Lokman Slim murdered in Lebanon: The Fearless

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A fearless person: Lokman Slim

Years ago we were together on stage at a panel discussion in Beirut when the power went out.

Lokman Slim just kept talking, his vibrating bass effortlessly filling the packed hall.

It was the voice of a fearless man.

The eloquent author, director and publisher repeatedly dared to criticize the overpowering Hezbollah militia party for their obsession with power to act as the executor of divine will.

Others do the same.

But none of them live in the middle of southern Beirut, the stronghold of Hezbollah.

I shouldn't have to worry about valuables in the car, Lokman Slim said when visiting the family home: his house is guarded around the clock.

On Thursday night this voice of peaceful protest was silenced.

On the way back to Beirut in the car, Lokman Slim was fatally shot several times.

He had visited a friend in the south of the country, left that evening and disappeared.

The search for him began that night until his car was found near the city of Nabatiya on Thursday morning.

The news of his murder spread furiously in the country and around the world.

Whoever shot will probably never be found.

But whoever has created the climate that beyond a murder order from the headquarters, the partisans and disciples of Hezbollah felt called to kill these critics from their own neighborhood and the common Shiite religious home, could hardly be clearer.

Minutes after the first news of the murder, Jawad Nasrallah, the son of Hezbollah general secretary, tweeted: "What a loss means to some people is actually a gain and unexpected goodness," followed by the hashtag: "#No regrets."

Nasrallah later deleted the tweet, explaining that he didn't mean Lokman Slim at all.

Massive threats from Hezbollah

When Slim joined the protests against the power cartel of the ruling parties in late 2019, the threats against him became more brutal.

Hezbollah thugs beat up demonstrators and burned down the tent of a planned event.

The saying that someone could paper his walls with death threats applied literally to Lokman Slim: Hezbollah supporters placarded his property wall over several square meters with printed curses and threats that it would soon be his turn, would end up on the rubbish heap of history and nothing but an "Israeli agent", part of the "Zionist conspiracy".

The agitators could hardly have been the reality.

What the 58-year-old built together with his German wife Monika Borgmann was much more than criticism of a single party and certainly not lobbying for the southern neighbor.

With culture against taboos

The duo of authors and directors became known around the world in 2005 with the dark, grandiose documentary »Massacre«, for which they managed to get six of those involved in the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in the Beirut camps of Sabra and Shhatila to speak for the first time in 1982 : In overheated, barren rooms, the men, whose faces were not shown, talked about laconism and cruelty.

About the fact that killing was their job at the time, that they were members of the "Falangists", one of the Lebanese civil war militias that was allied with Israel.

That only the trained butcher among them enjoyed the slaughter of more than a thousand civilians.

About how frustrated they were when Israeli officers only showed them Holocaust documentaries and not even pornography at the training camp.

In 2016 Slim and Borgmann brought together former Lebanese prisoners from the Syrian horror prison in Tadmor, who first reenacted the years of horror in a play, then in the documentary »Tadmor« in a breathtaking re-enactment, with oppressive authenticity of the roles of victims and perpetrators brought to the stage.

Shiite clerics came to one of the first performances in Beirut, in full regalia with turbans and robes, to publicly signal that not all Shiites and their religious establishment were Hezbollah supporters.

With the play, Slim and Borgmann came to Berlin, with the film to Hamburg, and to festivals in Switzerland.

But they regularly triggered the greatest tremors in Lebanon itself by making public all the taboos and trauma of the civil war, the Syrian occupation and their Lebanese accomplices.

Descendant of a long-established Shiite family

The Lebanese are locked up like prison inmates in the cells of their denominational groups and their leaders, Lokman Slim said at one of the demonstrations in late 2019, before the pandemic cut off public unrest.

The fact that, as a descendant of a long-established Shiite family, he did not reflexively accuse the others, but rather messed with the armed rulers of his own denomination, gave him credibility and put him in constant danger.

"Enough is enough!

If Hezbollah thinks it can silence us by doing this, it is wrong. "

Lokman Slim 2019 on the threats against him

Slim himself rarely spoke about the threats against him, it wasn't until the end of 2019, after the ongoing campaign, that he went public: “Enough is enough!

If Hezbollah thinks it can silence us by doing this, it is wrong. "

"Even if there were really a revolution in Lebanon, nothing would have been won"

When he was still missing on Thursday night, friends and companions discussed in fearful hope whether he might just have been kidnapped to frighten him.

The option was quickly rejected because it was clear to everyone that he was hardly to be frightened.

Not zealously, usually with a mocking move in the corner of his mouth, he repeatedly called for a normality that seems light years away in Lebanon: "Even if there were really a revolution in Lebanon, nothing would be won," he once wrote : "All is well when I can get into the car in the evening, drive to Haifa or Damascus to have a beer and then come back."

Now he hasn't even come back from a drive through his own country.

The voice of reason, which could never be tamed with threats, was silenced with murder.

For the murderers it may be a victory, for Lebanon it is another step towards suicide.

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