Towards the end of 1969, Ghassan Tueni's secretary Samia Shami called me, and said that her boss wanted to see me. I went to see him in his office in the former building that housed Al-Nahar, which was located opposite the Ministry of Information. It was only a few hundred meters away from my office at the Reuters news agency. There was a colleague from The Daily Star at Tueni's office, and he suggested that we publish a weekly English language report in cooperation with him and Al-Nahar group, under the title of “Al-Nahar Arab Report”. I was a shift leader at the British news agency and the chief editor of The Daily Star. I was trying to decide which one to choose, and which would be better for my career, and in the end, I chose the newspaper. Meanwhile, Mr. Tueni decided several weeks later to retain me exclusively to prepare the report, and assigned colleague Riad Najib Rayes to manage the entire endeavor. Rayes handled it superbly with his impeccable skills, intelligence and ability. We also had with us another dear friend who is Dunia Nahas, daughter of Habib Nahas, the head of Al-Nahar's advertisement arm at the time. Ghassan Tueni won a seat in the parliament in 1951 at the age of 24 years, which he amended and made 25 years at the court in order to become eligible for running in the elections. His granddaughter Nayla was elected at the same age to fill the seat vacated upon the assassination of her father Gebran. Although the parliament of 1951 was dissolved in 1953, Ghassan Tueni was reelected in 1953, and he participated in the revolt against President Bechara El Khoury, which ended with his resignation and Camille Chamoun's ascent to the presidency. This part of Ghassan Tueni's legacy came before I became politically conscious, and I read about it in his book “Let's Bury Hatred and Revenge; A Lebanese Destiny”. However, I was indeed a contemporary of the events that followed. In 1970, I would see Tueni on a daily basis, usually following editorial meetings with Al-Nahar's staff. I would be shown in to his office by Samia, and often was he asleep with his head between his arms on the conference table. I would then go over the material that I had with him and listen to his remarks, and I remember that he would sometimes take a Maalox tablet since he suffered from peptic ulcer disease. I used to see members of parliament entering or leaving his office, as he “schemed” to have Suleiman Franjieh elected president, which is indeed what happened, in 1970, by one vote, or “The One Vote…the Vote of the People” as Al-Nahar's front-page headline said on the next day. Ghassan Tunei was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for three times as I recall, of which the portfolio of Education wore him out the most. I suggested to him [back then] that we ought to delay the Al-Nahar Report, but he refused and said, “Each matter should be handled separately”. Several weeks after he assumed his ministerial post, Ghassan Tueni started complaining about working with President Franjieh. He once said to me, “We made a mistake”. I thought he was talking about the report, but he said that they made a mistake by supporting Suleiman Franjieh, whom Tueni thought is not fit to be even the Mukhtar [mayor] of a village. He then resigned after one hundred days. The [President's] Palace battled Al-Nahar with that fierceness of the town of Zghorta, and the newspaper often ran after that with no advertisements, despite the fact that it was Lebanon's number one newspaper in terms of advertisement revenue (around six million Lebanese Pounds per year), followed by L'Orient Le Jour with four million and The Daily Star with around two million Lebanese Pounds. I added the above, which is what I saw and heard from Tueni regarding the election of Suleiman Franjieh, to what I read in his book “Let's Bury Hatred and Revenge; A Lebanese Destiny”. I also found in the book a narration entitled “My Arrests” in which he recounts the story of when he was arrested for publishing the decisions of the Algiers Summit in 1973, which included confidential military information. He only says about this, “Someone left, out of sheer neglect, his dossier on the table of the Foreign Affairs Committee”. I believe that the colleague and friend Wafik Ramadan had something to do with the incident. He was held along with the chief editor in Al-Raml prison in Beirut. Ramadan was one of Al-Nahar's most prominent and most successful reporters in the Middle East, and we witnessed together the bombing of the hijacked airplanes in Jordan in 1970. Once, we almost all ended up in prison with Ghassan Tueni. All editors in chief and editors were referred for trial as their newspapers published confidential military information. The Press Syndicate and the Order of Journalists decided to boycott the trial, because the source of the information was Prime Minister Rashid Solh, i.e. the head of the executive branch of power. In the end, I appeared along with colleague Mohammed Al-Annan representing Al-Hayat before the magistrates. Journalists were sentenced to three to six months in prison; however, none of these sentences were carried out. I still have one memento from this story which is a photo of me standing in front of the Courthouse's foyer along with three magistrates, with a banner proclaiming that “Justice is the Foundation of [All] Rule”. The photo was taken by Al-Hayat's photographer Afif Khair, who had hidden his camera underneath his coat. Ghassan Tueni talks in his book about his close friend Kamel Mroue, the publisher and chief editor of Al-Hayat. I personally witnessed his assassination on Monday May 16, 1966, and I remember that I stood with colleague Iran Nizam Al-Din and brother Mohammed Al-Mallah thunderstruck over his corpse in the chief editor's office that day. Al-Mallah (Abu Mustapha) carried the corpse into the ambulance, with blood from Kamel Mroue's chest where he was shot in the heart staining Mohammed Al-Mallah's shirt. This was a day that I shall never forget for as long as I shall live, and I pray God have mercy on the martyrs and grant Ghassan Tueni the long life. [email protected]
