100,000 Mourn Slain Minister In Beirut

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The New York Sun

More than 100,000 Lebanese filled the streets of Beirut yesterday to bid farewell to an assassinated anti-Syrian Cabinet minister, Pierre Gemayel, and to vent their rage against Damascus.

Under a forest of flags in Martyrs’ Square, the chorus of voices denouncing Syria grew so loud it at times drowned out the army helicopters overhead. The crowd chanted “Down with Syria” and “Long Live Free Lebanon” before singing the national anthem. While it remained largely peaceful, every so often anger welled up and the crowd burned pictures of the Syrian president, Bashar Al-Assad, and those Lebanese politicians denounced as his stooges.

In the funeral crowd were teenage Christian girls in T-shirts, Islamic matriarchs in headscarves, and even the occasional mustachioed Druze chieftain in baggy, black shalvar leggings. It was as if the death of the 34-year-old politician had briefly united Lebanon’s notoriously divided society.

But the absence of any senior members of Hezbollah, the Shiite movement closely allied with Syria, showed a fault line across which bloody retaliation is likely. Many people stayed away, worried about violence, and the crowd numbered a quarter of those that turned out for last year’s Cedar Revolution.

The crowd waited for several hours beforethe coffins of Gemayel and the bodyguard who died at his side in Tuesday’s roadside killing, Samir Shartouny, came into view. Borne as high as the pallbearers could reach and shrouded in the flags of Lebanon and the Phalange party founded by Gemayel’s grandfather, the coffins seemed to float on a sea of emotion as they entered the square to a wave of applause and a fluttering of flags. Inside St. George’s Cathedral, the largest Maronite church in Beirut, the atmosphere was more serene as the head of Lebanon’s Maronite community, Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, intoned the funeral liturgy in Arabic.

“Lebanon has suffered a great loss,” he said. “We were expecting a lot from Sheik Pierre Gemayel as a leader and a politician.”

In the front of the congregation sat many of the leading figures of Lebanon’s anti-Syrian bloc, including a former president, Amin Gemayel; the victim’s father, Walid Jumblatt, who is a Druze leader, and Saad Hariri, who is a political heir of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated on Valentine’s Day 2005 after daring to stand up to the Syrian regime.

After the service, these same leaders mounted a podium in the square. Mr. Jumblatt stirred a huge ovation as he walked out in front of a bullet-proof screen before denouncing Syria and its role in Lebanon. “They will not nail down our determination for life,” he said.


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