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 sad
المزيد
