The presidential A330 with windows adorned with French and Lebanese flags lands in the evening on the tarmac of Rafic Hariri airport. It is August 31, 2020 and Emmanuel Macron is visiting the Lebanese capital for the second time since the explosions at the port. [de Beyrouth, le 4 août 2020]. The presidential delegation rushes by and arrives around 10 p.m. at the diva of divas: Fayrouz.
“What is your favorite song ?” we ask the French president. “Li Beyrouth.” Right answer. His new Culture and Communication adviser, the Franco-Lebanese Rima Abdul-Malak, would she have blown it? A tribute to the city, with the scent of jasmine but also the taste of “fire and smoke” then resounds in Lebanese homes.
“Rima Abdul-Malak helped the president a lot during these two trips to Lebanon and in particular organized the meeting with Fayrouz”, says Jack Lang, former Minister of Culture and current President of the Arab World Institute (IMA), who is full of praise for him. “She did what she could to make the president sensitive to the Lebanese cause,” adds Franco-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, who says he contacted her the day after the explosions, on August 5, 2020, to offer her a concert to raise funds for Lebanon. “She immediately contacted France Télévisions and Radio France, and within two hours we had a favorable response”, says the musician and longtime friend.
Two years later, the public discovers the young adviser in the shadow of Emmanuel Macron, propelled overnight to the front of the stage. The 43-year-old Franco-Lebanese was given the keys to the Ministry of Culture on May 20, that of André Malraux and Jack Lang, in the government of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne. “The ministry of what gives meaning and taste to life”, she said during the handover.
Her somewhat “top of the class” style contrasts with that of her predecessor, Roselyne Bachelot, in the political circuit for forty years, with whom she shares a “insatiable appetite for music, art, literature and theatre”. “He is a very simple person, in the noblest sense of the term, very humble. Some time ago she did not imagine being Minister of Culture, she had just bought a very small apartment in the Parisian suburbs, she had a lot of work to do and was preparing to settle there soon”. says Karim Amellal, ambassador, interministerial delegate for the Mediterranean since 2020.
His family leaves Lebanon during the civil war
The story of Rima Abdul-Malak is that of thousands of Lebanese forced to find refuge abroad with, for some, the prospect of returning to the country once things “calmed down”. “In the mind of my brother and his wife, it was temporary. They had even taken with them the program of Jamhour, the school [libanaise prestigieuse] in which their children were educated and insisted that they continue to learn Arabic”, says his uncle Samir Abdel-Malak.
During her investiture, the one who grew up in France, in the Lyon suburbs since the age of 10, does not fail to recall where she comes from. “I have a thought for my parents who gave me the basis of confidence that allows me to be in front of
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For a long time the French-speaking daily newspaper of Beirut, born in 1970 from a merger between the east et The day, was the perfect illustration of the French-speaking and Christian “Lebanon of Dad” that the civil war would make fun of. The departure of the elites fleeing the violence of the war and the decline of the French language in the country of the Cedars should have dealt the blow of a club to this newspaper.
Fortunately, these dire predictions did not come true. Not only thanks to the return to the country in the 1990s of thousands of French-speaking families fleeing an Africa torn by wars or a Europe in the grip of the economic crisis, but thanks to a real editorial dynamism and the arrival of a new generation of journalists who use a lively and hard-hitting French without preciosity, trickery, or conspicuous self-censorship… And it is no exaggeration to affirm that The Orient-The Day is today the most interesting Lebanese daily and one of the best in the Arab world.
The daily’s website also testifies to this dynamism, since it is one of the few in the region to update its information several times a day. Admittedly, the old habits have not disappeared and the articles “of convenience” still occupy a small space, but this remains quite acceptable in the face of the distressing editorial decline of a certain Lebanese press. Even the worldly gossip of The Orient-The Day keep a second degree that can make us smile.
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