ICC Note: The Syrian conflict has claimed far too many lives. In Homs, an aged Dutch priest, who had lived with the Syrian people for decades, was brutally gunned down. Fr. Frans has left an indelible legacy in the city of Homs and the many lives he touched there. A truce was struck that finally opened up aid to the city, but this came a month after Fr. Frans killing.
By: Jonathan S. Landay
5/29/14 Syria (McClatchy) And then there were 23.
Just 23 Christians, most of them elderly, left alive in the besieged Old City of Homs when a masked gunman killed the beloved Dutch priest who’d consoled them during nearly two years of government bombardment and rebel-imposed isolation, when food supplies disappeared, when the lone doctor fell ill with cancer. Throughout it all, he counseled hope.
“I drank scotch with him almost daily. He’d have just one glass,” recalled George Ibrahim, 75, who’d rescued a stash of Johnnie Walker Black Label from his shop. “Near the end, I was talking to Father Frans and he was telling me to be patient. This is going to stop. It’s like he knew there would be an end to many things.”
That end came in early May when the government and rebels agreed to a truce and the rebels pulled out. But the Rev. Frans van der Lugt was not there to mark the transition. He’d been gunned down 31 days earlier, April 7, in the Jesuit monastery that he refused to abandon, even when boiled grass and leaves were all that was left to eat. Now as life returns to the ruined heart of what’s been dubbed the “capital of the revolution” against President Bashar Assad, the priest’s presence runs like a bright current through the tales of privation from those who survived.
“Father Frans was neutral. He didn’t back any side,” said George Ghandour, 45, who helped bury van der Lugt’s body only steps from the spot in the shaded courtyard where he died. “He aided everyone, Christian and Muslim, young and old. When the crisis began, five Muslim families moved into the monastery and he took care of them.”
The reason for van der Lugt’s slaying is unknown. The esteem in which he was held by Homs’ majority Sunni Muslims makes the murder all the more perplexing to six Christian survivors of the siege interviewed by McClatchy during a two-day visit to their neighborhood of Hamadiya.
….
