No feelings of animosity and vengeance are harbored towards the killers of Shiite political activist Lokman Slim.
His mother, Salma Mershak has refused to move out of her house in Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahieh, a Hezbollah stronghold. Many in Lebanon have accused the party of assassinating Slim two years ago.
Mershak is a Lebanese-Egyptian-Syrian writer. Her father is Syrian and mother Lebanese and she lived in Egypt for a time.
She only has words to ease the pain of her son’s loss.
“The pain of a parent’s loss of a child cannot be healed in days and years. It differs from the pain of losing a parent,” she told Asharq Al-Awsat.
She added that sorrow has become her constant companion and will remain with her until the day she dies.
Mershak lamented that the judiciary has failed in uncovering her son’s killers. She has also expressed her dismay in the dire state of affairs in the judiciary overall.
“The law does not have the final say, rather the killer, who portrays himself as the hero, does,” she stated.
“What sort of barbarity is this?!” she wondered incredulously.
She recalled a time when her late husband Mohsen Slim won a lawsuit against the Lebanese government back in the 1940s.
“The independent judiciary that existed back then no longer stands today,” she lamented.
Asked if she knows who her son’s killers are, Mershak replied: “Those who possess the weapons know. My weapons are words and ideas. I don’t know who killed him and can’t make any accusations, because I may harm myself and my family if I do.”
She could find no reason why Lokman was killed, except that he was “honest and spoke the truth.”
On how he would describe the dire state of affairs in Lebanon today if he were alive, she said: “He would have been extremely sad because the country is like a person who is standing on top of a mountain and hurtling towards the abyss.”
