Damascus: Days after Syria achieved its independence from the French in 1946, a group of parliamentarians tabled a bill in Damascus demanding restoration of four districts that were detached and annexed to Lebanon at the start of the occupation back in 1920.
“The four districts of Hasbaya, Rashaya, Baalbak, and the Bekka Valley were Syrian territory that had been detached both illegally and forcefully,” they claimed, and ought to be restored now that the mandate was finished.
Then-president Shukri Al Quwatli, an ardent Arab nationalist, scoffed at the bill saying: “What difference does it make if they are part of Syria or Lebanon? These borders are artificial and temporary. One day both countries will get re-united, as they always have been throughout history.”
His words reflected the mentality of an entire generation of Syrians who had lived the creation of modern Lebanon back in 1920. Within living memory, there were no Syrian-Lebanese borders and cities like Beirut or Tripoli were indeed parts of Syria.
Long before modern ports were constructed in the coastal cities of Tartous and Latakia, many Damascenes considered Beirut “..the port of Damascus.”
The city was very close, after all, a mere 114-km by road — much closer than Syrian cities like Aleppo or Deir Al Zor. When it first opened in the mid-nineteenth century, the American University of Beirut was called “The Syrian Protestant College.”
- Shukri Al Quwatli, first president of Syria
It wrote on its degrees “ … given in Beirut, Syria” and did not get its new name until 1920. Prominent figures in the history of Syria are considered, by today’s geography, to be part of Lebanon. Fares Al Khoury, one of the founders of Syria’s independence, was born in a small village 11km from Hasbaya in modern Lebanon, and so was Shawqat Shuqayr, a Lebanese Druze who happened to be in Syria at the time of independence in 1946.
He stayed along, joining the Syrian National Army and rose to become its Chief-of-Staff in the 1950s. His successor Afif Al Bizreh, who co-created the union republic with Egypt back in 1958, was born and raised in Sidon on the Mediterranean, 40-km south of Beirut.
Several political entities refused to recognise Lebanese independence from Syria, claiming that these were artificial borders enforced on both countries by European powers, thanks to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
Most prominent was the Beirut-based Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) of Antune Saadeh, followed by the ruling Baath Party of Syria. In 1949, then-Syrian President Hosni Al Zaim tried to topple the democratically elected government of Beirut, promising to annex Lebanon to Syria by force.
In 1950, Syrian premier Khaled Al Azm closed down the Syrian-Lebanese border, promising to struggle the country economically and extract political concessions from Beirut. Eight years later, Syria and Egypt bankrolled an uprising against then-president Camille Chamoun, accusing him of aligning Lebanon with the US rather than the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
In the spring of 1975, President Hafez Al Assad sent the Syrian Army into Lebanon, at the request of Lebanese Christians to fight the Palestinian Liberation Organization during the civil war, where it remained until April 2005. During this time, he privately used to refer to Lebanon as “southern Syria.”
