Revisiting Lebanon: 'Journalists are seen as just another casualty category'

As I flew into Beirut airport by night, above the sparkling lights of the chaotic city in which I had spent many years as a correspondent before joining the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI) in July, I felt a familiar blend of exhilaration and apprehension - exhilaration because of the electrifying vibrancy of the city; apprehension because in Lebanon, behind the legendary joie de vivre, the spectre of violence always seems to lurk.

On the facade of the Al-Nahar newspaper building in rebuilt Downtown Beirut, in sombre juxtaposition to the frenetic surrounding construction activity, buzzing cafes and restaurants, and bustling tourists, hangs a larger-than-life portrait of the newspaper's former editor, Gebran Tueni, murdered in December 2005, in a powerful car bomb blast which turned his armoured Range Rover into a hulk of charred, twisted metal.

Remembering Gebren Tueni
It was early morning when it happened. I heard the muffled blast from my shower - and recognized it as an explosion.

When I arrived on the scene, I saw that a vehicle had been blown off a hillside road, through a metal railing and wall, and down a steep incline into the valley below. A swathe of bushy hillside had been set on fire by burning petrol. The emergency services were pulling out burned bodies.

A security official told me they'd found Tueni's laptop and cellphone. It was him. They'd got him.

I thought back a few months, to when I'd interviewed him in his spacious, newspaper office, with a sweeping view of the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains beyond.

Since October 2004, Lebanon had been caught up in a vicious cycle of assassinations, notably that of the country's former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, in a massive explosion on Beirut's famed seafront in February 2005.

One by one, vocal critics of Syria's decades-long political grip on Lebanon were being eliminated. Just a few months earlier, in June, the most prominent columnist at Tueni's newspaper, Samir Kassir, had been killed by a bomb placed under his car.

"Are you not afraid that you're going to be next?" I had asked Tueni in the interview.

"If they want to shut me up, they're going to have to kill me," he had said.

Tueni's face is familiar to all in Lebanon, and many throughout the world. But the faces of his killers are hidden behind a dark mask of impunity.

Journalists murdered
So, too are the faces of those who murdered columnist Samir Kassir.

And of those who tried to kill TV anchorwoman May Chidiac two months later, by placing a bomb under her car seat. Chidiac, who lost part of an arm and a leg in the attack, defiantly returned to the screen but those who attempted to silence her forever have yet to be identified.

That's two murders - and one attempted murder - of journalists in the last few years in Lebanon unsolved. No suspects. No leads. No progress. No charges. No trials. No convictions. Total impunity.

Sadly, this phenomenon is not new in Lebanon. Going back decades, journalists have been murdered and maimed with impunity. Tueni himself was shot twice and abducted during the 1975-1990 civil war.

• In 1958, Nassib Matni, the editor of Al Telegraph was assassinated as he left his Beirut office.

• In 1966, Kamel Mroueh, founder and editor of the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat was shot behind his desk.

• In 1980, the mutilated body of Salim al-Lawzi, editor of Al-Hawadeth, was found in Beirut, after he had been kidnapped. His writing hand had been burned with acid before he was killed.

A few months later, Riad Taha, the head of Lebanon's editors' syndicate was murdered.

In none of these cases has justice been served.

Since the end of the country's civil war in Lebanon, state-sponsored amnesia regarding 'the events' as they are euphemistically called, has prevailed. Forget, they will tell you, ever solving any of the murders of journalists that occurred during the civil war. And those perpetrated before the civil war? Well, that was a long time ago ….

As for the more recent ones? Unfortunately, since its creation as an independent state in 1948, Lebanon has had notoriously weak, politically-fragmented central state authority. And that includes the security services.

Since all of the murders of journalists listed above are thought to have been politically-motivated, in the absence of 'two hands clapping together,' in the absence of an independent judiciary, in the absence of united, forward-looking security service investigations, and under the shadow of an unwillingness to dredge up the 'ghosts of the past,' Lebanon, at both the public and political level, appears to have to a great extent resigned itself to the 'reality' that political assassinations are never solved.

Not just journalists
After all, it is noted, in addition to the journalists murdered, Lebanon has in the last few decades seen a president-elect, a president, a former prime minister, ministers, top religious personalities, and a variety of other prominent figures assassinated - and those murders haven't been solved. And then there are the tens of thousands of ordinary citizens who were killed or disappeared during the civil war. Their deaths have never been investigated.

In Lebanon, for the moment, impunity rules across the board when it comes to political murders. Journalists are seen as just another casualty category in a state accustomed to political breakdown, violence and death.

But the continuing, almost fatalistic culture of resignation to supposedly unsolvable political killing, the unwillingness or inability to ensure that justice is served, means that Lebanon continues to float in a judicial limbo, in which the central government is weak, polarized politics rules supreme, the law is only selectively applied, sectarian political leaders hold the real power, and the quest for justice in the murders of journalists is just another dead end in a country that has yet to convincingly chart the road ahead.

Anthony Mills spent almost 10 years in Beirut, Lebanon, as a freelance correspondent for CNN, Deutsche Welle, and other news outlets before joining International Press Institute (IPI) as Press Freedom Manager in July 2009. Among the events he covered were the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, and the brief takeover by Hezbollah-led gunmen of most of West Beirut in 2008.

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