An Apology to Bashir and Lebanon’s Martyrs

There are things that happen only in Lebanon. Our beloved country is known for being a place where contradictions meet. It is a place where you no longer ask questions, where you waive your right of knowing why. It is a place where no argumentation is convincing enough, and no rationale reasonable enough. It is a place where running out of logic to explain issues and situations is a perfectly Cartesian outcome.

Our beloved country is a place where rating is top notch. We rate everything that moves, including each other: adjectives, comparatives, and superlatives. We spare none. But we also rate death. We rate martyrdom. Our country is the only place where death has become a selective event according to which the deceased are rated as less important, important, more important than, and the most important of all.

We are the only country in the world in which people do not die equally, let alone live equally. As such, the late president-elect Bashir Gemayel, was one of the “unfortunate” martyrs of Lebanon, one who was never entitled to a decent treatment, one to whom the country’s successive governments never devoted a day of national mourning, or a decent national remembrance event.

To the eyes of Lebanon’s officials, the then 33-year old president is just one of the thousands martyrs who died during the war. Only the late prime minister Rafik Hariri stands out in the martyrdom arena. It is certain that the horrific assassination of the late premier with what he stood up for and his regional and international magnitude shook Lebanon just as much as Bashir Gemayel’s. In fact, February 14, the day of his horrendous assassination, has been institutionalized as an official day of mourning. There is nothing wrong with that. But what is wrong is the “preferential” treatment that the deceased have been receiving in our country. If Bashir Gemayel, Rachid Karameh and the numerous other officials who left their homes in suits and ties and came back in death bags were not “important enough” to deserve a mourning day, why should Hariri be? If Gemayel and Karameh were considered part of the 200,000 or so Lebanese war martyrs, why should Hariri be treated any differently?

Lebanon’s history did not start on February 14, 2005. It started 35 years earlier. It started 100 years, 200 years earlier. But today we commemorate the assassination of Bashir. Regardless of bloody acts that were perpetrated by the late president’s militia after the two-year war of 1975-1976, he was still Lebanon’s president-elect.

It is our duty to remember our martyrs, all of them, including Gebran, Samir, Pierre and all those who died in “peaceful” times. But it is abnormal to rate them. They all died for Lebanon, whatever their background, whatever their political belongings, whatever their religious beliefs. But it is also our duty to move forward, to quit living in the graveyard, while still keeping their memory alive. It is our duty to know that we are all equal in the eyes of death and it is about time we treated each other as such.

A final apology to Bashir, to all other politicians, journalists, ambassadors, school children, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and grandparents who were blown up to pieces during and after the war: no martyr is more important to Lebanon than you are, and nobody’s blood is more sacred than yours. But our successive governments have distorted visions of both life and death; after all didn’t our previous cabinet cancel Great Friday? I guess the martyr of the Christians, the son of God, is not entitled to a proper mourning either…