Gebran Tueni, the School of Freedom

Twenty years ago, Gebran Tueini was literally pulverized in a car-bomb attack. His assassins from the Damascus–Tehran axis, together with their Lebanese accomplices, had placed him on the blacklist of “dangerous personalities” to be eliminated at all costs, insofar as the latter had managed, within a few years, to reconstitute a distinctly Lebanese idea of a plural and coherent front, one that guaranteed sovereignty and freedom. A compact front, capable of transcending the divisions inherited from the civil war and the sectarian compartmentalizations on which the axis had waltzed for decades in order to divide the Lebanese more effectively, and thereby establish itself as the authority responsible for settling the very conflicts it had itself created, according to the classic logic of the arsonist-firefighter.

Tueni embodied, par excellence, the archetype of fervor, courage, and combativeness for a large segment of the youth of that era. He was respected as a free personality, fearless and beyond reproach, by broad swaths of Lebanese society, across all communities. He possessed an undeniable media presence that was not inherited from the paternal figure of the immense Ghassan Tueini. Certainly, the daily An-Nahar passed from father to son, but Gebran forged his own voice, his own identity, his own personality, and his own battles — at once similar to and different from those of Ghassan. Where the father had withdrawn from politics in its narrow sense — that of militant action — to impose himself as what he had always been in essence, a giver of meaning to politics, Gebran fully embraced engagement on the ground. He was in the event itself, not outside it, nor above it.

An-Nahar, under the dual imprint of father and son, alongside Samir Kassir and a brilliant team of journalists, analysts, and editorialists, had become, under Syrian occupation, far more than a political party: it embodied the idea that another Lebanon was possible — free, sovereign, emancipated from tribal and communal shackles, a generator of meaning, and capable of reconnecting with a cultural vision of Lebanon as a country-link with the world. More than that, through writing and thought, it unsettled the cold, monolithic comfort of tyrannies by opening its columns to opponents, including Syrian dissidents.

It is difficult to grasp that two decades have already passed without the inspiring and contagious flame of Gebran Tueini — a man of exceptional charisma, a tribune capable of galvanizing crowds through the sheer force of an energy that was at once elegant and animal. It is no coincidence that two of his reference figures were Kennedy and Guevara, both of whom, despite the political chasm separating them, were outstanding orators. In a sense, Kennedy’s youthful dynamism and Guevara’s rebellious momentum were reconciled in Gebran. He had the rare ability to create syntheses, abolish boundaries, and bring people together. In the eyes of tyrannical and totalitarian regimes, this is the mortal sin not to be committed.

Today, twenty years after his assassination, the temptation is strong to freeze Gebran into an icon — of a political struggle deemed completed, of a movement declared imploded, dead and buried, or of a disembodied cause. A “martyr” of…

This is to kill Gebran once again, endlessly. The same applies, moreover, to intellectuals, writers, thinkers, and certain singular political figures upon their disappearance, especially when they have been deliberately eliminated. Ideas continue to travel, to mature, to grow, even when their authors cease to exist. On the contrary, they enter life. They no longer belong to their owner. They merge with the wind and speak to human beings on their own. Now, Gebran — in his physical posture as in his thought — cannot be turned into a statue. It is a nonsense, a paradox. One need only reread his articles to realize this.

For Gebran Tueini, freedom and sovereignty were never hollow slogans or moral postures devoid of substance. They were, for him, the two inseparable conditions of Lebanon’s political existence.

Freedom as a rupture with falsehood

Freedom, for Tueini, is never conceived as an abstract right or a decorative principle, but first and foremost as an operation of unveiling. He attacks what might be called the great political fiction — the one that transforms violence into isolated accidents, assassinations into mere news items, and fear into fatality. Against this collective anesthesia, Tueini insists that violence is produced by a political climate, by an architecture of domination that targets less individuals than the very possibility of a free public space. Freedom thus begins, for him, with the refusal of alibi narratives. Naming responsibilities, rejecting euphemisms, restoring political causality to events: this is the first act of liberation. In this sense, journalism is not merely a profession; it is a vital function of society, charged with preventing fear from becoming the norm.

Sovereignty as mastery of decision

This demand for truth naturally leads to the question of sovereignty. Here again, Tueini rejects any sentimental or symbolic definition. Sovereignty is neither a flag nor an identity reflex, but the effective capacity of a state to decide for itself. In texts of great frontal clarity, he describes a Lebanon whose institutions have been hollowed out, where justice is instrumentalized, the press muzzled, and where, above all, political decision-making is delegated to the outside. This delegation is not only imposed; it is often internalized, rationalized in the name of stability, balances, or “realism.” It is precisely this abdication that Gebran Tueini consistently fought against. It is in revolt against it that he died. For sovereignty, in his view, is not lost solely through military occupation; it also dissolves through habituation to dependence, through the gradual acceptance of a state reduced to a façade. This is La Boétie’s famous voluntary servitude.

The letter to Bashar al-Assad: sovereignty through speech

It is precisely within this context that one must situate and understand his famous open letter addressed to Bashar al-Assad — a text that is a thousand miles away from gratuitous provocation or diatribe. It constitutes an act of intellectual sovereignty in its purest form — a journalistic, ethical, and political landmark, two decades later.

By addressing the Syrian president directly, Tueini refuses the posture of the dominated. No foolish supplications, no aggressiveness, no pomp. He speaks as an equal, as a journalist interpellating the tyrant-occupier. This simple shift is decisive, insofar as it breaks with the coded language of tutelage, the obligatory prudence, and the internalized self-censorship that were rife at the time.

Above all, the letter performs a fundamental inversion of the tutor’s logic: Lebanese sovereignty is not presented as hostility toward Syria, but as the condition for a healthy relationship between two states. Tueini affirms that no lasting stability can be built on the negation of the other’s freedom, and that domination weakens both the one who exercises it and the one who suffers it. Lebanon’s freedom thus becomes a moral and political test for Syrian power. Of course, Tueni is no utopian, and he knows perfectly well that Assad understands only the language of brute force. Nevertheless, he performs a founding act of sovereignty. This is the essence of the “cultural resistance” advocated at the time by Father Salim Abou.

Freedom, pluralism, and coexistence

This demand for sovereignty is never dissociated, in Gebran Tueini’s thought, from Lebanese pluralism. The freedom he defends is not that of a camp, a community, or a clan. It is the political regime of coexistence. When decision-making is confiscated and speech muzzled, it is not only individuals who are silenced; it is the very possibility of a plural political community that is attacked. This is why Tueini insists so strongly that political violence does not target only persons, but the Lebanese formula itself. In this sense, defending freedom of expression, state sovereignty, and the independence of national decision-making is tantamount to defending coexistence itself — against fear, fragmentation, and the logic of fait accompli.

Having militated during the war within the political ranks of the Christian East, Tueini was a “Lebanist,” and it is from this intellectual posture that he defended the idea of Lebanon. Twenty years later, in the face of the rise of a Christian particularism capable of accommodating the idea of a geographically fragmented Lebanon, it is worth remembering this.

Sovereignty against hollow compromises

Another essential aspect of his thought lies in his distrust of hollow compromises. Tueini consistently criticized arrangements that, under the guise of realism, enshrine dispossession. “Heart-washing” formulas, dialogues without real power, balances that freeze injustice — all of this, for him, amounted to a politics of façade that weakens both freedom and sovereignty. In his view, true sovereignty presupposes the state’s monopoly over decision-making — including matters of war and peace — and the refusal to allow the collective destiny to be confiscated by actors not accountable to citizens. Here again, freedom is not merely the right to speak, but the right not to be dragged into choices imposed without consent. There is no need to emphasize how аctual this vision remains today, at a time when the Lebanese state continues to stumble in reclaiming the monopoly of legitimate violence.

A legacy that still unsettles

Twenty years after his assassination, Gebran Tueini’s thought remains uncomfortable because it allows no escape: it rejects both resignation and escalation. Tueni’s leitmotif is this: freedom must be exercised as a matter of right — and sovereignty is never acquired once and for all, but must be defended daily, through speech, institutions, and political courage. Ideas, words, and language exist only when they are accompanied and translated into practical and decisive acts — into anchors. The letter to Bashar al-Assad is perhaps the starkest expression of this: a text in which freedom ceases to be discourse and becomes an act, and in which sovereignty is reconstructed first through direct, frontal, and assumed speech.

Thus, freedom and sovereignty do not form two parallel struggles, but one and the same equation. Freedom without sovereignty is fragile, tolerated, reversible. Sovereignty without freedom is nothing but a simulacrum. Together, they constitute the minimal condition for a people to exist politically, without fear and without tutelage. National unity and coexistence form the cement that turns this people into a coherent, viable, living force.

To think Gebran Tueini, twenty years on, is not merely to commemorate the memory of a man whose voice was silenced, but to engage in a profound examination of conscience and to have the courage to ask a more demanding question: do we, in today’s Lebanon, exposed to every wind, still live within a framework where freedom can produce sovereignty — and where sovereignty truly protects freedom? And above all, have we known how to defend the coexistence that is its sine qua non?

It is by this measure, no doubt, that fidelity to his legacy is truly assessed.