Lebanese intellectual and political activist Lokman Slim, known for his fierce hostility to the Shiite Hezbollah movement and for his work on the memory of the Lebanese civil war, was found dead Thursday, February 4, in the south of the country. This 58-year-old figure of the Lebanese cultural scene, whose disappearance had been reported the day before, was shot dead, while driving around in the Nabatiyé region, an area where the “party of God” is very influential.
This jack-of-all-trades, editor, essayist, archivist and documentary maker, born into a Shiite family but deeply secular and liberal, loudly denounced Hezbollah’s stranglehold on this community. Through the exhibitions and debates he organized, the books he published and the development projects in which he participated, he strove to reinject pluralism into the Shiite political and social scene. Lokman Slim also strongly criticized the intervention in Syria of Hezbollah, in support of the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, its main ally in the region with Iran.
Founded in the early 1980s, on the initiative of the Khomeinist Pasdarans, this party has a powerful military wing, which pushed the Israeli forces out of Lebanon in 2000, and held this army in check during the conflict that brought them down. opposed during the summer of 2006. Of all the actors of the Lebanese civil war, Hezbollah is the only one to have retained its weapons.
In January, in an interview with Saudi television channel Al Hadath, Lokman Slim accused Damascus of being responsible for the arrival, in the port of Beirut, of the stockpile of ammonium nitrate that caused the explosion. devastating August 4.
Shortly before, an investigation by the Lebanese channel Al Jadeed had highlighted the possible role played by two pro-Assad Syrian businessmen in the importation of this highly explosive product. In the interview, Slim suggested – without putting forward any concrete evidence – that part of the nitrate shipment could have been transferred to Syria, with the complicity of Hezbollah, to be used to manufacture the explosive barrels, dropped by the Syrian army. in rebel territories.
Death threats
All these statements had earned Lokman Slim several death threats. In pro-Hezbollah circles, he was readily shouted at, presented as an agent of Israel or the United States, a “Shiite of the embassies”. In the fall of 2019, during the Thawra, the abortive revolution against the political class, in which this sectarian slayer got involved, a group of men calling him “Traitor” had entered the garden of his house, located Haret Hreik, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a stronghold of Hezbollah. Posters threatening him by name had been plastered all around this large villa where he persisted in wanting to live, and the “Hangar”, a space where he organized cultural events with his German wife, Monika Borgmann.
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