AS 100,000 mourners packed Martyrs’ Square in the centre of Beirut last Thursday for the funeral of Pierre Gemayel, the murdered Christian industry minister, leading members of Hezbollah gathered in sparsely furnished offices in a dusty southern suburb and stared intently at their television screens.

They watched with studied indifference as the crowd chanted “Down with Syria”, burnt photographs of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, and accused him of ordering the assassination.

But when the white coffin was borne aloft and the camera zoomed in on the 34-year-old minister’s widow Patricia sobbing in the arms of her equally grief-stricken mother-in-law, Hussein Rahal, a senior Hezbollah official, was pricked by emotion.

“As a husband, I couldn’t help thinking this could be my wife,” he said. “As a father, my heart went out to the family whose loss of a son will be immeasurable.”

His comment revealed an unexpected personal affinity between sworn political enemies — the Christian elite on one side and leading Shi’ite radicals on the other. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, whose eldest son died in a raid on an Israeli position in 1997, telephoned Gemayel’s father Amin, a former president, last night with his condolences and the two men talked about their lost boys. Yet there is little room for sentiment in Lebanese politics.

The funeral took place on the day Hezbollah had been due to call a million supporters on to the streets with the aim of toppling the government in which Gemayel served. No sooner had he been laid to rest than the group’s leaders began calculating how soon they could reactivate their plan.

Officials refused to say what had been decided, but the indications were that once seven days of mourning have been observed, their supporters would prepare to march on the Lebanese parliament to demand the resignation of Fouad Siniora, the prime minister.

Syrian-backed Hezbollah and its allies — including the Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun, a Christian general — claim that with 57 of the 128 seats in parliament they are entitled to 44% of the posts in government, but had to put up with 25% until their six cabinet ministers resigned earlier this month.

The ruling anti-Syrian majority says Hezbollah has another motive for destabilising the government — that it is hell-bent on blocking the establishment of an international tribunal to prosecute the suspected killers of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister blown up last year by a car bomb. Lebanese officials are convinced that Hezbollah’s paymasters in Damascus are guilty of that crime.

Last night the cabinet gave its approval for the tribunal to be set up, although Syria had warned earlier that it might refuse to co-operate. It appeared that the shooting of Gemayel had brought no more than a brief respite from a potentially calamitous standoff. The threat of mass demonstrations to bring down the government prompted fears that violence could break out between factions who fought a ruinous civil war from 1975 to 1990, with Syria and Iran drawn in on Hezbollah’s side while the West backed the government.

AMID all this tension, what chance does peace stand in a country that is sick of war? Can Lebanon, which could have a pivotal influence on prospects for peace in the wider Middle East, hang on to its nascent democracy and relative prosperity, or have the events of last week set it on a path to renewed conflict and suffering?

It was with trepidation that I boarded my plane in London after hearing Gemayel had been assassinated as he drove through a Christian area of Beirut, where he should have been safe.

As a Lebanese, I was only too well aware that a similar murder in February 1975, when a Sunni leader called Maarouf Saad was shot, had triggered a civil war. That conflict began two months after the killing, when gunmen opened fire on four Christians outside a church. In retaliation, Christian Phalangists ambushed a bus full of Muslim passengers and massacred them.

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