The story of Salma Mershak, who waited 5 years for justice for her son Lokman

How miserly time is.

Lebanon and the East have known few women like Salma Merchak Slim, mother of the thinker-martyr Lokman, who passed away yesterday, longing to be reunited with him, without having seen human justice strike down his assassins.

Salma Merchak survived her son by exactly five years, her tears flowing inward, within a vast heart saturated with sorrow, only rarely moistening her cheeks. She remained present, upright, unbroken, alongside her daughter Rasha al-Ameer, Monika Bergmann, and her son’s companions, steadfast in defending the values of dialogue, acceptance of the other, knowledge, culture, and the Enlightenment.

This mother, scholar and intellectual, accused no one. And yet her son Lokman had named his killers even before they committed their crime. In a written statement, he had personally held the head of Hezbollah responsible for any harm that might befall him, his home, or his family, after a group from the party had demonstrated in the garden of his great-grandfather’s house in Haret Hreik. He nevertheless refused to leave that house, just as his mother Salma had done before him, faithful to the recommendation of her husband, MP Mohsen Slim, who had asked her to preserve its memory and presence. The demonstrators hung on the garden wall the sinister words: “Glory to the silencer.” To which Lokman replied: “They will not silence us.”

Six months after Beirut itself had been assassinated by the port explosion, Lokman was assassinated in turn. It is likely that his crime was to have dared expose those responsible, to have brought to light, through facts and a coherent narrative, the roles of the Assad regime and its allies in Lebanon. The government, then convened under the presidency of Michel Aoun, promised a transparent investigation within five days and the identification of those responsible for this catastrophe, which had killed nearly 230 people, injured 7,000, and devastated entire districts of the capital and its surroundings. But Hezbollah paralyzed the investigation with an arrogance that has since become proverbial. Lokman, for his part, hastened to proclaim the truths as he had gathered and understood them, before walking toward martyrdom.

In his book published by Dar al-Jadeed, the publishing house directed by Rasha al-Ameer after her brother’s assassination and titled in its Arabic version By Soul and by Blood… Nasserism and Its Legacies, journalist Alex Rowell reports that Salma was the first to notice the striking similarities between her son’s assassination and that of Kamel Mroué, founder of the newspaper Al-Hayat, killed in 1966. Despite the difference in age, Kamel and Lokman shared the same hostility toward totalitarian regimes. Both were targeted by systematic campaigns accusing them of treason and allegiance to the West and to Israel, in a press skilled in moral assassination. Both were Lebanese Shiites convinced of the necessity of pluralism and openness. Both were shot at close range, a preferred signature of apparatuses acting on the orders of foreign states, which thereby dispels any lingering doubt as to their involvement.

Cruel irony of fate: the family of Kamel Mroué had entrusted its defense to Lokman’s father, the late Mohsen Slim, a criminal lawyer and one-term MP for Beirut’s Second District, so that he might support them and claim their rights. Two of the murderers were arrested at the time. When Mohsen Slim agreed to defend the Mroué family, he too was threatened with death. Decades before his son was targeted, a bomb exploded at the entrance of his home, intended to silence him, perhaps to eliminate him.”

Alex Rowell further writes: “From the balcony of the first floor of the family ‘White House,’ Salma, widow of Mohsen and mother of Lokman, shows me the exact spot where the explosion took place more than half a century earlier.

“That October afternoon in 2021, stifling with heat and humidity, her daughter Rasha was sitting with us, passing around glasses of chilled wine. ‘At the time of the explosion, our gates were wooden,’ Salma said. After the attack, her husband replaced them with the heavy iron gates we see today. She drew a long breath, then sighed: ‘How many threats we received.’

“Salma, like her late husband and son, seemed to have learned to live on the threshold of danger.

“She was an extraordinary woman. When I met her, she was entering her tenth decade and remembered with undiminished precision her childhood in British and monarchical Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s. After studying at the American College for Girls in Cairo, now Ramses College, she pursued journalism at the American University in Cairo, where she was trained by Wilton Wynn, whom Reuters described on the day of his death as ‘one of the greatest American journalists of the twentieth century.’ She was also a student of Samir Souki, Newsweek’s correspondent in Cairo, who offered her, during her final year of studies, an internship at the magazine. That internship opened to her, after her graduation in 1956, the doors to full-time employment.

“That same year the Suez War erupted. The revolutionary officers newly installed in power in Egypt began restricting the foreign press and public freedoms. In 1957, censorship reached its peak; Newsweek closed its Cairo bureau, and Salma joined her new post in Beirut, alongside her director, in the Kantari district, that ‘Paris of the East,’ free and enchanting, between sea and mountain, according to optimistic accounts.

“Hardly had she arrived when the events of 1958 broke out, claiming hundreds of lives over the months. In the relative stability that followed, Salma earned a master’s degree from the American University of Beirut and studied under distinguished figures, among them Professor Malcolm Kerr, assassinated on campus in 1984. After her marriage to the successful lawyer Mohsen, elected to Parliament in 1960, she entered Beirut’s social elite; and it was in those renowned circles that she met Kamel Mroué.

“With a Cairene accent unchanged despite decades in Beirut, she would say of him that he was an affable and endearing man with whom it was a pleasure to converse and debate.

“When she left Cairo to say ‘no’ to military dictatorship, Salma Merchak Slim believed she had saved herself. She believed that her husband’s engagement in accusing Kamel Mroué’s killers, the instigators of the 1958 events, and the perpetrators of the attack on her own home would keep the bitter cup far from her. But that was without reckoning with fate’s blow… called, in this context, Nasser.”

Despite the intense burning that ravaged her heart in the wake of Lokman’s assassination, she carried to the end the message of dialogue and encounter with the other. She thus kept the flame alive before taking her leave with the dignity and courage of enlightened intellectuals.

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A service for the repose of her soul will be held on Thursday, February 26, 2026, at 11 a.m. at the National Evangelical Church of Beirut, opposite the Grand Serail.

Condolences will be received on Thursday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the church hall.