Bernard Tyan: We haven't talked enough about miracles<

It was during a brief and intense telephone call on Marcel Ghanem's show, a few days after August 4, that Liliane Tyan screamed her pain. While she had not planned to do so, she confides, live, that her husband died in the double explosion at the port and that her only son, Bernard, 45, is in critical condition. “Marcel, my dear Marcel, all pray for my son, whatever your religion. I only have one. His condition is serious (…). With my husband, they were at work, like all decent people. It's a crime… We've been through wars, but that's a crime. Breathless with emotion and the flood of words, she nevertheless continued: “How can the leaders live with this? If I had met one of them, I swear to you that I would have killed him. Murderers, worse, “blood scum (of) assassins”, as Issa Goraieb called them, aren't you ashamed of not even calling to see how we're doing? To all of you, I have rendered services when you needed them. Where are you today? 40 years of serving this country, where are you hoodlums? Never dare to believe that you are Lebanon! »

It was while listening to this usually very strong woman, this daughter of Édouard Honein brought up to love an independent and sovereign Lebanon, that her friends and collaborators learned the sad news: her husband Armand is one of the many victims of the carnage of August 4, “his heart could not resist” the explosion; and Bernard is seriously injured. The damage is heavy: the son's jugular vein was severed by a splinter, the floor of the orbit and the upper jaw are fractured, a few teeth are broken, the upper lip is split in two, the left eye is girded with injuries, but was miraculously spared. “Armand, she whispered to her husband, the first weeks following the tragedy, you will forgive me if I do not cry for you right away. For now, I need my strength. »

Apocalyptic view of the neighborhood where Armand Tyan and many other victims fell. Photo DR

The murder of my father

This strength, Liliane Tyan, now always in black, transmitted it to Bernard who gave it back to him, barely out of his coma. Like two communicating vessels of love, they went through hell together to join the living. “I went back to sleep on August 3 to wake up I don't know when, on the 10th or 11th. The day of August 4 no longer exists in my head. I woke up in the hospital with no face and no father. It boils down to this…” he confides with disconcerting calm, his gaze elsewhere. This unspeakable day, he was working as usual in his clinic next to his father's, near the EDL, in the Doculand building. After an absence due to Covid-19, Armand, called for an emergency, had exceptionally returned to work... A dentist like his father, Bernard specializes in orthodontics. They used to meet at the end of the afternoon at one or the other's house "to philosophize about life". The immediate aftermath, of which he does not want to know all the details, was told to him later. “My uncle Jihad Honein, who lives in the family house opposite our clinics, immediately rushed to take me to the hospital. My face was bloody but I was awake, I was told. It even seems that I would have spoken on the phone..." The person in charge of the parking lot opposite gives him the keys to a car parked near the exit, the two men manage to pass between the traffic jams that were already forming, "c It was a matter of minutes”, and arrived in time at Rizk Hospital.

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The sequel will be both very quick and very long. Bernard is operated on urgently and placed in an artificial coma for three days. Then a second time, two weeks later, to restore his jaw, allow him to open his mouth again, talk and eat, and fix the eye he couldn't close. “The surgeon Nabil Hokayem, a great friend of the family, had asked me to find an orthodontist to attach braces to me before the operation. It happens to be my specialty, so I wasn't going to let someone else do it for me…” With the firm will to take up this challenge, and despite his generally weak state, he undertakes the he particularly delicate exercise, alone and facing a mirror, of placing the rings one by one… Six weeks after the explosion, he also received his first patients. Months of facial rehabilitation later, he "virtually regained all (his) faculties, except the left side of the face which remains anesthetized".

The Miracles

In this collective and individual drama, Bernard Tyan prefers to talk about the miracles that (sometimes) appease his anger. “There have been several miracles, and I can only see in them a divine presence and will. A god, a spiritual force, an energy, call it what you want. That's what saved me and thousands of Beirut residents from one of the biggest explosions in history. Everyone has a story to share, which begins with “if”. "If I hadn't answered the phone, if I hadn't got up to drink water, if I hadn't gone home, if there hadn't been the confinement..." Even my uncle Jihad: the roof that was collapsing over his head was stopped by a treadmill that was in his room. And without my uncle, I would be dead. The second miracle takes the face of a stranger posted near the hospital. “She appeared out of nowhere, she had seen me through the car window and it was she who opened the way for us. “Then, says Bernard Tyan, barely arrived at the already overloaded emergency room, I come across a doctor who is available by chance. It was Dr. Fadi Hayek, vascular surgeon, another little miracle, who immediately took him to the operating room. Bernard will wake up "on the 10th or the 11th". “I will never forget that moment, the most painful of my life, when I opened my eyes and saw and heard my mother. And in her voice, in this effort she made to explain to me that there was something very serious, I understood that my father had died and that my case was serious. »

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Rabies

But the dentist refuses to be defeated. “I had to take myself in hand right away to ease my pain and his. Human beings are not programmed to endure this kind of pain. His recovery, he programs it far from any emotion. "Passionate about music, I didn't listen to anything for months so as not to feel things that would upset me..." No time, no right to let go, even a year later... With contained rage, he talks about responsible for the "murder" of his father and the other victims. "There are for me those who carried out the murder, those who stored these products (at the origin of the explosion, editor's note) and above all, above all, those who knew and who could have prevented this carnage but who did not. haven't done. They can be judged and even hanged, I will feel no justice. I might get a little satisfaction, but it won't give me back my father. Ultimately, I would like them to suffer an explosion similar to that experienced by the victims..." While one year after the explosion, the investigation carried out by the investigating judge at the Court of Justice, Tarek Bitar, always comes up against an outcry from part of the political class, Bernard Tyan wants to believe in another justice.

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“I especially believe in another form of justice, divine or supernatural justice. And there, no one will get out of it… Otherwise, and without appearing arrogant, nothing affects me anymore. When you've been in such intense survival mode, almost everything seems futile. I had to survive, get up and take care of my mother. That's all,” he said again.

The facades after the renovation works undertaken by Help Lebanon. Picture CH

Rebuild and rebuild

His mother, Liliane, for her part, lived at the pace of her son, in the first months following the tragedy. “For Bernard to be well, he had to follow his own rhythm. If he was good, I was very good, if he was bad, I was very bad..." In his living room filled with cigarillo smoke, his "before" paintings hang on the wall, photos of 'Édouard Honein and d'Armand are placed on the low tables. There is, in these places, a black and modest veil which recalls the absent.

Color, however, Liliane Tyan, Lhyla, has made it her signature on her canvases, but also on the facades of faded buildings in Beirut, Tripoli, Saïda which she has taken charge of renovating through Help Lebanon, the NGO which it founded in 1979. Its fight for Lebanon has been, for 22 years and thanks to its accomplices and partners of SNA Allianz, by refreshing the poor neighborhoods of these cities. A way of "bringing a smile back to their inhabitants" and serving his country. And her own way of doing politics and being in line with the Honein spirit.

Liliane Tyan, between courage and modesty. Picture CH

Thus, her relatives were not surprised when, a few months after that sinister day in August, and when she felt that "Bernard was better", she returned to the field. Her own way of erasing the physical traces of the explosion and of turning a certain page. Its own land after the double explosion, and because its partners and sponsors, at their head Antoine Wakim and Antoine Issa, respectively former and current CEO of SNA Allianz, proposed it, was more precisely "a small section" of the destroyed city, the one where Armand and 11 other victims fell, the one where his son almost died and the one of the family home which is over a hundred years old. Help Lebanon tackled the exterior of the buildings, while many other NGOs, “which did an extraordinary job”, shared other rehabilitation tasks. In three months, and with a budget of 60,000 dollars, the NGO was able to complete the exterior work and the painting of ten buildings. Mission accomplished for the first part of the mission, to the delight of the inhabitants who were even able to choose the colors of their facades. “We don't usually do that, but here we wanted to make them really happy. I knew them all, most of them were neighbors to my parents for 40, 50 or 60 years, specifies the founder of Help Lebanon. There is still a lot to do, other buildings and shops to repair. We hope to be able to find funds to continue. »

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Because she has regained her energy, today certainly mixed with an unnamed anger, but an intimate anger, Liliane Tyan also proposes to share her experience with young NGOs. “Informing them, encouraging them, teaching them how to do it, all these tricks that I myself have acquired over time. Today, she too, like so many others, wants to understand.

“The more time passes, the more it seems obvious to me that what happened was not an accident. We will never be able to grieve if we do not understand. Those who have loved this country love it doubly, suffer doubly. “On this sad anniversary, Bernard and Liliane Tyan have declined any invitation to participate in television programs in memory of August 4, preferring to withdraw alone and in their silence, in order to remember Armand and all the little miracles…