Lebanese communists commemorate leader

Lisa Macdonald, Sydney

Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) members and supporters in Australia commemorated the life of the party's former general secretary George Hawi at a memorial meeting in Auburn Town Hall in Sydney's west on July 3. Hawi was assassinated in Beirut on June 21, when a bomb exploded under his car.

Speakers at the Sydney memorial, which was attended by about 350 people, described Hawi's lifelong struggle for Lebanese national liberation and pledged to continue that struggle, including ensuring that his murderers do not escape justice.

Hawi joined the LCP in 1955. He was a student leader in the 1950s and later a union leader. Hawi was jailed in 1964 for his role in a tobacco workers' strike, and again in the aftermath of an April 23, 1969, demonstration in support of the Palestinian resistance. In 1970 he was jailed again for defying the army.

In the face of Israel's occupation of Lebanon in 1982, Hawi was among the founders of the Lebanese National Resistance Front, and played a major role in military operations that drove the Israeli Army to the south of southern Lebanon, thus liberating most of the occupied Lebanese land.

Hawi was the youngest elected member of the central committee of the LCP (in 1964). He was elected as the party's general secretary in 1979 and remained in that post until 1993, before serving as party chairperson until the end of 2000.

From Green Left Weekly, July 13, 2005.

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From GLW issue 633