The assassination of writer, researcher, publisher, and media activist Lokman Slim has drawn widespread denunciation and condemnation from politicians, political parties, journalists and the media in Lebanon. This has also been echoed by Arab and Western media which consider the crime a political-cultural intimidation targeting a multi-talented figure. Whether you agree with Slim or oppose him, you cannot in any way but bow down before his prolific career and the diversity of his preoccupations. He is a journalist, writer, linguist, translator, and scholar who is well-versed in the issues he works on, in addition to being a cinephile and documenter.

In “Jousour”, we have our reasons to refer to this dynamic man who was always busy with documenting thorny issues with the aim of supporting marginalized groups of refugees as well as vulnerable and oppressed people, genuinely and not pretentiously, which people who discussed him failed to mention. Thus, he contributed to the “Jousour (Bridges) for Dialogue and Return” periodical, in addition to discussing with us its contents and topics at length and supporting its objective of healing the shared memory. The Umam Documentation and Research center, which he founded along with his sister and novelist Rasha Al Ameer, tackles Lebanese-Palestinian relations. By digging up in the old newspaper archives, Umam  has provided unparalleled material on the development of these relations during nearly three quarters of a century. Slim also worked on the memory of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), which means a lot to the Lebanese and the Palestinians as well. He documented it through the relevant publications, the testimonies of those who lived the horrors of this war and those whose memories are haunted by permanent wounds and scars. He also documented the missing persons’ cases in that war, those who were lost at the crossing points and in the cantons. Slim did not derive any personal benefit from all this documentation, but he left for future generations a treasure that is worthy of study and analysis and from which lessons can be learned. He also completed the documentation of the forcible uprooting of Palestinians from their land and country, since the Lebanese war cannot be documented without its prelude, including delving into the Palestinian narrative on the plight of the refugees after the establishment of the Zionist entity in Palestine. He also devoted considerable efforts to documenting the refugee issue and torture in Syrian prisons, as part of his passion for the cinema.

The law of the jungle that governs Lebanon and covers up criminals killed Lokman Slim because he exposed it with written and audio-visual evidence. The same perpetrators are behind the killing of hundreds of people who were torn to pieces by tons of aluminum nitrate in the Beirut Port explosion, and the killing of individuals with silencers, as punishment for daring to speak out at this time of lawlessness.

* Jousour