Arabs (50 page)

The Lebanese considered themselves fully independent and saw no grounds to expect any resistance from the French. The Free French had pledged to end the mandate, and the Vichy Regime had been forcibly expelled from the Levant by the British. The Lebanese parliament proceeded to assert its independence by revising the constitution to strip France of any privileged role or right to intervene in Lebanese affairs. However, when the Free French authorities learned of the agenda for the Lebanese parliamentary session of November 9, 1943, they demanded a meeting with al-Khoury. They warned the Lebanese president that General de Gaulle would
not tolerate any unilateral measures to redefine Franco-Lebanese relations. It was a tense meeting that ended without a resolution of the two sides’ differences.

The Lebanese paid little concern to French warnings. The Free French were a fragmented government in exile whom the Lebanese believed to be in no position to halt their legitimate claim to independence—which Great Britain had guaranteed. The Lebanese deputies met as planned and revised Article 1 of the Constitution, which defined the frontiers of Lebanon as those “the Government of the French Republic officially recognized” to assert their “complete sovereignty” within the country’s current and recognized boundaries, which were spelled out in some detail. They established Arabic as the sole official national language, relegating French to a subordinate status. They empowered the president of Lebanon, rather than the government of France, to conclude all foreign agreements, with the parliament’s consent. All powers and privileges delegated to France by the League of Nations were formally excised from the Constitution. Finally, the deputies voted to change Article 5 of the Constitution, which defined the national flag: horizontal bands of red, white, and red replaced the French Tricolor, with the national symbol, the cedar tree, still emblazoned in its center. Legally and symbolically, Lebanon had asserted its sovereignty. It remained to secure French agreement to this new order.

The French authorities reacted swiftly and decisively to the revision of the Lebanese Constitution. President al-Khoury was awakened in the early morning hours of November 11 by French marines who burst into his house. His first thought was that they were renegades who had come to assassinate him. He shouted to his neighbors to call the police, but no one answered. The door to his room was flung open by a French captain armed with a pistol, holding his son. “I do not mean to do you harm,” the Frenchman said, “but I am carrying orders from the High Commissioner for your arrest.”

“I am president of an independent republic,” al-Khoury replied. “The High Commissioner has no authority to give me orders.”

“I will read the order to you,” the captain responded. He then read a typewritten statement that accused al-Khoury of conspiracy against the mandate. The officer refused to give the order to al-Khoury and allowed him only ten minutes to pack his things. He was surrounded by soldiers “armed to the teeth.” Al-Khoury was disturbed to see that the soldiers were Lebanese. The French took al-Khoury by motorcar to the fortress of the southern town of Rashayya. They were joined en route by several other cars carrying the prime minister, Riyad al-Solh, and leading members of his cabinet. By that afternoon, six members of the Lebanese government had been taken to Rashayya.

Violent demonstrations broke out in Beirut as word of the arrests spread. Al-Khoury’s wife joined the demonstrators to show solidarity with those protesting the injustice done to her husband and the Lebanese government. The Lebanese appealed
to the British, in their role as guarantors of the Free French declaration of Lebanon’s independence in July 1941, who intervened to force the French to release President al-Khoury and the other Lebanese politicians. The changes to the Lebanese Constitution were preserved, but France clung to its Levantine mandate through its control over the security forces. The government of Lebanon would continue its struggle against the French to secure command of its army and police forces in a tug-of-war that would last another three years.
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The Syrians were less sanguine than the Lebanese about their prospects for achieving independence after the July 1941 Free French proclamation. The Free French authorities in Damascus had made clear to the Syrian political leadership that they had no intention of conceding independence to Syria or Lebanon until a new set of treaties had been concluded to secure French interests in both countries. The National Bloc needed to mobilize for a major confrontation with the French to force its demands for independence.

The leader of the National Bloc was Shukri al-Quwwatli, a wealthy Damascene from a notable land-owning family. Exiled in 1927 by the French for his nationalist activities, al-Quwwatli returned and assumed the leadership of the National Bloc in September 1942. When parliamentary elections were called in Syria in 1943, al-Quwwatli’s list emerged with a clear majority and elected their leader as president. The National Bloc government pursued conciliatory policies toward France, hoping to persuade the Free French to relinquish increasing authority until Syria might secure its independence. However, as in Lebanon, the Syrians found the French unwilling to make concessions with the country’s security forces—the national army, known as the Syrian Legion, and the internal security force, the Sureté Générale
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Al-Quwwatli’s government in Syria worked closely with the al-Khoury government in Lebanon, seeking international support for their position against France. Large anti-French demonstrations were held in the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945. When France announced it would not surrender control over the Syrian national army until the government of Syria had signed a treaty, the governments of Syria and Lebanon refused further negotiations.

French intransigence led to widespread demonstrations and anti-French protests across Syria in May 1945. Damascus emerged as the center of opposition, as the capital and the seat of national politics. Without sufficient armed forces at their disposal to police a situation rapidly deteriorating beyond their control, the French responded with lethal force to decapitate the government and bombard its citizens in to submission.

The first target of the French attack was the Syrian government itself. Khalid al-Azm was a member of the National Bloc who had been elected to parliament in 1943 and was appointed finance minister. On the evening of May 29, 1945, he was
in the Government Palace in downtown Damascus discussing the crisis with a group of deputies when they heard the first rounds of artillery at six in the evening.
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Al-Azm and his colleagues were appalled by the French escalation of the crisis and the severity of the artillery bombardment. They tried to call for help but found that all the telephone lines in the government offices were dead. Al-Azm received reports from messengers that the parliament building had already been stormed and occupied by French troops, who had killed all of the Syrian guards there. Shortly after they had taken the parliament, French soldiers took up positions around the Government Palace. They opened fire on the building, shattering its windows.

The French had cut the electrical power supply to Damascus, and night fell over the darkened city. The politicians and their guards in the Government Palace worked together to barricade the entrance to the building with tables and chairs in a vain attempt to deter the French from entering. Before midnight, al-Azm and his colleagues were tipped off that the French planned to occupy their building, and they slipped out through a back window. They made their way through the back streets of the city, eluding the French forces, and took refuge in al-Azm’s spacious house in the center of the Old City of Damascus. His large courtyard was soon filled with over one hundred refugees—government ministers, deputies, and guards. The French discovered their whereabouts when the prime minister, Jamil Mardam, foolishly attempted to use al-Azm’s telephone, which was under French surveillance. Once the French knew their whereabouts, they trained their artillery on al-Azm’s neighborhood and unleashed a merciless barrage. The government ministers and deputies sought refuge in the most secure rooms of the house. The ground shook beneath their feet with the impact of the artillery and aerial bombardment, showering plaster and masonry onto those sheltered inside. They passed the night in fear and uncertainty, to the sounds of the destruction of their city.

The French redoubled their efforts to reduce the Syrian government to submission the following day. President al-Quwwatli had set up office in the hillside suburb of Salihiyya, where most of the government ministers went to join him. Al-Azm chose to remain with his family in Damascus and share the city’s fate. The French attack grew yet more severe. They began to fire incendiary shells into the city’s residential quarters, setting fires that blazed out of control. “Terror spread among the residents who feared the entire neighbourhood would be consumed by the flames,” al-Azm recalled. “The shells continued to fall, and there was no fire brigade willing or able to fight the fires, as the French soldiers would not allow them to perform their duty.” After another day under the artillery barrage, al-Azm decided to abandon his home and take his family to the relative safety of the suburbs with Shukri al-Quwwatli and the rest of the government.

From his safe house in Salihiyya, President al-Quwwatli appealed to British officials to intervene. Invoking the 1941 guarantee of Syrian independence, he formally
requested the British to intercede with the French to stop the bombardment of Damascus. The Syrian president’s appeal gave Britain legitimate grounds to interfere in French imperial affairs, and they prevailed upon their wartime ally to lift their attack. By the time French guns fell silent, more than four hundred Syrians had been killed, hundreds of private homes had been destroyed, and the building that housed the Syrian parliament had been reduced to rubble by the ferocity of the attack. France’s desperate bid to preserve its empire in the Levant had failed, and nothing could persuade the embittered Syrians to compromise on their long-standing demand for total independence.

 

The French finally admitted defeat in July 1945 and agreed to transfer control of the military and security forces to the independent governments of Syria and Lebanon. There was no question of France imposing a treaty on either state. The international community recognized the independence of Syria and Lebanon when the two Arab states were admitted as founding members of the United Nations, on an equal footing with France, on October 24, 1945. All that remained was for France to withdraw its own troops from the Levant. The French military withdrew from Syria in the spring of 1946 and that August boarded ships in Beirut to return home.

As a young woman, Damascene journalist Siham Tergeman remembered the celebrations in Damascus on “the Night of Evacuation,” when the last French soldier withdrew from the capital in April 1946. She described a jubilant city celebrating its first night of true independence as a “wedding of freedom” in which “the happy charming bride” was Damascus herself. “The guests came in carts and in cars big and small, and torches lighted up all the roofs of the city, the hotels and sidewalks, electrical poles, the gardens of Marje and the poles of the Hejaz Railway line, the iron railings of the River Barada, and all the thoroughfares and crossroads.” Tergeman and her family celebrated through the night as singers and musicians entertained the crowds that gathered around the central Marje Square. “And the wedding of independence in Syria,” she recalled, “continued on until daybreak.”
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Syrian joy was matched by French bitterness at the end of the mandate. Though France still held its Arab possessions in North Africa, it regretted the loss of influence in the Eastern Mediterranean. After twenty-six years in Beirut and Damascus, the French had nothing to show for their efforts. Worse yet, France suspected its wartime ally and imperial rival, Great Britain, of coming to Syria and Lebanon’s assistance only to draw the Levantine states into its own sphere of influence. Even so, the British Empire in the Middle East was under pressure and on the retreat in 1946. Indeed, France’s troubles in Syria and Lebanon seem benign in comparison to the crisis Britain faced in Palestine in 1946.

 

1. Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman Al Saud, better known in the West as Ibn Saud, founder of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is pictured here (center with glasses) towering over his advisers in Jidda in 1928. Following his conquest of the Hashemite Kingdom of the Hijaz in 1925, Ibn Saud took the title “Sultan of Najd and King of the Hijaz.” In 1932, Ibn Saud renamed his kingdom Saudi Arabia, making it the only modern state named after its ruling family.

 

2. Fawzi al-Qawuqji (center) among commanders of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine. Qawuqji took part in the most famous Arab revolts against European rule, including the Battle of Maysalun in Syria (1920), the Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), the Arab Revolt in Palestine, and the Rashid Ali Coup in Iraq (1941). He took refuge from the British in Nazi Germany during WWII before returning to lead the Arab Liberation Army in Palestine in 1947–1948.