Introduction

On Wednesday 18 February 1987, amid raging street battles tearing apart West Beirut, the left-leaning Lebanese daily al-Safir headlined its front page as follows:

The civil war was entering one of its darkest moments, with the conflict between former allies spiralling out of control. The head of the Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, was in charge of asserting the Syrian regime's control over the unfolding events of the Lebanese civil war. The battles of February 1987, which ended with the entry of the Syrian army into West Beirut, were to become a crucial step in the establishment of the Pax Syriana, the regional and domestic arrangement that ended the civil war and established the parameters of the post-war settlement that followed.

Under the main headline was a short piece entitled ‘The Assassination of Husayn Muruwwa’ and signed ‘al-Safir’. The piece broke the news of the assassination of the Lebanese intellectual and member of the Central Committee of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), Husayn Muruwwa (1910–87). The murder was attributed to the ‘civil war’ that had been raging since 1975, a war of which the latest episode was covered in the headline above. Muruwwa, an intellectual and writer, and a symbol of tolerance and openness, was killed by unnamed attackers, ‘without memory’, who ignored the achievements of their victim, according to the unsigned eulogy.3 An absurd and violent war had led ignorant assassins to their tolerant victim – this was the story on the morning of Wednesday 18 February 1987.

The political headline and the eulogy coexisted uneasily on the front page of the leftist daily, and called for some clarification of their possible connections. The ‘official’ interpretation was provided on the same page by the owner and chief editor of al-Safir, Talal Salman, for whom the assassination was the result of the absurd violence raging in Beirut, a violence that could only stop with the intervention of Damascus.