FactualGerman-Lebanese director Monika Borgmann is still searching for the truth after the death of her companion. And continues the memory work on the Lebanese civil war that the couple had undertaken.
The office remained almost identical. A photo of Lokman Slim sits on a shelf full of books. His overcoat hangs on the coat rack. “I have the impression that he is still there”, said Monika Borgmann in French with a German accent. Installed at the black square table, cleared of the piles of documents accumulated by her companion in life and struggle, the German-Lebanese director points to the empty chair next door. The Lebanese Shiite intellectual and political activist always sat facing the door, on the ground floor of his family home, in the Haret Hreik district.
In this stronghold of Hezbollah in Beirut, the couple had made the villa Mohsen Slim a place of exchange and debate where intellectuals, artists, diplomats, people from the neighborhood and even sheikhs opposed to the organization met. Shiite Islamist. A bit provocative, resolutely secular and liberal, Lokman Slim, a jack-of-all-trades intellectual, liked to slay the all-powerful armed movement on his land. It was in another stronghold of the “Party of God”, in southern Lebanon, that he was reportedly kidnapped on February 3, 2021, before being found dead in his car the next day, shot six times.
Hezbollah’s responsibility is in no doubt for his family and loved ones. A year later, the investigation has still not identified the culprits. “For twenty years, the fight against the culture of impunity has been at the center of our work. Today, I am no longer just a spectator, Lokman is no longer there”, confides Monika Borgmann.
At 58, she is determined to continue the work they have built together within the UMAM documentation and research center and now with the Lokman Slim Foundation, which she created to disseminate the work of her companion and raise awareness of the issue of political assassinations. His commitment was rewarded with the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law 2021.
A common interest in “morbid things”
Their meeting, twenty years ago, was like ” An evidence “. A mutual friend, the Syrian director Ali Al-Atassi, presented them in 2001. “You should talk, you’re both interested in morbid things”, he told them. The same questions about war and violence, the work of memory and justice animate them.
She, born in Aachen in 1963, from the first generation of Germans to whom school taught the still taboo history of the Holocaust, studied political and Islamic sciences. He, the Beirutin born in 1962 to a Shiite father, lawyer and deputy, and a Protestant mother, journalist for Newsweek, only got out of the civil war (1975-1990) while studying philosophy and ancient Greek at the Sorbonne.
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