Sunday December 18, 2005, The Observer, One of the world’s most distinguished newspaper publishers came out of retirement last week at the age of 79. He had settled in France, a country he loved and which loved him back, only last week having bestowed on him the L
Lebanon has long occupied a special place in the modern Arab world. Politically, it was founded as a remarkable – ultimately unsustainable – jigsaw of faiths, cultures and languages: mostly Arabic-speaking Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Francophone Maronite Christians, as well as Druze, Armenians and, like the Tuenis, Greek Orthodox. Its universities, libraries and bookshops bubbled with intellectual vitality, even in the deadly civil war years of the 1970s. It has always had an astonishing variety of newspapers and magazines for such a small state, not least because almost all Arab governments and opposition factions used Beirut’s press as a forum for the kind of argument their own regimes made impossible.
I first got to know Ghassan Tueni when I was a boy war reporter in the late 1970s. My office was in the An-Nahar building on West Beirut’s Hamra Street, barely a mile from the ‘green line’ separating the snipers and shellers and RPG bands of the largely Muslim and Palestinian west of the city from the mostly Maronite east. The building was across from the Information and Tourism Ministry, its roles not much in evidence, there being little call for glossy brochures about sunning and skiing when just going across town could be a matter of life and death.
The ministry did churn out press releases on presidential or prime ministerial statements, but real power lay with warring militias, above all the 40,000 Syrian troops and their even more powerful mukhabarat, or intelligence enforcers, that had rolled into Lebanon under an Arab League mandate the year before.
To work alongside Ghassan, his erudite, insightful columnists, and above all a team of reporters and editors to distinguish any newsroom was a humbling insight into the pressures involved in newspaper truth-telling.
Only weeks after I arrived, I was given a story by one of the paper’s reporters, whom I used as a stringer, about a tacit agreement between the Syrians and Israel aimed at preventing head-on conflict in southern Lebanon. I filed it – only to find myself summoned by Lebanon’s head of security. ‘My friends in Damascus are not happy,’ he said. ‘I fear I can no longer guarantee your safety in Beirut.’ In the end he, or someone else, did, but it was a bracing lesson in the limits of First Amendment rights in civil war Lebanon.
But An-Nahar published many more stories than it spiked. It covered all sides in the conflict, never to my knowledge ran anything it suspected might not be true, and promoted an extraordinary breadth of ideas and debate. Hearing columnists, reporters, editors or Ghassan reflect on the stories and broader political issues on any given day, it was impossible not to marvel at the survival of a taboo-free environment of debate and questioning even as the country they loved had dispensed with such niceties and chosen killing instead.
An-Nahar has since moved to what is known as Freedom Square. In the 1970s it was called Martyrs’ Square and was at the heart of a moonscape of abandoned, shell-pocked buildings.
Ghassan Tueni, his craggy features unchanged but his hair now grey and white, said at his son’s funeral: ‘I call not for revenge or hatred but for us to bury with Gibran all our hatreds and to call on all Lebanese, Muslims and Christians to unite.’
His paper’s front-page headline read: ‘Gibran Tueni is not dead. An-Nahar will continue.’