Nasser, Chamoun, and the 1958 Civil Crisis
The Role of the SSNP
Dr. Adel Beshara
In 1965, Professor M. S. Agwani of West Asian Studies at the Indian School of International Studies published a book entitled The Lebanese Crisis, 1958: A Documentary Study. The book is "an attempt to reconstruct the story of the crisis and its local, regional and international ramifications with the help of relevant documents" by illustrating "the respective viewpoints of individuals, groups and countries" directly or indirectly concerned with the crisis. The principal defect of Agwani's book, however, is that it does not adequately cover the viewpoint of an important political party whose role in the crisis was far more important than most of those presented in the book. That party is the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP).
The 1958 Civil Crisis
The Lebanese civil crisis of 1958 sparked an international crisis involving regional powers as well as world major powers. To understand how the crisis evolved it is important to examine the internal and external changes that took place under Chamoun. This entails, among other things, a clear understanding of the events that swept the Middle East after 1950 and their impact on the Lebanese domestic situation and foreign relations, particularly with the Arab countries.
Up until 1958, Lebanon had experimented with a consociational democratic system as a means of managing conflicts between its religious communities. This system worked "as long as it was not seriously challenged by an ideology, or by external aggression." This is because it was based on two faulty assumptions: an internal one based on the belief that the elite consensus established in the National Pact reflected grass-roots communal support; and an external one derived from the assumption that the balance of power in the region would remain unchanged in that sense that it will always reflect the value system of the moderate Arab nationalists. In the immediate post-1943 period, the durability of both of these assumptions was tested twice: first, by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and, then, by the rise of Nasserism in Egypt.
Despite its grave political repercussions for many Arabs, the Palestine catastrophe in 1948 passed relatively peacefully in Lebanon. By sharp contrast, Nasser's appearance on the Arab political scene in the early 1950s provoked a great tremor in Lebanon, particularly among the Sunni Muslims. His "populist style, charismatic appeal, and bombastic rhetoric," gave the politically under-represented Lebanese Muslim groups the impetus to challenge the political system and demand their communal rights.
Nasser's influence over the Lebanese Muslims might not have been powerful if not for the negative attitude of the Lebanese president toward him. Chamoun, a pro-Western politician particularly close to the British, adopted an anti-Nasser foreign policy, exemplified by his criticism of the Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi agreement of 1955, and then, by his endorsement of the Eisenhower Doctrine propounded in early 1957 to contain both communism and radicalism in the Middle East. The attitude of Chamoun created a great deal of tension between him and the pro-Nasser Sunnite leadership in Lebanon. Some Christian leaders, realizing the political harm that Chamoun's was causing, also joined the chorus of opposition to his regime.
Following the tripartite invasion of Egypt in October, 1956, Chamoun decided against joining the other Arab countries including Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in severing Lebanon's diplomatic relations with France and Great Britain. As a result, the opposition, openly identified with the Egyptian point of view, mobilized to damage the government. The day the Lebanese parliament passed a joint defence agreement between Lebanon and the United States in March, 1957, pro-Nasserite deputies walked out, leaving Chamoun with no other choice but to dissolve the parliament. In the ensuing elections, four pro-Nasserite Muslim leaders, including Jumblatt and Salam, lost their seats and Chamoun, using "a combination of fraud and coercion," was able to secure a favourable majority in the new Chamber. The ejection of these leaders, however, only served to fuel public dissatisfaction with the regime and to raise the level of opposition to Chamoun to a dangerous new level.
When in February 1958 Egypt and Syria united to form the United Arab Republic (UAR), Chamoun fueled the anger of the Lebanese Muslims by initially refusing to recognize the new entity. The straw that finally broke the camel's back came when, early in the same year, Chamoun announced his intention to run for a second term. Pro-Nasser Lebanese, Christians, and Muslims called on the President not to violate the National pact. "A renewal [of the presidential term]," argued one, "shall be an attack on the constitution itself and will go against the very aims which its framers had laid down." When Chamoun refused to budge a showdown between the contending parties became imminent.
On the street level, sparodic fighting brokeout between armed groups loyal to the government and supporters of the National Union Front (NUF). The NUF was a loose alliance that brought together the powerful urban following of Saeb Salam, Abdullah Yafi and Marouf Saad of Sidon together with Junblatt's mainly Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), Adnan Hakim's Najjadah party, Shia' leader Ali Bazzi's moderate National Call organization and Muhammed Khalid's National Organization. While the NUF was Nasserist in outlook, it drew important support from leading Christian leaders such as Henri Pharaon, Charles Helou, Hamid Frangieh, Ghassan Tweiny, Phillippe Takla, Fouad Ammoun, Edmond Naiim, Nassim Majdalani, and ex-president Beshara el-Khoury. Calling themselves "The Third Force" and backed by General De Gaulle of France, they advised the Lebanese state to follow a policy of strict neutrality. Standing by the President, however, were moderate Muslim leaders like Sami Solh, brother of slained Riad, the former prime miniter in Khoury's government, and Majid Arslan, Junblatt's leading rival among the Druze, the Kataeb Party of Pierre Gemayel, and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.
When Nassib Matni was murdered on May 8, the fighting developed into a full-scale rebellion. Matni was a leading Maronite journalist, the owner and editor of the Beirut daily Telegraph which generally took an anti-Chamounist, pro-Nasserist line. The opposition was convinced that Chamoun's supporters were behind Matni's murder and called for nation-wide strikes. To calm the situation, the Lebanese government declared in May that it would not support a second term for Chamoun. But the anti-Chamoun forces, backed by UAR, demanded the resignation of the President in order to end the crisis. Chamoun responded to this period of the crisis in several ways. His government lodged two complaints against the UAR for interference in the internal affairs of the country: the first submitted to the Arab League on 21 May and the second submitted to the UN Security Council on the following day. Both of these responses, however, failed, and the crisis then exploded into open warfare.
The SSNP and the 1958 Crisis
In the weeks leading up to the violent outburst in May 1958, the SSNP tried to steer a middle course between the government and the opposition. The Information Department in the party released a public statement on April 2 to define just exactly where the party stood in the continuing dispute between the two sides over Chamoun's bid for re-election:
A violent political dispute is taking place in Lebanon today towards which the Social Nationalists have not yet defined their final position between those who support and those who oppose the President. The party's adherents have rather chosen a position that does not allign itself with either of the two camps, a stand in full accordance with their past principled position and in compliance with the will of their leadership which has not yet defined any final position as it awaits the point at which it will be appropriate to conceptualize the situation on an official basis so that the nationalist movement can declare an opinion having taken a certain amount of time to study it in the light of the people's interest alone.
At that stage in the crisis, the SSNP felt that both the government and the rebels were making some valid points and demands. It accepted, on the one hand, the view enumerated by the government, that the crisis in Lebanon was largely the product of a broad Nasserite-Communist conspiracy against the Lebanese State provoked by unfriendly acts of intervention in the internal affairs of the country by the UAR. Already before the proclamation of the UAR on February 1, the relationship between the SSNP and the two signatories to the UAR was tense due to conflicting aims. This tension was clearly reflected in a fiercy speech delivered by the SSNP Chairman in parliament on the eve of the proclamation of the UAR.
Ashqar was responding to the growing number of attacks on the SSNP by the Syrian Deuxieum Bureau. The most brutal of these attacks had occurred on January 4, when a bomb ripped through an apartment owned by an SSNP official. The bomb, which was intended for Mahmoud Ni'meh, an SSNP officer in the Syrian army who managed to escape from the much-dreaded Mezze prison in Syria, killed two innocent SSNP members and a little boy. A similar attack occurred on the residence of Mustafa Abd al-Satir, the provincial director of the SSNP in the Beka'a district, but there were no casualties this time. Several weeks later, on April 24, a special unit of the Lebanese internal security branch intercepted an agent of the Syrian Deuxieum Bureau on a mission to assassinate the SSNP's leading public speaker, Saeed Taki al-Din. The assailant, Bilal Barhoumy, revealed in his confession that he was offered an undisclosed amount of money by Sarraj in return for Saeed's head.
After the proclamation of the UAR, the pro-Syria and pro-Nasser press in Lebanon stepped up its propaganda against the party. It found a way smear its reputation by linking it to the wave of unrest and sporadic explosions that took place in different parts of the country. Here is a sample of some of the claims that were made:
1. February 3: the radical pro-Syria Lebanese newspaper al-Siyyassi (Owned by the Lebanese politician Abdullah Yafi) blamed the SSNP for the "cowardice attempt" to blow up the main municipale office in Tripoli, even though the official investigation into the incident gave a different version.
2. February 15: the pro-UAR newspapers in Lebanon, including al-Siyyassi, reported that one of the conspirators arrested in the Saudi-sponsored plot against Nasser uncoverred by Sarraj a few days earlier, was the private secretary of the SSNP Chairman, Mohammad Abd al-Rahim. An SSNP official denied the allegation and sarcastically remarked that if al-Ashqar had a secretary he wouldn't be living in Syria.
3. March 14: Egyptian newspapers circulating in Beirut reported an altercation between the SSNP and residents in the Hermil district. It turned out to be a dispute between two traditional families.
4. March 18: The same newspapers reported that the SSNP was organizing nation-wide demonstrations of support for President Chamoun. They were, in fact, the annual celebrations of Antun Sa'adeh's birthday. One of these celebrations, and by far the largest, was held in the pro-UAR Northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.
5. March 25: Egyptian newspapers claimed that a judge who indicted three youths for tearing up the national flag and then wiping their shoes with it during a demonstration in Tyre was a member of the SSNP. Both the Judge and the Party denied the allegation.
That aside, the SSNP had, on the other hand, regarded some of the political and constitutional demands put forward by the rebels as basic democratic grievances and legitimate aims. It sympathized with them on at least three important issues:
1. Chamoun's bid for a second term in office. According to Adib Qaddura, an SSNP delegation told Chamoun that the party could not support his bid for re-election because "the majority in Lebanon were against [it]."
2. Foreign policy. Athough the SSNP was bitterly opposed to Nasserism and international Communism, like the rebels it objected to Chamoun's attempts to bring Lebanon into Western-sponsored international and regional pacts.
3. Domestic policy. The SSNP supported the rebels' demand for a more equitable distribution of power and national wealth. But instead of the opposition demand for a revision of the Natonal Pact it called for the total secularization of the Lebanese state.
However, the impulses that some in the SSNP had to steer a middle course and keep out of the conflict and civil war that was developing were brought to nothing by the fierce attacks on the UAR and Arab nationalism waged by the dominant Party leaders and writers. It is true that the SSNP leaders had for some time shown impulses to place (a) more established Lebanese leaders who became rebels in 1958 - Rashid Karami, Saeb Salam, Abdullah Yafi, Kamal Jumblatt - in a "Lebanese" category distinct from (b) local Nasserites, Baathists and Communists who were "stooges" of the "Nasserite-Communist conspiracy" to subject Lebanon. But these impulses would prove to be ultimately unwarranted because most of the semi-establishment "Muslim politicians" had already associated their political fortunes with Nasser and were, therefore, bound to take the SSNP's attacks on Nasser and the UAR personally.
Following Matni's muder early in May 1958, the rebels seized on the outbreak of fighting to attack the Party's members wherever they could get at them. In Tripoli and sections of mainly Sunni West Beirut, SSNP sympathizers were chased out of their homes and their houses were burnt to the ground. The SSNP retaliated with a stern warning to the rebels to leave its members alone. That warning was published in the front page of its daily newspaper, al-Bina'a:
If the authorities adopt an indulgent attitude towards you when you are so clearly violating the law, the Social Nationalists warn you for the last time that you still have some leeway to avoid incuring the antagonism of the strongest and most organized popular group to have resisted imperialism in all its forms.
But as the fighting escalated and rebel attacks on its members intensified, the crisis then began to appear to the party as part of a general unheaval in the country, seriously threatening its own interests in Lebanon. The influx of weapons and Syrian volunteers across the Lebanese borders convinced the SSNP that the crisis in Lebanon was, in fact, a do-or-die battle in which its own survival and that of the Lebanese State were at stake. Calling it "The Battle of Lebanon", a senior member of the party explained the situation like this: "This battle is not about Camille Chamoun's continuation in office, but rather one for maintaining Lebanon as a haven for free thought and liberty."
The Battle of Lebanon
In view of the conflicting reports that emerged from the battlefield and lack of proper documentation, opinions on the role of the SSNP in the 1958 crisis have differed, and will continue to differ, in accordance with each person's religious and party affiliation. One thing, however, is certain. The level of cooperation between the SSNP and the Lebanese government during the crisis, particularly on the battlefield, was one of the most outstanding features of the whole conflict. As George Lenczowski perceptively put it:
In view of the army's passive role, much of the brunt of defense against the rebels had to be done by armed volunteer groups. Not infrequently, the latter were organized and led by the members of the P.P.S. [i.e., SSNP], whose superior organization and experience (especially true of Syrian refugee army officers affiliated with the party) nationally placed them in a position of military leadership. It was such a heavily P.P.S.-staffed group which at the "battle" of Shemlan, successfully stopped Jumblat's Druze in their attempt to capture the Beirut airport and invade the city.
Just as important was the SSNP's willingness to take on the hard and dangerous assignments. "The SSNP members," wrote Haddad, "were well organized and trained, and played at times a more effective role in fighting the rebels than the Lebanese army itself." Another scholar of Lebanese politics, Nadim Makdisi, claimed that the SSNP was accredited "with most of the serious fighting with the Syrian-led rebels in the border and mountainous areas of Lebanon."
Foreign correspondents in Lebanon at the time of the crisis also gave an impressive description of the SSNP. Reporting from the battlefront, the correspondent of the Paris daily, Le Figaro, wrote:
For the first time I have seen real men fighting the rebels. These were 'civilians' of the [SSNP] who fought with faith and determination, repulsing thousands of rebels who greatly outnumbered them, and inflicted on them heavy casualties.
The SSNP fought on four major fronts, three of which were vital to Lebanon's national security. In the north, one of its garrisons held up a major advance by the rebels in a fierce battle that raged on for almost forty eight hours. The "Battle of Edbil", as it became known, was significant not for its ferocity, but because it thwarted the rebels' plan to control the district of Akkar, which includes the frontier areas of Northern Lebanon. Given its proximity to the Syrian borders, the fall of Akkar into rebel hands would have, indeed, been a major setback to the government as it would have allowed the insurgents to link up with their comrades-in-arms in Tripoli and other rebel-held areas around the city.
In the district of Koura, north of Tripoli, the SSNP militia set up road blocks and organized night patrols effectively blocking up all traffic and communications between the opposition town of Zgharta and the insurgent quarters of Tripoli. At one point, the SSNP intercepted a rebel supply convoy carrying a huge quantity of weapons, including energa bombs, and seized its load. It is thought that were it not for the firm stand of the SSNP in Koura, the army would have been surrounded by the rebels from Seer-Diniyeh and Zgharta.
In the Beka'a valley, the SSNP's success in holding on to the central town of Hirmel prevented the rebellion in the city of Baalbek from establishing contact with the Akkar insurgents and from forming with them the "rebel government" anticipated in the mass media and press of the UAR. The party gave Sabri Hamadi, a rebel leader in the area, an ultimatum to stay away from his hometown for fifty day. A bigger showdown between between the SSNP and the rebels occurred at Nabi Osman, a Muslim village situated between Hirmel and Baalbek. The main battle for the control of this village occurred on the first of June and lasted for almost thirty hours. In the Rashayya-Mashghara-Ein Zibdeh stretch of Southern and Western Beka'a, the presence of the SSNP was just as important: it served as a cut-off point between the Shouf mountains, then under the command of Kamal Jumblatt, and the Syrian frontiers east of them.
But by far the important battle involving the SSNP was the one which took place at Shemlan and Einabb. In the early morning of June 29, 1958, a large rebel force attacked these two villages and the surrounding hills, which overlook the International Airport of Beirut, with the intention of marching on Beirut. The correspondent of the New York Times reported, that after defending Shemlan, "150 members of the [SSNP], supported by seventy Lebanese policemen, attacked Ainab and engaged the rebels in a heavy battle. In less than an hour the rebels were forced to retreat." The SSNP fighters went on to occupy the rebel village of Kayfoon and, on the third day of the battle, seized Kaber Shemmoun, driving the insurgents almost 10 miles back.
Conclusion
The role of the SSNP in the civil crisis of 1958 cannot be overlooked with simplicity as Agwani did. To do so would leave an important episode in modern lebanese history terribly lacking and underdocumented. It is important to realize that the SSNP's part in the 1958 crisis was not restricted to military fighting: the party also gave the Lebanese Establishment moral support that had some importance in Lebanese politics, and aided the international diplomacy of Chamoun's government in several ways. For example, the party presented a fairly detailed note to the United Nations Observation Group in Lebanon (UNOGIL) during its investigation into the charges against the UAR. Moreover, when the Ecuadorian director of the UNOGIL, Galo Plaza, submitted his final report to the Security Council on July 3 minimizing the extent of Syro-Egyptian infiltration and activities into Lebanon, the SSNP presented another note to the UN questioning the wisdom and accuracy of the whole investigation. It is hard to comprehend how Agwani could have missed all of that in his documentary book about the 1958 crisis.