the refugee camp hospitals, called Akka Hospital and Gaza Hospital.

The writer Kai Bird observed that some people at the time considered her a "partisan journalist" while others suspected her of working for an intelligence agency.

She befriended Dr. Fathi Arafat, the medical doctor who founded and directed the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

She knew Fathi's brother, Yasir Arafat, who was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and she interviewed him on several occasions.

The Japanese journalist Shigeo Arata, who was reporting for the Osaka-based newspaper Asahi Shimbun, later observed in a memoir about his time in Lebanon that, "She knew every detail of the three refugee camps in Beirut, even every corner of the narrow alleys of them, and she had surprisingly extensive contacts with Palestinians from Chairman Arafat to ordinary refugees."

The Palestinians called Stevens "the little drummer girl" because of her staunch support for their cause.

In 1982, she gave the British novelist John le Carré, a tour of the Sabra and Shatila camps.

The writer Kai Bird claimed that on August 8, 1982, shortly before Yasser Arafat's departure for Tunis, Stevens visited Arafat in his bunker, begged him not to leave with his PLO fighters, and warned him of the dangers the Palestinian women and children would face if left alone in the camps.

Bird traced this account of Stevens's meeting with Arafat to Imad Mughniyah, Arafat's bodyguard at the time, who went on to become a leader in Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi'ia Islamist militant party.

One month after the withdrawal of the PLO fighters to Tunis, on September 16–18, 1982, a massacre occurred in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in southern Beirut.

This massacre was the work of the Phalange, a mostly Maronite Christian right-wing militia, which acted with the knowledge of allies in the Israel Defense Forces, including Ariel Sharon, in order to uproot residual PLO elements at a time when Israeli forces were poised to enter West Beirut.

Stevens toured Sabra and Shatila immediately after the massacre; witnessed the Red Crescent's efforts to collect the dead bodies, some of which, she reported, showed evidence of rape and mutilation; and interviewed survivors.

According to UCC Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a group of students and staff at University College Cork (Ireland) engaged in recording the history of Palestinian political advocacy, Stevens went to the U.S. embassy on the day of her death to urge William McIntyre, deputy director of USAID in Lebanon, to pledge more U.S. aid to Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shi'a groups in Lebanon.

According to the University of Pennsylvania's Almanac, Stevens had also been serving as an interpreter to an Arab delegation to the embassy.

Stevens died in the April 18, 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, for which a local Iranian-backed Shia militia claimed responsibility.

Stevens inspired the title of John le Carré's novel The Little Drummer Girl, which was published in 1983.

According to one source, Stevens and Le Carré became friends; he consulted her on possible sites for filming in the region; and she was reportedly scheduled to fly to Cyprus to see him a day after the bombing in which she died.

Mughniyah later orchestrated a string of kidnappings and attacks, including the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut of October 1983, the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in June 1985, the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, and the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in June 1996.

She was married during this time to the Tunisian playwright Taoufik Jebali, who years later wrote dialogue for the acclaimed 1990 film of Férid Boughedir, Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces.

In 2003, the family of Stevens and other American victims filed a lawsuit against the Iranian government, and in 2005, a U.S. Federal District Court found Iran guilty of orchestrating the embassy bombing and ordered it to pay damages to the plaintiffs, including $13,449,000 to relatives of Janet Lee Stevens.

Iran did not respond or pay.