In Lebanon, Talal Salmane, famous pen of the Arab press, is dead

2023-08-26 17:36:39
Talal Salmane, in Beirut (Lebanon), in June 2011. ANWAR AMRO / AFP

He was a tireless defender of Arab unity and the Palestinian cause. He founded and directed the Lebanese daily As-Safir, which was for four decades one of the flagship titles of the Middle Eastern press and the breviary of the left-wing intelligentsia. Talal Salmane died Friday, August 25, in Beirut, at the age of 85, more than six years after the disappearance of his newspaper, which claimed to be “the voice of the voiceless”.

Talal Salmane was born in 1938 in Chmestar, an underprivileged Shiite farming village in the Bekaa Valley. The successive assignments of his father, a policeman, led him to discover, in his youth, other regions of Lebanon. This experience of the ethno-religious richness of the country of the Cedars marked him deeply. He will later stand up, in the editorials that will make him famous, against community compartmentalization, the “confessional monster that devours the country”.

A self-taught reporter, he started working at the age of 17. In the 1960s and 1970s, he traveled the Arab world from Libya to Kuwait, on behalf of various newspapers. He established many friendships there, in cultural, journalistic and political circles, particularly in Egypt. He is a fervent admirer of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, leader of Arab nationalism.

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When he created in Beirut As-Safir, in 1974, with a donation from the Guide to the Libyan Revolution, Muammar Gaddafi, Talal Salmane gathered around him journalists and left-wing intellectuals from Lebanon and other Arab countries. The country of the Cedars is in turmoil, at the gates of civil war. The newspaper acts as a sounding board for student and social movements. It also devotes a page to neglected regions, an innovation, nourished by the progressive convictions of Talal Salmane as well as by loyalty to his modest origins.

Standard bearer of the Palestinian cause

With the outbreak of war in 1975, which led to the splitting of Beirut in two, As-Safir becomes the major daily in the western part of the capital, which is predominantly Muslim, and the standard-bearer of the Palestinian cause. The title welcomes in its columns big Palestinian names, such as the cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. It is not uncommon for Yasser Arafat, who made the land of Cedars the rear base of the fedayeen, to show up in the newsroom. The head of the Palestine Liberation Organization also finances the newspaper, a tradition in the Lebanese press, historically dependent on political subsidies.

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