Grief turns to rage as Lebanon buries assassinated politician

The coffin of Pierre Gemayel was passed overhead through the crowd into the church, handed from mourner to mourner, while in the square nearby hundreds of thousands of supporters unleashed their anger, burning pictures of Syria’s president and his allies in Lebanon.

The grief over the assassination of Gemayel, a prominent anti-Syrian Christian politician, quickly turned to rage over what seems to many like an endless series of political killings in this small Mediterranean country.

“We want to live,” proclaimed one poster, waved by a young woman wrapped in the Lebanese flag, summing up the feelings of the estimated 800,000 people who massed in downtown Beirut’s Martyrs' Square.

The funeral rally was on the scale of some of the largest of the series of massive anti-Syrian protests that followed the February 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Those demonstrations, dubbed the “Cedar Revolution,” built momentum for the withdrawal of Syrian troops which took place in April that year, ending 29 years of Syrian military presence in Lebanon.

However, while those were held in a festive atmosphere, today’s gathering was sombre, angry and fearful over what could come next in a political crisis that threatens to detonate tensions between Lebanon’s deeply divided religious communities.

Some held out hope that Lebanese could come together.

“The unity that we had following last year’s demonstrations has been lost. I have come here in the hope that we can recapture some of that lost spirit - otherwise, it’s the end of Lebanon,” said Omar Farhat, a 35-year-old supporter of Gemayel’s right-wing Christian Phalange Party as he carried a picture of the slain politician over his head.

The boyish, smiling face of the 34-year-old Gemayel looked down over the crowds in the square from a huge poster with the words: “Sacrificed for Lebanon.”

However, bitterness ran though the crowd. Standing shoulder to shoulder beneath clear blue skies, many shouted anti-Syrian slogans and called for revenge for Gemayel’s killing. Some burned pictures of Syrian president Bashar Assad and pro-Syrian Lebanese president Emile Lahoud.

“We want revenge from Lahoud and Bashar!” they roared. “Syria stop killing us,” read one placard in the crowd.

Underlining the tensions, Shiite Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, an ally of the Hezbollah guerrilla group, was booed as he went into the church and Gemayel’s father, former president Amin Gemayel, skipped him while greeting dignitaries. Lahoud and Hezbollah did not send representatives to the funeral.

Saad Hariri, the murdered Hariri’s son and now the leader of the anti-Syrian bloc that dominates parliament, also spoke of unity in his address to the crowd - which he delivered from behind a panel of bullet-proof glass, as did all the speakers.

He praised Sunni Muslim and Christian leaders who make up the anti-Syrian coalition but he made no mention of Shiites, who overwhelmingly back the pro-Syrian militant group Hezbollah and are Lebanon’s largest community, slightly more than each of the other two.

In the only friction during the day, about 50 pro-Syrian protesters shouted slogans at anti-Syrian leaders in a neighbourhood on the edge of downtown, but there was no clash with the mourners in the square, which was heavily protected by troops.

Schools, stores and business were closed in Christian and predominantly Sunni Muslim areas across Lebanon. But not in some Shiite areas, such as the eastern city of Baalbek, where private schools and stores opened as usual.

In the morning, thousands lined the roads as Gemayel’s funeral procession made its way slowly from the Gemayel family residence in the mountain hometown of Bikfaya in the Christian heartland to the Lebanese capital. Women showered the hearse with rice. When pallbearers took the coffin out, they swayed it over their heads, a traditional sign of anguish for those who die young.

Outside St. George’s Cathedral, near Martyrs’ Square, the white coffins of Gemayel and his driver – also killed in the Tuesday shooting attack – were passed hand to hand over the heads of the hundreds massed outside, including one Sunni Muslim cleric. Inside, the packed congregation sang hymns as Gemayel’s wife wept on the shoulder of her mother-in-law.

The coffin was then returned to Bikfaya for burial, as church bells tolled and automatic weapons were fired into the air. At the cemetery, members of the family lined up, each carrying a white rose.

Before returning to Bikfaya, Amin Gemayel drew wild cheers and whistles as he appeared in Martyr’s Square, where the crowd roared: “Pierre lives inside us!”