SSNP-Lebanese State
Relations (1935-1938)
Dr. Adel Beshara
In November 1935, the Lebanese and French mandatory authorities discovered a secret political party called the Syrian National Party (SSNP). The discovery took the Lebanese State by surprise. This was not an ordinary party. The SSNP was highly organized and cross-sectional. Its leader was motivated and popular, and its members were mainly university students or recent graduates. After the 'discovery' a confrontation transpired between the Lebanese State and the SSNP and lasted for three years. The following is a step-by-step reconstruction of this confrontation.
The advent of the SSNP
The SSNP was originally founded in 1932 as an underground movement among the students of the American University of Beirut. Until 1934 very little concerning its activities and beliefs was published.1 Its founder, Antun Sa’adeh, was a Lebanese Orthodox Christian brought up in South America.2 Described by Albert Hourani as “a man of courage, decision and powerful intellect,”3 he differed from others in the determination and inflexibility with which he held his political opinions. Sa’adeh stepped into the political arena at a time when most Lebanese were uncertain about what kind of an independent country they wanted, and hazier still about how to achieve a viable society. Their main point of contention was over the legitimacy of the Lebanese state: while most Christian Maronites - then the largest and most influential Christian sect in Lebanon - felt that Lebanon had a right to lead a separate national existence along Western lines, most avowed Muslims, led by veteran Sunni politicians, wanted to re-incorporate Lebanon into the Syrian hinterland as it had been before 1920, although in terms of realizing a wider pan-Arab community. In a country where the central authority was weak and where the government was regarded with suspicion and mistrust, this sectarian-driven division over national identity threatened to split the Lebanese entity in half.
The establishment of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in 1932 was largely inspired by the desire to see this condition in Lebanon ameliorated. However, instead of siding with one group against the other, as most Lebanese appeared to have done, the SSNP proposed a solution that explicitly emphasized nationalist goals over parochial interests.4 The point that should be emphasized, though, is that the unity sought by the SSNP was a Syrian, not a Lebanese nor an Arab one.5 The Party believed that neither the Arabs nor the Lebanese constituted a nation because the factors that underlay their political claims, namely language, ethnicity and religion, did not play a vital role in the process of nation-formation.6 The SSNP also argued that the Lebanese, both Christians and Muslims, had always been historically part of the Syrian nation and that, until 1920, when the French proclaimed its establishment as a separate political entity, Lebanon shared with Syria a common national outlook.7
The second key characteristic of the SSNP was the goal of building an independent secular state in Syria. Political reforms were encouraged by the party to further specific goals but also from a sincere desire to break down the barriers that impeded the process of national and political integration. In the first place, reforms provided an excellent rational for the urbanized nationalist elite to diminish the powers of local chiefs, headmen, and clergy who appealed to narrow ethnic or religious loyalties. Moreover, the usefulness of reforms in the nationalizing process is obvious. In a pluralistic society like Syria, they served as an instrument in the development of national identity within politically alienated groups of the same society.
Thirdly, the SSNP advocated the creation of an “Arab Front” as a bulwark against foreign ambitions in the Arab World. The idea of an ‘Arab Front’ is quite different from that of an ‘Arab nation’: the first would be an alliance while the second was a national idea par excellence. In assessing the significance of the idea of ‘Arab Front’ in relation to Pan-Arab nationalism, Daniel Pipes has classified the SSNP as a “purist” organization because it regards the unification of Syria as an end in itself rather than as a stepping-stone toward a wider Pan-Arab polity.8 Pipes’ characterization is useful when comparing the SSNP with pan-Arab organizations, such as the Baath Party or the Arab Nasserites. It does the party no justice, however, when the purpose of it is to depict the SSNP as anti-Arab. For despite the pan-Syrian focus of its program, the SSNP did not reject the idea of Arab unity per se, nor did it deny the existence of historical and cultural ties between Syria and the rest of the Arab World.9
The most distinguishing feature about the SSNP is that, from the outset, it adopted an oppositionist posture, preferring to defy the prevailing social and political norms rather than pay lip service to the predominant problems in Syria (including Lebanon). The party rejected the country’s traditional patrimonial and confessional system and vociferously attacked the political leadership for “dissipating the interests of the people for the sake of their personal power.”10
Despite formidable barriers, Sa’adeh expected the SSNP to develop into a mass party when it became public.11 He was confident that it had the potential to fulfil the same functions as those of the major independence movements of the Third World, like the Congress Party in India or the Wafd in Egypt. Sa’adeh may have been over optimistic here, although some positive factors seemed to support his views. Firstly, the SSNP was the “first party in Lebanon, and in fact in the entire Arab World, to think out the national problem in its entirety and to develop a program of action designed to modernize not only the political process but the entire life of the people.”12 Secondly, the absence of an organized opposition at that stage was another reason for optimism. The small political groups who dominated the political scene in Lebanon “were scarcely more than loose alliances of prominent politicians, based upon personal common interest rather than a common doctrine.”13 None of them, though, was strong enough to dominate the political scene.14 Furthermore, the leading figures in the then officially-tolerated political arena in Lebanon, Beshara al-Khoury and Emile Edde, did not rely on the support of a mass organization. They had taken the shorter and more congenial route, which was to form an alliance of notables and seek power through legitimate channels with French approval.15 However, Sa’adeh, was to experience immediate disillusionment.
A frustrating beginning: The SSNP and the Lebanese State (1935-1938)
Almost from the start, the SSNP was viewed with suspicion by the authorities. These were not the ordinary Lebanese politicians that the authorities knew. These were young men with intense emotions and a deep sense of responsibility. Not surprisingly, during the first encounter with the authorities the party had to struggle continuously for its political survival. Even though life was a little easier after the restrictions on political freedom were lifted in 1936, the Party continued to receive harsh treatment from the regime in power unless it was allied with it.16
On the first day of its “discovery” on November 16, 1935, its leaders including Sa’adeh were arrested and charged with plotting against the internal security of the state. The charge was proved in court and Sa’adeh was sentenced to six months imprisonment. Less than two months later, on March 17 1936, the Lebanese government dissolved the party on the grounds that “it was organized secretly and acted in an illegal manner in the territory of the Republic of Lebanon.”17
In a rare show of solidarity, the two main factions in the government, a clique of Christian Maronites and a group of pan-Arab collaborating Sunni Muslims, brushed aside their parochial differences and combined to combat the SSNP. Their primary concern was to stop the party from gaining a foothold in the government. Ideologically, both sides were at odds with the SSNP: the Christian Maronite group because they regarded its doctrine of Syrian nationalism as a threat to Lebanon’s ‘inalienable’ right to an independent national existence, and this particular Sunni Muslim group because it regarded the SSNP as striving for separation from a wider Arab community. This group opposed the SSNP even though it desired a union between Syria and Lebanon.18 Certainly, the Government did not want to become involved or seen to be involved in a political struggle directed in the first place against the French mandate. This would undoubtedly have incurred the wrath of the French High Commissioner and harmed the negotiations that started early in that year for a treaty with France.
This attitude seriously diminished the possibility of open dialogue between the Party and the Government. Undeterred, the SSNP pursued its activities quietly, recruiting new members and founding new units in various parts of the country. Politically, the party maintained a low profile and did not interfere with the functions of the state while its leader was in prison. But the government viewed its activities quite differently, and attempted to break up the party again by intimidating its members. It also instituted a secret service agency called Bureau d’Investigation whose function was to collect information on all secret, prohibited or dissolved societies, and to assure the repression of such activities.19 The Bureau was allocated the task of intercepting members of the SSNP who had found their way into government offices and other strategic positions.
The campaign of intimidation against the SSNP continued unabated in 1936. Shortly after Sa’adeh was released from prison in May, he was arrested for the second time after his supporters attacked the owner of a pro-government newspaper. He was sentenced to a second term of six months imprisonment.20 From that moment the struggle between the two sides emerged into the open. There were clashes between the party militia and the police21 and in Damascus, out of reach of the Lebanese government, party members held a sizeable demonstration protesting against the arrest of their leader.22 The Government finally caved in and released Sa’adeh a little more than four months after sending him to prison. In return, Sa’adeh pledged to work within the framework of the Lebanese state and to respect its political sovereignty.
The truce between the two sides, however, proved to be of short duration. During the last week of February 1937, a political rally was held in the Lebanese mountain town of Bikfayya, during which fighting broke out between members of the party and the security forces. The incident, known thereafter as yawm bikfayya (the day of Bikfayya), did little to advance the cause of understanding between the two sides. A public statement issued by the leader of the SSNP, March 1, inflamed the issue even further. In it, Sa’adeh sarcastically asked:23 "What is Lebanon and who do you suppose us to be - Have we become strangers in Lebanon now? After so vaingloriously inflating one’s zeal for Lebanon and its defense there is always a danger that we can start conceiving Lebanon as something on which one has a patent, or something outside the Lebanese people and above its wishes, or even still as something to which some of the Lebanese have title to the exclusion of the rest of them, or that it is something that appertains only to those who are in power."
Sa’adeh went on to accuse the “ruling class” of misusing the power of the state for its own political and personal interest:24 "If the ruling class regards itself as Lebanon and the people as no more than the group to be ruled, then we are proud indeed to announce that it is among the most important aims of our party to eradicate this bizzare image - the image of the ruler and the ruled - of our national life, and to put an end to special privileges in the state."
For the SSNP leader it was a matter of principle: no government should be permitted to take away an individual’s right to express a political point of view as long as he was a member of the state and operating within the boundaries of the law. But the Government was not in the mood for dialogue. Less than a week later, it arrested Sa’adeh for the third time and unleashed a vast and well-organized campaign of persecution against the party. The crisis would have exploded into open conflict if not for the intervention and wisdom of certain independent mediators. A deal was struck between Sa’adeh and the Lebanese Prime Minister before the trial in which the Party was granted full political recognition in return for greater cooperation with the government.25 By granting Sa’adeh political amnesty, the Prime Minister of Lebanon has been expected to draw political gain from the SSNP in the general elections scheduled for later in the same year.26
However, suspicion between the two parties did not dissipate completely. As one independent writer observed “... the two sides preferred first to lock their doors and then trust one another.”27 The Party was kept under close watch by the Lebanese secret police and its newspaper was closed down several times for criticizing government policies. As if to punctuate this state of mutual distrust, minor skirmishes kept occurring and several arrests of Party members were made both at Beirut and Damascus.28
After the parliamentary elections of 24 October 1937, which were marked by widespread corruption and vote fixing, the two sides locked horns again. The Party’s newspaper, an-Nahda, was banned and its leader was continuously harassed and intimidated. Finally, reports reached the SSNP that the Government was planning to arrest Sa’adeh once more as part of an elaborate plan to dispose of him.29 The Lebanese Government denied the claim but, as a precaution, the Supreme Council in the Party advised Sa’adeh to leave the country. Two days later, government security forces raided the headquarters of the SSNP, confirming what the party had suspected all along.30
The attempts of the Lebanese government to suppress the SSNP in those years differed, in their ferocity, with the authorities’ more tolerant treatment of other pan-Syrian groups that emerged in Lebanon after 1925. Known collectively as the ‘Lebanese Syrian unionists’31 and claiming to represent the Syrian territories that Lebanon annexed after 1920 (Beirut, the South, the Beka’ Valley and Akkar to the north), these groups moved freely and actively around Lebanon and held meetings and conferences even when they were directed against the state. According to Raghid Solh, “unable to identify with the idea of Greater Lebanon, they decided to boycott it and not accept senior government positions. They insisted that they were Syrians and refused to be counted in any census or to accept Lebanese identity cards.”32 At least verbally, these groups challenged the Lebanese State, but without being persecuted as was the case with the SSNP.
The question then arises as to why the Lebanese government attempted to suppress the SSNP while it tolerated other groups with pan-Syrian ideas. The answer is threefold. Firstly, in contrast to the early predominantly Muslim pan-Syrian groups, the SSNP’s rigorous ideological program posed a real challenge to the confessional structure of the state and therefore to its legitimacy as an independent political entity.33 The type of reforms that the SSNP advocated indicate that the party did not regard the social and political inequities which existed in Lebanon as mere sores and bruises which were accidental in their nature. Rather, it regarded them as profound evils stemming from organic defects in the structure of society that were curable by similar organic change. Nationally, the position of SSNP was equally uncompromising. Although it originated in Lebanon, the party refused to recognize the “national” and “artificial” frontiers drawn by foreigners. Contrary to Syrian unionism, however, its interest in the national question went well beyond the call for border adjustments between Lebanon and Syria: it questioned the legitimacy of Lebanon as a whole. That it was a Syrian rather than a Lebanese party was emphasized from the beginning.
Secondly, unlike early Syrian nationalist groups that emerged in Lebanon after 1920, the SSNP tried to appeal to a broad range of sects rather than focus on one sect. From the beginning, it represented all religious groups in Lebanon, particularly those groups in the middle, “which felt politically underprivileged in a country where the small lion’s share was divided between the Maronites and the Sunni Muslims.”34 These groups rallied behind it because its secularism “offered them a level playing field, erasing their historic disabilities” at the hands of the Sunni majority.35 Being a secular national party, therefore, it took all Lebanon as its unit of action rather than focusing its attention only on the issue of the disputed territories. This of course made it easier for the government to suppress the party than might have been the case if it had mobilized one sect.36
Thirdly, several changes and shifts that took place in Lebanese political life after 1936 made it easier for the Lebanese government to contain and move against the SSNP. The most important of these changes was the decline of Syrian unionism as a major political tendency in Lebanon in the mid-1930s, after some of its most influential members defected to the government side.37 Emphasizing a more gradual approach to Syrian unity as opposed to the confrontationist style of the 1920s, the defecting members joined the Lebanese State after they “had come to realise that, whereas they might be of first-rate importance in Lebanon, in a Greater Syria they would at best be second-rate next to political leaders from Damascus and Aleppo.”38 The political repercussions were immediately felt at the 1936 Conference of the Coast: none of the Sunni or Shiite Muslim politicians who had already been drawn into the formal parliamentary system attended.39
These factors, which between them determined SSNP-Lebanese State relations in those years, created considerable resentment and ill-feeling between the two sides. Neither side showed any sign of capitulating, but the intensity of the conflict had a telling effect on the SSNP.
Notes
1Haythem A. Kader, The Syrian Social Nationalist Party: Its ideology and Early History, (Beirut, 1990), 87.
2A. Beshara, Syrian Nationalism: An Inquiry Into the Political Philosophy of Antun Sa’adeh, (Beirut: Bissan, 1995), 43-44.
3A. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay, (Beirut: Librairie Du Liban, 1968), 197.
4Hisham Sharabi, Governments and Politics of the Middle East in the Twentieth Century, (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1962), 143.
5Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Christians Between Ottomanism and Syrian Nationalism: The Ideas of Butrus Bustani,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, II, 1980).
6 For detail studies of the party’s conception of nationalism see Nassif Nassar, Tassawarat al-Umma al-Haditha , Kuwait: The Kuwaiti Institute for Further Education, 1986.
7A note of caution: although the SSNP and the Lebanese Sunni Muslims shared a common interest in Syrian nationalism, there were major differences between them. Compared with the Lebanese Sunnis, whose support of a Syrian-Lebanese union was motivated by sectarian considerations arising from the creation of the heavily Christian state of modern Lebanon, the SSNP regarded the unity of the two countries strictly as a national, political and ideological question.
8Daniel Pipes, “Radical Politics and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 20, (1988), 305.
9Indeed, in its political platform, the SSNP regards Syria as an “Arab nation” and the country most “qualified to lead the Arab World.”
10A. Sa’adeh, The Ten Lectures, Beirut: SSNP Information Centre, 1980), 34-45.
11Ibid.
12Leonard Binder, Politics in Lebanon, 167.
13A. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay, (Beirut: Librairie Du Liban, 1968), 185.
14 S. M. Jurdak, “The Evolution of Lebanese Party Politics: 1919-1947” (MA , American University of Beirut, 1948), 47-61.
15See M. W. Suleiman, Political Parties in Lebanon: The Challenge of a Fragmented Political Culture, (New York: Ithaca, 1967).
16See “The Syrian Social Nationalist Party: The First Thirty Years, 1932-1962,” Fiches du Monde Arabe, 27 June 1979, No. 1309.
17Oriente Moderno, Vol. XVI, 1936, 192.
18For a discussion of the different points of view during this period see Najla W. Atiyah, “The Attitude of the Lebanese Sunnis Towards the State of Lebanon” (Ph.D, University of London, 1973).
19Oriente Moderno, Vol. XVI, 1936, 399.
20The newspaper in question was al-Masa’. Party affiliates decided to give the owner of the paper “a good lesson” after he incessantly attacked the Party.
21The Assyrian Bulletin, 1936, 213.
22Oriente Moderno, Vol. XVI, 1936, 679.
23A. Sa’adeh, The Complete Works, (vol. 3), 50.
24Ibid.
25It was issued a license to operate a newspaper and was allowed, for the first time, to open a legal office.
26The then Prime Minister of Lebanon, Khayr ad-Din Ahdab was locked in a political battle with another powerful Sunni leader, Riad Solh. The latter was desirous of a unity between Syria and Lebanon, but was critical of the SSNP’s fervor for Syrian nationalism, probably because the SSNP appeared to him as a potential rival. As far as the SSNP was concerned, though, the two men were two sides of the same coin.
27Robert D. Sethian, “The Syrian National Party” (Ph.D Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1946), 18.
28Oriente Moderno, XVII and XVIII, 1937.
29Bureau of the Syrian National Party Abroad, “Declaration to the Press,” in Propaganda Circulars of the Syrian National Party, 3 September, 1938.
30Adel Beshara, Syrian Nationalism, 58.
31R. Solh, “The attitude of the Arab natioanlists towards Greater Lebanin during the 1930s,” in Lebanon: A History of Conflict and Consensus, ed. Nadim Shehadi and Dana H. Mills, (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), 152.
32Ibid., 152.
33The SSNP has been described as “first party in Lebanon, and in fact in the entire Arab World, to think out the national problem in its entirety and to develop a program of action designed to modernize not only the political process but the entire life of the people.” In Leonard Binder’s Politics in Lebanon, ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966, p. 167.
34K. Salibi, “Lebanon Since the Crisis of 1958,” The World Today 17, No. 1, (January, 1961), 38.
35D. Pipes, ibid, 307.
36The fact that Sa'adeh's movement had a Christian core helped the government move to suppress it with less fear of immediate reaction from Moslem groups.
37The defectors included such prominent figures as Omar Beyhum, Khayr Eddine Ahdab, Ahmad Arif al- Zein, and Riad Solh.
38Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920-1945, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 58.
39Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, (London: Hutchinson Inc, 1985), 65.