Fisk on Gebran Tueni

In the past several months, Robert Fisk's articles on Lebanon have been extremely lacking in content. I will never forget one of them, in which he wrote about dinner he had with Jumblatt, who he described as a nihilist. However, he has written two good articles on Tueni.

Article one:

Ah yes, how many times must we be told that these Lebanese assassinations are not to Syria's benefit? The "moamara", the "plot", means that the Israelis killed Tueni to embarrass the Syrians, that the Americans wanted to get rid of so free-thinking a Lebanese (Greek Orthodox, as every Lebanese - who knows his sectarian dictionary - knows) now that the Syrian army has left. No, perhaps it was not President Bashar Assad of Syria, but what about the Baath party intelligence which most Lebanese suspect murdered Hariri on 14 February this year?

Standing on the narrow mountain road yesterday morning, the smoke still rising from the carbonised motorcade, the darkening blood still wet on the ground - how many times must I and Lebanese friends come back from these fearful places and wash, rather than brush, our shoes on the doormat - there were obvious lessons. This is a war. I repeat to myself: no-one is safe. Lebanon has tens of thousands of troops, thousands of cops and intelligence men and forensic scientists. They were there in their hundreds at Mkalles yesterday morning, patrolling, searching for bomb parts amid the pine forest, when they, and the reporters, should have been ordering cheese "manaouche" - sandwiches - from local shops and enjoying new freedoms.

But now what are they for, these thousands of soldiers? They can protect no-one. Or so it seems. Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, should, of course, have addressed the nation after so callous a crime. But there was only silence. In parliament, Marwan Hamade, the telecommunications minister who was also Tueni's uncle - he was himself badly wounded in a car bomb attack in October of last year - called for an investigation into all of Lebanon's prominent assassinations (messers Kemal Jumblatt, Bashir Gemayel, Rashid Karami, Grand Mufti Khaled, Danny Chamoun, Rafiq Hariri et al) to be investigated by an international tribunal. Some hope. Just over an hour after the assassination of Tueni - father of four, a one-time spokesman for the messianic General Michel Aoun - Hamadi turned up in shades, weeping, to see the place where his nephew died. "It's a new crime for Lebanon - there's nothing else to say," he snapped at us as we stood amid the blood. Later, he was to be more cold-blooded, blaming the "dictatorial hegemony" of Bashar Assad. "... if the Syrians want it this way, we know how to respond." How?

Article two:

They will bury Jibran Tueni today.

"You animals, you insects," the woman screamed in the Greek Orthodox church yesterday as his old father Ghassan leaned forward to shake our hands. "Jibran is still alive. He lives now."

Alas, the editor of An Nahar was assassinated on Monday - his few, atomised remains to be buried today - and his father received mourners in the Ashrafieh district of Beirut, bent over, his frog-dead cold hand gripping bravely each mourner’s clutch. What was one to say? To his young wife? A journalist’s life is not a happy one? No, indeed.

posted by Lazarus, 7:28 AM