DUBAI   - Twenty-three years after hacking to death Palestinian refugees, the Lebanese perpetrators show no remorse recounting the massacre in a chilling documentary film showing in the Middle East this week.

German director Monika Borgmann's film "Massaker" shows six men speaking out for the first time about their role in one of the most infamous massacres of the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war.

After several months finding and befriending the men, members of the Israeli-backed Christian Lebanese Forces militia, Borgmann coaxed them into giving testimony on camera.

"It was a long process of building up a relationship of confidence. We entered into their daily lives. Their attitude was that we were neither accomplices nor judging them," Borgmann told an audience in Dubai, the latest stop in the film's tour of cinema festivals.

Borgmann said she wanted to examine the individual and collective mindset that could lead to such atrocities.

Hundreds of Palestinian refugees were brutally killed by the militiamen over several days in September 1982 at Beirut's Sabra and Shatila camps during Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

The documentary is disturbing for the almost total lack of remorse shown by the men, whose faces are kept in shadow by the German crew's nifty camera work.

Chatting in a bare room with the sound of Beirut traffic filtering in and chinks of light showing through the shutters, they draw diagrams showing how they systematically moved through the camps "cleansing" sector after sector.

They flick through photographs of carnage and try to remember if they had had a hand in a particular scene, while the camera shows their muscles, a way of holding a cigarette or playing gently with a cat.

One explains how he took an old man and held him back against a wall, slicing him open in the shape of a cross. "I will execute you in the name of Bashir Gemayel," he said, referring to the Lebanese president assassinated days earlier.

"With hanging or shooting you just die, but this is double. You die twice since you also die from the fear," he says nonchalantly of the act, describing white flesh and bone.

COMMON CAUSE

The atrocity -- one of the most brutal in the Lebanese civil war -- continues to cause controversy.

Gemayel's Lebanese Forces had made common cause with the Israeli army to drive the Palestine Liberation Organisation out of Lebanon. Gemayel's killers have never been identified.

Enraged by their charismatic leader's death, his supporters took revenge in an orgy of violence at the refugee camps, where they believed the killers were hiding.

In the film, the men talk of their obsessive love for Gemayel, their hatred of Palestinians whose presence in Lebanon challenged Christian domination, and how they became inured to violence as the war progressed and the atrocities mounted.

In passing, they give details of the links between Israel and the militia it had helped train. The men describe trips in 1980 to Israel, where they were shown films about the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jews in World War Two.

The militiamen explain how they began a frantic rush to dispose of as many bodies as possible before the media came, in part accounting for the absence of an exact figure for the dead.

One says the Israeli army gave them large plastic sacks for bodies, another says they herded people into army vehicles to ferry them to a sports stadium where they were killed. They said they used chemicals to destroy many of the corpses.

Several mention that Israeli army officers conferred with the militia's leaders in Beirut on the eve of the massacres.

Unlike massacres in some other conflicts, the perpetrators of Sabra and Shatila have not been brought to justice. The film is not intended as evidence of their crime, Borgmann said.

"They are all living normal lives. One of them is a taxi driver," she said. (Reuters)