The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  On Syrian television, they back-clothed the whole affair with Beethoven while a commentator swooned over the dead president. “You are our teacher and our method and we have learnt from your example—we will learn from your thoughts and ideas. Our hearts are broken and our eyes are weeping—we were stunned by your death and we cannot really wake up . . . and we cannot believe that you have left us.” Here again was that essential infantilism of every dictatorial regime. This was not adoration. This was, you might say, more than adoring; a systematic, god-like transformation of Syria’s leadership into Titans.

  It was no different at Qardaha, where Assad was now ceremonially laid in the ground, in the same mosque as his son Basil, beneath a bed of white flowers. “Oh God!” an old man shrieked beside the grave, hurling himself to the marble floor, writhing and groaning, his words more and more distorted by the cavernous interior of the building. “My God! My God!” he kept crying. “He has lost his senses,” the head of protocol muttered. Maan Ibrahim was a tall man in midnight-black clothes. “This often happens here. The people loved him so much, you see. But we see these things all the time now.” The middle-aged man was dragged past us by three officials, the back of his head reflected off the marble floor, thick clouds of incense drifting past us in the smoky interior.

  Idolatry or love? Affection or insanity? They passed through the mosque at the rate of 5,000 an hour, Shiite prelates and Catholic priests and Syrian generals, the sunlight splashing off their golden lapels, and elderly women and girls in tight black trousers and village men, unshaven and weeping, and an entire passenger aircraft crew, all in their neatly pressed Syrian Arab Airlines uniforms. There was only so much of this that a visitor could take. Critical obituaries were not to be had in Syria; references to past “mistakes” are only acceptable because Assad himself once referred to them.

  But there were lessons to be learned. Qardaha was the very centre of the Alawi Syrian minority which has controlled so much of Syria’s destiny, indeed so much of Syria, over the past thirty years. Which also helped to explain why a convoy of Hizballah coaches turned up at Assad’s tomb, their black-shirted occupants, bearded and funeral-faced, longing to pay reverence to the greatest of all modern Alawites. The black flags and a fascination for the meaning of death seemed quite natural for these young men, the guerrillas who had just driven the last Israeli soldiers out of southern Lebanon, many of whose colleagues had been torn to pieces by Israeli rockets and bombs over the past eighteen years of guerrilla warfare.

  For the Alawis themselves are a Shiite sect, a remnant of the Shiite Muslim upsurge that swept Islam a thousand years ago. Like the Shiites, the Alawites believe that the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali—hence “Alawite”—was robbed of his inheritance by the three caliphs. Like the Christian Maronites of Lebanon, they took refuge in mountain valleys, safe from the torments of their Sunni Muslim cousins. Most Alawites belong to four tribes—the Matawira, the Haddadin, the Khaiyatin and the Kalbiya. Assad’s grandfather Sulieman belonged to the Kalbiya.

  Officially, Baathism, the great equaliser, could not accept the concepts of Alawite leadership—certainly no discussion of it—and Assad was a Syrian first and a Syrian last. Forget the Qardaha motorway, the luxury hotel, the local airport. “I’m just a Syrian Arab citizen,” Maan Ibrahim had told me when I asked him where he was from. The Alawites comprised perhaps 12 per cent of Syria’s 15 million people. So under Assad’s rule, any questioning of the apparent disproportion of Alawites to the majority Sunnis in positions of power could cost you your freedom or your job. Yet close analysis proved how many senior positions in the military and government had been given to Alawites. Assad and his family were Alawites, so was the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, and the then information minister, Adnan Omran. So were many of the most powerful intelligence and special forces officers in Syria.

  During the French Mandate, some—though by no means all—Alawites gave their support to Paris, helping to repress Sunni insurgency. And during the Sunni “Islamist” insurgency against Assad’s rule, exploding from the cities of Aleppo and Hama, Alawites were the primary target. More than fifty Alawite officer cadets were massacred at the Aleppo artillery school in 1979; the initial Hama atrocities by fundamentalists were directed against Alawite officials and their families.

  While Assad ensured a large Sunni participation in government—including the defence and foreign ministers—the ethnic origins of Syria’s political power have been used by the country’s enemies. Israel’s constant predictions of civil war between Alawites and Sunnis have not been fulfilled. But Alawite power explains many things. It explains why Iran—the very vanguard of the Shiite Muslim revolution—should have become so close an ally of a country ruled by a man whose own faith sprang from Shiism. It explains why the Hizballah, a Shiite organisation though it claims to be interfaith, should be so enamoured of the regime in Damascus. Though the Baath is secular, the women of Qardaha cover their faces even more assiduously than the women of Tehran.

  Yet not since the days of Haroun al-Rashid had we seen a non-monarchical Arab potentate pass on his inheritance to his son. The Syrian parliament lowered the age of future presidents to thirty-four to accommodate Bashar Assad’s new inheritance. In private, he echoed his father: a strategic decision of land-for-peace, no peace treaty with Israel until all of Golan was returned, a final agreement based not on Arafat-style piecemeal bargaining but on UN Security Council Resolution 242: an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory in return for the security of all states in the area. And good relations with the Christians of Lebanon—providing they do not scream for the withdrawal of Syria’s 21,000 soldiers. If Syria ever leaves her little “sister” Lebanon, it would not be at the behest of the Christian minority that first invited her there.

  From the place of Assad’s burial, I returned briefly to Hama. Outside a state school in this haunted city hung a black banner. “Oh master of our nation, to Paradise eternal gone!” it proclaimed. But from the homes of Hama’s survivors, there hung only washing and tattered sun awnings. In the paper shop across the road from the great, creaking noria water-wheel, three piles of unsold posters lay on the counter: Hafez, Basil and Bashar. Fear remained. “What happened, happened,” an old Hama friend remarked sadly as the sun cut through the broken glass of an old store and the cats hissed at each other in the light. “The past is gone. We are children of the present—’eighty-two is over with. Let’s say no more.” The water-wheel outside his home creaked on, a screaming complaint of ancient iron axles and soaked wood and weight as the water of the Orontes splashed onto the disused aqueducts.

  But still no one will tell the truth: of the slaughter in the underground tunnels of Hama, of the Muslim “suicide girls” who hurled themselves into the arms of soldiers and blew them up with grenades held to their breasts, the original “black widows” whom we would later see in the occupied West Bank and Gaza and Israel and in Chechnya and Russia. The party men and Rifaat’s lads went round the smoking ruins afterwards, summarily executing the wounded and the suspicious and those who could not explain their presence.

  Which raised a familiar question. Can a regime survive without some form of acknowledgement of sins past, a truth-accountancy test for the inheritors of Baathism as well as the survivors of the murderous Muslim Brotherhood? Would a time come when Bashar Assad could—would—say that terrible things were done in the name of the party? Given his need for the support of some of the same dark forces that were responsible for Hama, I doubt it. Truth and reconciliation may work in South Africa or in Northern Ireland, but in the Middle East, history lies too deep. Too deep in Algeria, too deep in Iraq—where no Baathist regime survives to resist such admissions—too deep in Palestine, too deep in Israel, too deep in Lebanon.

  In Beirut, true, there is a “garden of forgiveness,” but the only physical memorial to the civil war—save for a concrete block impregnated with guns and armour outside the defence m
inistry and the thousands of Lebanese houses still peppered with bullet holes—is the old statue commemorating the Christians and Muslims who were hanged by the Turks in 1915 and 1916 for daring to oppose Ottoman rule. “Martyrs’ Square,” as it was called, acquired a different meaning during the fifteen-year Lebanese civil war, for it lay on the front line between Christian and Muslim militias, its very significance demeaned by those who used its geographical location in the centre of Beirut to destroy their capital city. The statue’s protecting angel was perforated with hundreds of bullets; but it has been preserved for the future with the bullet holes still clearly visible—a permanent rebuke to those who would destroy the brotherly love that this long-ago martyrdom supposedly represented.

  Before the First World War, Arab intellectuals had argued publicly for a new relationship between the Arab world and Constantinople, seeking a form of “home rule” for the Arab lands inside the Ottoman empire, either through a federal system of government—under which the sultan would be crowned king of the Arabs as well as king of the Turks—or, more mischievously in Turkish eyes, with an autonomy guaranteed by Western powers, especially France. At this time, a similar though not identical crisis afflicted the proponents of Home Rule in Ireland, some advocating a “free” Ireland within the British empire, others complete independence from Britain.

  Syrian notables met in Paris before the war and discussed what form of autonomy they might be given; among other demands, they asked that Arabic should be taught in schools alongside Turkish and used with Turkish in all government affairs. But although the Turks appeared initially well disposed towards these ideas, the deliberately vague nature of the instructions sent out to Turkish governors in the Arab provinces quickly proved that the Sublime Porte had no intention of dividing power within the Ottoman empire. There would be no “Austro-Hungarian” solutions in the Middle East. Thus by the time they declared war on the Allies in 1914—arguably the greatest mistake the Ottoman authorities had made since the fourteenth century—the Turks had maintained the unity of their empire but allowed sufficient debate for this same unity to be threatened.

  No one can dispute the suffering of the Lebanese during the First World War. The British and French navies blockaded the Ottoman Mediterranean coastline from 1914, preventing food entering the Levant. So Turkish Ottoman forces impounded all the grain in Lebanon for their troops and commandeered farm animals; a plague of locusts that set about the country in 1915 destroyed what crops were left. The land could not be tilled and there was a famine of biblical proportions. In northern Syria, 300,000 are estimated to have perished, 120,000 of them Lebanese; in Beirut alone, civilians were dying at the rate of a hundred a day. Abriza Kerbej was still alive in 1998 to give her own account of this semi-genocide. “We had become like animals. We took to eating rotten fruit off the ground. But that didn’t last long and we were soon digging up wild roots and grass.” Her family lived on boiled weeds. Neighbours were discovered dead only because of the stench from their homes.

  Turkey’s fears were not for the lives of its Arab Ottoman citizens in the Levant—Lebanon being part of Syria—but for the Arab lands that it ruled. Ahmed Jemal Pasha was commander of the Turkish 4th Army in Syria as well as one of the triumvirate of Young Turks who now effectively governed the Ottoman empire. Just as the Turks feared that their Armenian population would assist the Russians, French or British, so they suspected that their Arab Ottoman troops might defect to the Allies or join a pro–Allied Arab revolt. Jemal Pasha dispatched Arab units of his army to Gallipoli and then turned with venom upon the handful of civilians under his rule against whom any evidence of treachery could be produced. Upon these men, Jemal Pasha’s fury would now be administered with Saddam-like cruelty.

  When Turkey entered the war, the French abandoned their consulate in Beirut, and it was in this building—officially under the protection of the United States, which remained a neutral power until 1917—that the Ottoman secret service discovered letters and documents signed by thirty-three Arabs—most of them Lebanese—who had failed to leave the Levant before the war but who had been foolish enough to trust French diplomats with their written opinions on the future of Syria. These unfortunate men, both Muslim and Christian, were dragged for interrogation to the Lebanese hill-town of Aley, brutally tortured and then placed before drumhead courts for inevitable death sentences. Twenty-seven were Muslims, six were Christians, and their suffering was ever afterwards to be extolled by the Lebanese as proof that both religions could fight and die together for the independence of their country.

  They were to die, most of them, on gallows set up scarcely a mile from where my Beirut home would later stand and—each time I rooted through Beirut’s old bookshops or travelled around the Middle East—I would seek some contemporary account of their life and death. Here, after all, were Arab “martyrs” who died that others should live free—and who went to their deaths for their nation rather than for sectarian regimes or armies. After many years, in a small antiquarian shop in Kasr el-Nil Street in Cairo, I came across a heavily stained pamphlet published in Egypt in 1922 and written by a Lebanese Christian Maronite priest, Father Antoine Yammine. It was littered with poorly reproduced photographs of stick-boned children and corpses lying beside laneways. But it also carried a compelling account of the last days—and last speeches—of the condemned men.

  The first eleven were taken to the Beirut central police station in the Place des Canons—later, of course, to be Martyrs’ Square—where, at three in the morning, they were given white smocks to wear as shrouds for their hanging. Eleven gallows had been set up on the square and, before their execution, the Turks permitted each of the doomed men to speak to the crowds who had gathered in the darkness, along with the Turkish governor, the Turkish chief of police and members of the court martial “tribunal” who had condemned the victims.

  With the rope around his neck, Abdul-Karim al-Khalil shouted down from the scaffold: “My dear fellow countrymen, the Turks want to suffocate our voice in our lungs! They want to prevent us from speaking and from claiming our right to independence and our liberation from the hateful slavery of Turkey . . . But . . . we will ask all the civilised nations of the world for our independence and freedom. My beloved country, remember always these eleven martyrs! O paradise of my country, carry our feelings of brotherly love to every Lebanese, to every Syrian, to every Arab, tell them of our tragic end and tell them: ‘For your freedom, we have lived and for your independence we are dying!’ ”

  At this point, according to the Maronite author, al-Khalil himself pushed away the stepladder to the gallows, effectively hanging himself. Next to die were two brothers, Mohamed and Mahmoud Mahmessani. For a quarter of an hour, Mohamed held his brother in his arms and tried to comfort him. “I have never betrayed my country,” he told the crowd. “I swear this before God and all men. The Turks judged me guilty, but this is a lie. I don’t believe it’s a crime to love freedom and to want the liberation of my country.” Turning to the executioner, he pleaded that he and his brother should be hanged at the same moment—so that neither should see the other die. Mohamed’s wish was granted.

  Other condemned men cursed Jemal Pasha for his cruelty. Joseph Bechara Hani went to the gallows, like so many others, denying any treachery. “I am innocent, completely innocent—I swear this before God . . . I have lived a blameless life and I die without fear . . .” Then the hangman kicked the ladder from beneath Hani’s feet. Within months, another fourteen men would be hanged in Beirut, two of them colonels on the general staff of the Ottoman army who went to the scaffold in full military uniform. One of them, Selim Djezairi, said that he died “with love for my fellow Arabs, love for my country and hatred for the Turks.” Of two brothers—both Christians—one wrote a last letter to his wife, saving her the knowledge of his impending execution by pretending that they would soon meet again at their home in Jounié.

  Despite the natural desire to dress their words in courage, even the Turks were said
to have been impressed by the heroism of the victims, who included at least one Arab from Palestine. The Ottoman authorities decreed that their bodies should be thrown into a mass grave on the beach at Ras-Beirut. In those days, the area now covered by Beirut airport had not been reclaimed and the sea shore ran along the edge of what is today Corniche Mazraa. In this red earth, the Muslim and Christian dead were buried without ceremony.

  But how were they betrayed? A French scholar, researching his country’s foreign affairs archives at Nantes, has provided the most detailed account of this miserable affair. The interpreter at the French consulate in Beirut, Philippe Zalzal, himself a Christian, had been imprisoned by the Turks in Damascus and, in order to secure his return to his native Lebanese town of Bikfaya, had told Jemal Pasha of the letters, which French diplomats had concealed behind a false wall and a table in the consulate. The consul who left the documents—including signed letters that specifically requested French military intervention in Lebanon and Syria—was none other than François Georges Picot, the very same Picot who, with Sir Mark Sykes, reached the secret agreement in 1916 that France should form its own administration in Syria and Lebanon after the war was over, no matter what “independence” the Arabs were demanding. As a direct result of this foreign accord, the French carved Lebanon out of Syria and deposed the Arab king Feisal in Damascus. The slaughter at the battle of Maysaloun was a direct result of the same Sykes–Picot agreement which was concluded, in a letter from the French ambassador in London, on 9 May 1916—exactly two days after the Turks hanged the second group of Lebanese patriots in Beirut. Picot’s reaction to the discovery of the incriminating letters he so shamefully left behind was never recorded.