BIKFAYA, LEBANON — The mourners stood for hours Wednesday in a creeping line, crushed together in this tiny village perched high above the Mediterranean Sea. Praying and weeping quietly, they doggedly awaited a chance to say farewell to Pierre Gemayel, the Christian Cabinet minister whose assassination has paralyzed a fragile nation.
The 34-year-old industry minister and heir to a Christian political dynasty was the latest critic of Syria to be killed in the streets of Beirut. He will be buried today, and his political allies have urged Lebanese to turn out en masse.
Outside Gemayel's ancestral home, nuns stood silent, shifting their weight in the thin winter sunlight. Pale-faced teenage girls shuffled along, shoulder to shoulder with aging men. Politicians in expensive suits, flanked by beefy guards, shoved their way through the crowd without apology.
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Deepened differences
On the eve of Gemayel's funeral, an uneasy silence suffused the empty streets of the country. There was a sense of suspension, of a perilous political struggle shot in freeze-frame. The yawning crisis and refreshed communal hatreds seemed to pause only long enough to allow the burial of one of Lebanon's youngest politicians.
"This is traditional in Lebanon; it's some kind of respect," said Maroun Zeidan, a 28-year-old lawyer and member of Gemayel's Falangist Party who stood weeping in the courtyard of Gemayel's home. "First we bury the body, and then we look at our differences."
There is a Lebanese saying that translates, loosely, to: "They kill a man, then march in his funeral." If anything, Lebanon's differences have been deepened by Gemayel's death.
Wednesday was Lebanon's Independence Day, a holiday marking the break from French control. But instead of parties and military parades, daybreak illuminated a landscape of shuttered shops and people lurking inside their homes.
Before Gemayel was killed, Hezbollah and its allies had mounted a campaign to seize a greater share of power in the government. The Shiite Muslim ministers and their allies had resigned from the Cabinet. Hezbollah's charismatic leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, told his vast army of followers that the government was illegitimate. He repeatedly threatened to use massive demonstrations to attempt to force the anti-Syria bloc, which includes Christians, Sunni Muslims and Druze, out of power.
