Gemayel's
Mourners Know That In Lebanon Nothing Is What It Seems
By Robert Fisk
23 November 2006
The
Independent
In the house of mourning, an
old Lebanese home of cut stone, they did not show Pierre Gemayel's body.
They had sealed the lid - so terribly damaged was his face by the bullets
which killed him - as if the nightmares of Lebanon might thus be kept
away in the darkness of the grave.
But the Maronites and Greek
Orthodox, the Druze and - yes - the Muslims who came to pay their condolences
to Gemayel's wife, Patricia, and his broken father, Amin, wept copiously
beside the flag-draped casket. They understood the horrors that could
unfold in the coming days and their dignity was a refusal to accept
that possibility.
Down in Beirut, I had been
watching the Lebanese detectives - they who had never solved a single
one of Lebanon's multitude of political murders - photographing the
bullet holes in the pale blue Kia car which Gemayel had been driving,
13 rounds through the driver's window, six of which had broken out through
the passenger door after tearing through the Lebanese Minister of Industry's
head and that of his bodyguard. But in the family home town of Bikfaya,
mountain cold with fir trees and off-season roses and new Phalangist
banners of triangular cedars, the black huddle of mourners spoke of
legal punishment rather than revenge for Gemayel's murder.
It was a heartening moment.
And who would have imagined the day - back in the civil war that now
haunts us all again - that the Druze could enter this holiest of holies
in safety and in friendship to express their sorrow at the death of
a man whose Uncle Bashir was the fiercest and most brutal enemy of the
Druze?
Bashir's best friend Massoud
Ashkar, a militia officer in those dark and terrible days, spoke movingly
of the need for Lebanese unity and for justice. "We know the Syrians
killed people during the war," he said to me. "We are waiting
to find out who killed Sheikh Pierre. These people wanted to restart
a civil war. We must know who these people are."
Ah, but there is perdition
in such hopes. With the sadness of those who still expect recovery when
all such possibility has been taken away, some of the local Christians
gathered in the Beirut suburb of Jdeideh where the three killers had
blasted away their MP on Tuesday afternoon. His car, Lebanese registration
number 201881, the hood smashed upwards where it had been rammed by
the gunmen's Honda CRV at 3.35pm and its rear still embedded in the
van of a waterproofing company into which it rolled when Gemayel died
at the wheel, was photographed a hundred times by the cops. They were
watched silently by the men and women who, less than 24 hours before,
had not heard the silenced pistol which killed him, and thought at first
that the minister was the victim of a road accident. No one would give
their name, of course. You don't do that in Lebanon now.
"I was asleep when I
heard some very mild sounds, like gunshots but not loud enough,"
a white-haired man told me on the balcony of the old family home where
he was born. "Then I heard a crash and several real gunshots. I
got up, put on my clothes but didn't see any gunmen. A neighbour went
over and came back and told me it was Sheikh Pierre and then I saw him
carried from his car covered in blood and put in the back of a van."
Scarcely an hour earlier,
Pierre Gemayel had been up in Bikfaya, only 200 metres from where his
body lay yesterday, honouring the ominous statue of his grandfather
- also Pierre - who had founded the Phalangist party which his grandson
represented in parliament.
No one mentioned, of course,
that this same old granddad Gemayel, a humble football coach, had created
the Phalangists as a paramilitary organisation after being inspired
- so he told me himself before he died in 1984 - by his visit to the
1936 Nazi Olympics in Hitler's Germany. As usual, such uneasy details
had long ago been wiped from the narrative of Lebanese history - and
from our journalistic accounts of the grandson's death this week.
Pierre Gemayel Jnr, however,
had been an earnest MP as the witness to his death made clear. "You
see that house over there with the awnings?" he asked me. "Well
an old lady had died there and Sheikh Pierre was coming here to express
his condolences to the family." The dead woman's home was scarcely
30 metres from where Gemayel's car had come to rest. He must have been
slowing down to turn into the side road. Everyone here knew he was coming
to the house on Tuesday morning, so the neighbours said, which meant
- although they did not say this, of course - that he had been betrayed.
The murderers were waiting for the good MP to pay his condolences, knowing
that the man's own family would be receiving condolences themselves
a day later. They didn't even wear face masks and coldly shot a shopkeeper
who saw them.
The Lebanese have been responding
to the international outcry over Gemayel's murder with somewhat less
rhetoric than President George Bush, whose promise "to support
the Siniora government and its democracy" was greeted with the
scorn it deserved. This, after all, was the same George Bush who had
watched in silence this summer as the Israelis abused Siniora's democratic
government and bombed Lebanon for 34 days, killing more than a thousand
of its civilians. And the Lebanese knew what to make of Tony Blair's
remark - he who also delayed a ceasefire that would have saved countless
lives here - when he said that "we need to do everything we can
to protect democracy in Lebanon". It was a long-retired Christian
militiaman, a rival of the Gemayel clan, who put it succinctly. "They
don't care a damn about us," he said.
That little matter of the
narrative - and who writes it - remained a problem yesterday, as the
Western powers pointed their fingers at Syria. Yes, all five leading
Lebanese men murdered in the past 20 months were anti-Syrian. And it's
a bit like saying "the butler did it". Wouldn't a vengeful
Syria strike at the independence of Lebanon by killing a minister? Yes.
But then, what would be the best way of undermining the new and boastful
power of the pro-Syrian Hizbollah, the Shia guerrilla army which has
demanded the resignation of Siniora's cabinet? By killing a government
minister, knowing that many Lebanese would blame the murder on Syria's
Hizbollah allies?
Living in Lebanon, you learn
these semantic tricks through a kind of looking glass. Nothing here
ever happens by accident. But whatever does happen is never quite like
what you first think it to be. So the Lebanese at Bikfaya understood
yesterday as they gathered and talked of unity. For if only the Lebanese
stopped putting their faith in foreigners - the Americans, the Israelis,
the British, the Iranians, the French, the United Nations - and trusted
each other instead, they would banish the nightmares of civil war sealed
inside Pierre Gemayel's coffin.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited
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