LEBANON: Yesterday's bomb was a message to journalists and Lebanon's opposition, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.
Samir Kassir, who was assassinated in Beirut yesterday morning, was one of Lebanon's finest newspaper editorial writers, a television commentator in Lebanon and France, where I met him at TV5.
He wrote books on Lebanon and the Arab world, taught political science at Saint Joseph University and was a founding member of the anti-Syrian Democratic Left movement. He was 45.
When I last saw Samir in March, he wore the insignia of the protesters who gathered nightly in Martyrs' Square in Beirut to demand the departure of the Syrians: a red-and-white scarf, and a photo badge of the slain prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Kassir was one of the organisers of the rallies. A superb orator, he climbed on to the stage most nights to denounce the Syrian mafia who bled the Lebanese economy and the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services who intimidated the population.
Kassir was a cheerful, charming man, with a salt-and-pepper beard and easy laughter, always ready to help a colleague.
At Abdel Wahab restaurant in Ashrafieh, at dinner with his wife Gisèle and me, Kassir said he was certain Bashar al-Assad would keep his promise to pull all Syrian troops out of Lebanon by the end of April. But as Kassir foretold, remnants of the intelligence services lingered.
An Nahar, the prestigious Arabic language Lebanese newspaper that employed Kassir, was one of several that published the names of three Syrian generals who returned to Lebanon to meddle in the legislative elections that started last Sunday and will be completed on June 19th. Last month's UN report confirming the troop departure noted that co-operation between Lebanese and Syrian intelligence services continued, with Lebanese officers visiting Syria and Syrians possibly coming to Lebanon.
Yesterday Kassir left his apartment in Ashrafieh at 10.30am, as he did every day, and got into his grey Alfa Romeo. Gisèle, who hosts a political talk show on al-Arabiya television, was attending a television journalists' conference in Atlanta. Kassir turned the key in the ignition and the bomb under his car seat exploded.
It was a small bomb, perhaps one-tenth the size of the one that killed Hariri and 20 other people on February 14th. But no one doubted that the perpetrators were the same. Kassir's assassination was a message to his newspaper, to journalists in general, to opposition politicians and Detlev Mehlis, the German anti-terrorist judge who is in Beirut with a team of UN investigators to hunt down the men who killed Hariri. We're still here, yesterday's bomb said.
Lebanese television showed videotape of Kassir on a talk show, saying in reference to Hariri's death that it didn't matter whether the man who planted the bomb was Lebanese or Syrian; they were all part of the same system. A Greek-Orthodox Christian of Palestinian origin, Kassir dared to speak out against the Syrian presence in Lebanon long before the opposition began to organise last year.
In 2000, Gen Jamil Saïd, the head of Lebanese general security, had Kassir's Lebanese passport seized at the airport. Saïd's men tailed Kassir for several months, ostentatiously, threateningly. Hariri invited Kassir to dinner in a Beirut restaurant, then sent his own bodyguards to accompany him home.
When Saïd was forced to resign at the demand of the Lebanese opposition this spring, Kassir wrote a cutting editorial in An Nahar: "It's good to see someone who has been threatening and censoring us for so many years fearing justice." That article may have done for him.
Or perhaps it was the one he published last Friday, entitled "Mistake After Mistake," criticising the Syrian regime's arrest on May 24th of eight members of the last political discussion group to be shut down in Damascus.
"The Ba'athist regime in Syria is behaving as it behaved in Lebanon," Kassir wrote, "adding mistake to mistake ... under the direction of Syrian leaders, with Bashar al-Assad at their head."
Nassib Lahoud, a former Lebanese ambassador to Washington and the leader of an opposition party, said that "criminal hands" targeted Kassir "because he was one of the leaders of Lebanon's spring... So the battle with the intelligence apparatus is not over."
Kassir was a close friend of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, also an opposition leader. Every time I spoke to Samir, he said he feared for Jumblatt's life. Unlike Jumblatt, Kassir had no bodyguards or armoured cars.
Kassir's murder has increased pressure on the Lebanese president Émile Lahoud, who was reappointed last year by Assad, to resign. Jumblatt said yesterday: "Samir Kassir was assassinated by the remnants of the security agency that controls the country, and that is headed by Émile Lahoud... As long as the serpent's head is in [ the presidential palace at] Baabda, the assassinations will continue."