2023-09-12 00:26:41
Writing a farewell text to Talal Salman (1938-2023) is a delicate undertaking. Professional aspects are indeed closely intertwined with the private sphere. Of course, we can always try to take a step back when reporting the facts, but, whatever the angle of approach or the path taken, the stories always come back to personal relationships. Likewise, every time we broach the subject of the newspaper Assafir (The Ambassador), launched in 1974, we find ourselves talking regarding its founder and the experience we shared with him.
All those who have been brought to work long-term at Assafir, the organ of its “owner and editorial director Talal Salman”, as he liked to write on the front page, are custodians of a story – no, multiple stories, which focus both on the man and on the indisputably gripping, delectable and fascinating experience he had there. This newspaper constituted an exceptional environment in which one of the most important periods in the history of contemporary Lebanon, and more generally of the Arab world, might be documented.
A project, the Arab renaissance; a matrix, Palestine
It must be said that Talal Salman was one of the voices which nourished, from the podium of journalism, the dream and the political project of an Arab renaissance – which for him embodied the fundamental antithesis of the Zionist project for the region. This is why his daily life has attracted the pens and reflections of great writers from all corners of the Arab world, from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Yemen, to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, passing through Syria, Jordan and Egypt, without forgetting the capital matrix of this revivification project: Palestine.
Talal Salman succeeded in creating a completely unique situation in the Arab press, controlled at the time by traditional elites affiliated for the most part with political capitalism and the regimes in place.
Born on the eve of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), Assafir interacted strongly with his environment and with the affairs of the moment. He exerted his influence on us as much as we ourselves exerted our influence on him, which is basically the prerogative of living organisms. When his ability to bring regarding change was at half mast, he himself decided, at the beginning of 2017, to close his business for good.
Asked regarding the reasons which led him to close the newspaper, he replied:
Where is politics in what we experience? Is all this gossip and slander that politicians spread politics? Just look at Syria: it’s war. Iraq? The war. Yemen? The war. This whole region is full of wars. The Israeli enemy is the only one who lives his life peacefully. And no one ever thinks regarding Palestine once more. We live in another era. A time in which the expression “Arab world” has become a source of ridicule. Whereas personally, I believe in the existence of a united Arab world, even if circumstances are adverse to it today. For me, that’s the hope, that’s the dream. And I, this dream, I lived it personally1
Son of the Bekaa and national figure
During his last farewell, while his remains made the journey back to his region of origin, his legacy might be measured by the cheers that resounded throughout the journey of the funeral procession from Beirut to Chamistar, his native village. .
These were meaningful farewells. In many of the villages she passed through, people stopped the mortuary procession to spread flowers and grains of rice while ululating — exactly as they did to greet the procession of martyrs or pay last respects to the young dead. prematurely.
Because the contribution of this son of the Bekaa (one of the most deprived regions of the country, both in terms of development and social status, since the creation of Greater Lebanon) in favor of its inhabitants who have rather the reputation of Being outlaws, wanted delinquents or hashish cultivators, appeared to them as estimable as that of the martyrs fallen for the homeland. And in this they were right.
Even if I have already worked in numerous media, before and following Assafir, if I were asked today to determine the birthplace of my professional identity, well, there is no doubt that I would choose this newspaper immediately and without the slightest hesitation. There, I found the tranquility that came from working in an organization endowed with its values: secularism, social justice, Arabism and national resistance. I also found this tranquility in the field, through an experimental orientation such as was favored by this journal, eager for new methods, however daring they may be.
More than a newspaper, a “family”
“Why did you leave there?” Talal asked me one day, regarding the reasons why I had been kicked out of the Al-Moustakbal television channel, where I had worked following returning from Paris to Beirut in 1993. My departure was due to my investigations into corruption, which extended to ministers of the government of Rafic Hariri. The latter, owner of the channel, returned to the fold following the end of the war and the Taif Accords (October 1989), with a Saudi project for Lebanon.
That day, I responded to him with simple generalities, considering that I might not denigrate a company where I had worked for the benefit of another where I wanted to be transferred. I remember him smiling. This smile was enough to open the doors of the newspaper for me as well as its “professional heart”, and to integrate me into Assafir’s “family”.
In truth, I got into it through the magazine Al-Yom Al-Saba, a weekly published in Paris since 1985, and financed at the time by Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestine Liberation Organization ( PLO). I stayed there for around ten years before joining the “family”. Because the founders of Al-Yom Al-Saba, Bilal Al-Hassan and Joseph Samaha, were elders of Assafir who were fleeing at the time the wave of assassinations following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance from Beirut. The atmosphere that reigned within Al-Yom Al-Saba was, as I discovered later, of the same order as that of Talal’s newspaper, and more generally of the Arab street, which was bubbling with culture, of rebellious thought and political vitality.
This is why, as soon as I entered the doors of Assafir in 1994, I felt that this atmosphere and this place were already very familiar to me, and that I was in the right place. These are countless opportunities that “Mr. Talal” has made available to me and to that of young journalists like me.
He never hesitated to send me on a mission outside Lebanon, to write on subjects that I had not yet completely mastered, or to take charge of training and selecting university students for the writing of the “youth” page that we were planning to publish. Or, he would call me point blank to be at his side when receiving an important guest, such as the Pope’s representative, or the former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, or even Hervé de Charrette, the French minister Foreign Affairs. It even happened that he asked me to relieve him entirely of the task of receiving them!
Perhaps he found in the similarity of our paths, as children of soldiers from disadvantaged areas and who went to Beirut in search of a place where we might assert our identity, a reminiscence of his own beginnings. . Because he too was the son of a soldier who had raised seven children. The father, constantly traveling from one region to another, took his children everywhere with him, and this is what, later, benefited the journalist Talal. It was for him the opportunity to carefully explore the different Lebanese regions where the Salman family settled, with their confessional, tribal and political specificity.
A journey intertwined with regional crises
Knowing that we must talk regarding his personal trajectory, I would say that the most important step during his youth and his stay in the Chouf region was his meeting with Kamal Jumblatt, a political and intellectual figure of the country. In the words of researcher Saqr Abou Fakhr, Jumblatt “instilled in an entire generation the dream of social justice” and “succeeded in linking Lebanon to Arab affairs in the Arab world and Palestine”.2 And Fakhr added:
Talal Salman was an Arab nationalist without being involved in any of the nationalist parties, although he later became acquainted and established friendly relations with the founders of the Arab national movement, such as George Habache or Hani Al-Hindi, and met Mohsen Ibrahim and Ghassan Kanafani.
After completing his secondary studies in 1955, Talal arrived in Beirut with nothing in his pockets, except a paltry sum of barely 40 Lebanese pounds that his father had given him before his departure, as he often recounted. He also talks regarding this story in the documentary entitled The Paper Man: The End of a Diary and Other Stories, directed by Ali Zaraqit. He also specifies: “My father told me: “from now on, you manage because I still have six children to take care of.” »3
And in fact, Talal managed on his own. He moved in with a relative in the suburbs of Beirut and in 1956 landed a job as a proofreader at the Al-Shark newspaper, an unpaid position because he was on probation. It wasn’t long before he moved to another newspaper, where he worked as an editor in the crimes and news section; there, “he constantly walked the path between the police headquarters, the courts, the emergency medical services and the fire stations, collecting the necessary information”4
These wanderings allowed him to practice the art of field surveys, thanks to which he was able to grasp the pulse of the street and where he developed his way of thinking. At the newspaper, he preferred to climb the stairs instead of taking the elevator, with rare exceptions. We often came across him running down the steps from his office on the 6th floor, greeting everyone he passed and addressing them in a low voice. We always asked him to raise his voice a little, particularly during editorial conferences, which took the form of a sort of café open to all. Anyone who wished might enter to listen to the debates that animated the participants without preeminence being recognized to any hierarchical category, whether one was a great writer, a “small” journalist or even a guest.
The biography of Talal Salman is closely intertwined with the important political and intellectual events that ravaged the Arab world in general and Lebanon in particular. This particularly applies to events occurring within the country, such as the overthrow of the first Lebanese president Bechara El-Khoury in 1953, or the crisis of 1958 which led to the split between the Nasserists and the Baghdad Pact group as well as the United States, under the leadership of former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun – the crisis led to the arrival of the American Sixth Fleet off the coast of Lebanon, and to British intervention in Jordan to prevent this country from joining the axis of “Arab unity” constituted by Egypt and Syria.
The art of “highlights”
But the most important event, which marked the conscience of the young journalist at the time, was undoubtedly the revolution of July 1952 in Egypt, particularly following his meeting with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, in Damascus, at the time of the Egyptian-Syrian Union.
This meeting was immortalized by a photograph displayed on the front of the Ibrahim Amer room (where the newspaper’s editorial conferences were held). Saqr Abou Fakhr, responsible at the time for Assafir’s “Palestine” supplement, reports as follows:
Talal was part of the delegation of the weekly magazine “Al-Hawadeth”, published by Selim Al-Lozi, a Nasserite at heart (assassinated during the civil war). The latter presented him, in Damascus, to President Nasser, who said to him: “So, professor, how are your achievements going? », thus showing that he closely followed the young journalist’s articles in the magazine, and the daring writing which he displayed in his column aptly titled “Coups d’brilliance”.
The “outbursts” in question led him to prison on several occasions, under various pretexts, such as in 1961 when he was accused of establishing relations with Ahmed Al-Saghir Jaber, the representative of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Lebanon, of having clandestinely shipped weapons to Algerian resistance fighters, and even of having prepared military coups in certain Arab countries!
Algeria at the heart
Of course, these “charges” were a source of pride for Talal, but following he was exonerated and released from prison, he discovered that he had been fired from his position at Al-Ahad magazine. In 1962, Abdelaziz Al-Massaïd, the founder of the Kuwaiti publishing house Al-Ra’y al-Aam, which published the newspaper of the same name, suggested that he leave for Kuwait to run a magazine called The World of Arabism. Salman set the condition of being able to leave first for Algeria, in order to attend the independence ceremonies which were to be held there imminently, notably the inauguration session of the National Constituent Assembly in September 1962 There, he met the first president of independent Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, who remained loyal to him until his death as did his comrades Mohamed Reda, Mohamed Boudiaf, Hussein Aït Ahmed and Rabeh Bitat, but also Jamila Bouhired. The latter subsequently visited him in Assafir on the occasion of his visit to Lebanon to express solidarity following the Israeli aggression in the summer of 2006.
Talal did not stay in Kuwait very long. He returned the same year to Beirut, which at the time had become a rallying point for exiled Arab opponents, as well as a laboratory of protest ideas. After an interlude as editorial director of Al-Sayyad magazine, towards the end of 1973 he started the countdown for the publication of Assafir, the idea of which had been germinating in his head for a while.
“The voice of those who have no voice”
Thus, with the support, and even at the suggestion of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, then a Nasserite at heart, the first issue of Assafir appeared precisely on March 26, 1974. On the front page was an interview with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, in a way to mark the orientation which will be that of the newspaper. As for its motto, we can say that there were in reality two: to the first, “The newspaper of Lebanon in the Arab world and of the Arab world in Lebanon”, was added a second: “The voice of those who have no voice.
However, what is most striking is that in the wake of the publication of the second issue the next day, the association of Lebanese banks brought a lawsuit once morest the fledgling newspaper, subsequently followed by numerous complaints (sixteen in a single year ). This proves to what extent Assafir was committed body and soul once morest the regime in place and the great financial captains.
This commitment, carried out with constancy and which went so far as to challenge the powerful, had serious consequences. When I met “Mr. Talal” in 1994, his injury, sustained during the assassination attempt perpetrated once morest him in 1983 (one of multiple attempts, including the dynamiting of the newspaper’s printing press and the planting of a time bomb at his home), was still visible on his face. When asked if he knew who had tried to assassinate him that day, he replied: “Amine Gemayel”, before correcting himself and specifying, like a good journalist weighing each of these words: “From the less he is the one who bears the responsibility.”
Talal took a position once morest the “election” of Béchir Gemayel to the presidency of the Republic in 1982, as he subsequently took a position once morest his assassination and once morest the accession of his brother Amine to the top of the State, but also once morest the agreement of May 17, 1983 between Israel and Lebanon, which he described as an “agreement of shame”.
From the Israeli invasion to Syrian tutelage
When Israeli forces invaded and then occupied Beirut in 1982, they wanted to go to Assafir’s premises. But seeing all the employees lined up in the entrance as one man to block their access, they gave up on entering.
The period of Syrian presence in Lebanon, which transformed into a sort of long protectorate, quickly proved complicated. The entry of the Syrians had been prepared, with the arrival, at the start of the civil war, of Arab resistance forces, multinational troops deployed in Lebanon in 1976, by virtue of a decree taken during the Riyadh conference held the same year. Subsequently, the contingents sent by Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates withdrew one following the other, leaving only Syrian troops behind.
During this delicate period, Talal tried to find a balance, in my opinion, between, on the one hand, his historic relationship with Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad, due to the latter’s position in favor of Arab nationalism and the geopolitical situation of Syria, and on the other, the inexcusable practices of certain Syrian military and security personnel in Lebanon.
I owe him a valuable intervention when, to protect me, he deliberately failed to include my signature under an article in which I covered a security event. Knowing that the distribution of the article risked displeasing the Syrian “big brother”, he was content to mention as a source a foreign press agency which had broadcast part of the information!
“Dead Standing”
After the assassination of Rafic Hariri in February 2005, Assafir began to gradually decline. Not because of this event, of course, but because the newspaper was — and had always been — the reflecting mirror of the Lebanese environment in particular and the Arab environment in the broad sense. This environment was beginning to suffer from the acute and growing polarization between the two antagonistic axes of the region, namely the American axis and the Iranian axis.
As a result, the funding money provided by the countries in question began to be directed towards the media that were clearly subservient to them, or placed directly under their supervision.
In a recent article5 in memory of Talal Salman, the novelist Elias Khoury writes:
Assafir died standing before he was even swallowed by the death of the idea of Arabism and the spread of sectarianism and radical ideologies in the region. Was Talal Salman aware, when fire was opened on his newspaper, that it was he himself who was also being targeted? He was courageous to the point of fearing more for his diary than for himself, so he killed it himself in a rare moment combining audacity and fear.
These words perfectly sum up what “Monsieur Talal” embodied in my eyes, until the last second…
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