Aoun, Salam commemorate Bachir Gemayel assassination

BEIRUT — President Joseph Aoun on Sunday commemorated the 44th anniversary of Bachir Gemayel’s assassination, invoking the former president’s “timeless” slogan of a Lebanon encompassing its entire 10,452 square kilometers and describing it as a unifying national philosophy.

“On Sept. 14 of each year, Lebanon is confronted with one of the great moments of its national memory. It remembers the image of the elected and martyred president Bachir Gemayel, who was killed before even being able to assume his constitutional duties,” Aoun wrote on X. By commemorating the date, “we renew our commitment to continue the building of a strong and just state, the sole guarantor of the independence of its decision, its full sovereignty over all its territory, and the dignity of its citizens.”

Bachir Gemayel, founder of the Lebanese Forces, was killed in a bomb attack in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood that also killed 32 other people, three weeks after he was elected president. In 2017, the Court of Justice sentenced two individuals, Habib Chartouni and Nabil Alam, to death after they were tried in absentia for his assassination.

For his part, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, as he did last year, focused his message on political assassinations. "On the anniversary of the death of President-elect Bashir Gemayel, I affirm that however deep and vivid the political disagreement may be, we cannot accept assassination in our society, neither by means of explosives nor by weapons equipped with silencers. Our history has taught us that assassination can end a life, but that it has never succeeded in settling a dispute," he wrote on his X account on Sunday.

For his supporters, Bachir Gemayel remains a symbol of resistance to the Palestinian militias and the Syrian army's tutelage over Lebanon. His opponents criticize him for his alliance with Israel, which launched a war and invasion in Lebanon in 1982.