Book review: Syria, A Recent History

By John McHugo

For the last seven years, Syria has been engulfed in a devastating civil war that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, while millions of refugees have lost their homes and livelihoods. The civil war has become the scene of vicious sectarian violence, as battles are fought between adherents to different ideologies and religions. At the same time global powers have intervened, the most significant of these being the United States, Russia and Iran. To many Westerners this conflict is hard to fully comprehend, as many different actors with their own agendas and allegiances wage war while the civilian population suffers.

In Syria, A Recent History, international lawyer and Middle East historian John McHugo examines the history of Syria from the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and on to the present day, in order to give readers a deeper understanding of the festering discontent that led to the eruption of civil war, as well as the brutality of the regime’s response.

The land we now know as Syria was originally known in Arabic as Bilaad al-Shaam, which roughly means “the land to the left”. This is because a man standing in the middle of Arabia, facing north, has Shaam to his left. Today’s borders are no natural creation, and the concept of Greater Syria encompasses territories that currently belongs to several neighboring countries. Under Ottoman rule an area of land greater than Syria’s current landmass fell under the administration of a province named Syria, but after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, the victorious English and French sought to carve up former Ottoman territory to expand the size of their own colonial empires. During this process, lines were drawn on a map to divide the territory, often without consideration for the ethnic and religious borders and entirely new countries, such as Lebanon, came into being. I would have wished that McHugo had taken the time to explain how the borders in the region were drawn up at this time, in particular how this division reflected earlier agreements, such as the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. As it is, the reader must consult other sources to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this process. 

In 1923, France was given a mandate by the League of Nations to govern the newly created countries of Syria (whose borders differed from those of the Ottoman province) and Lebanon. Since Britain was already deeply invested in Egypt, they acquired the neighboring territories of Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. The mandate system differed from a traditional colony, in the sense that the indigenous population were supposed to be handed control of their respective territories in due time. In its founding covenant, the League of Nations describes a mandate as a “sacred trust of civilization” where the people in question are to be given tutelage so they can one day prosper and be granted independence.

This wasn’t something that a powerful and vocal colonial lobby in France was willing to accept, and French rule over their mandate was marred by instability and a clash of priorities between developing the new territories domestically and giving French trade and exports preferential treatment. Local elites also saw French administrators as interfering with their own interests. In 1925, Sultan al-Atrash, a leader of the Druze religious minority called his followers to revolt against French rule, and soon the entire French mandate was in jeopardy as the small garrison force was unable to fend off a tidal wave of revolts erupting all over Syria. France only managed to cling on to their mandate, notes McHugo, by shipping in large numbers of colonial troops, mainly from Morocco and Senegal, to finally end the rebellion in 1927. Thousands of Syrians had been killed or displaced and parts of the country were in ruin, adversely impacting commerce and agriculture.

McHugo uses the 1925 revolt as an example to illustrate the many divergent agendas and interests that have jostled for control of the hearts and minds of the Syrian people, and still do today. Devout Muslims were angered that Syria was ruled by Catholic France, but religion and dissatisfaction with French rule was only part of the explanation. The concept of an Arab identity and Arab nationalism were steadily gaining more and more adherents. The ideology known as Baathism was born in Syria, its founders being the gentle Damascene intellectual Michel Aflaq and a fellow Syrian he met while studying at the Sorbonne, Salah ad-Din al-Bitar, the Christian Orthodox son of a grain merchant. Baathism combined Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism with a form of socialism that was milder than the Marxist-Leninism espoused by the Syrian Communist Party, which both men had had an earlier falling out with.

After the Second World War, Syria was granted independence in 1946. Syrians now had their own sovereign state and a fragile democracy, but many obstacles remained if the country were to achieve stability and prosperity. Government expenditure during the Mandate had mostly gone to security and the military, with the unfortunate side effect that education, infrastructure and all that a burgeoning country desperately needs had been neglected, notes McHugo sourly, and he makes a solid case for the Mandate period to have been one of lost opportunities for Syria’s economic development. With a growing population that was restless, poor and ill-educated, Syria was in a precarious position. Nevertheless, successive governments made some progress in developing the country.

After Egypt’s president Nasser had successfully stood his ground against France, the UK and Israel during the Suez crisis of 1956, his prestige and popularity in the Arab world was enormous, and support for Pan-Arabism was on the rise. Two years after Suez, these dreams became a reality when Syria and Egypt merged to form the United Arab Republic. This republic turned out to be short lived, as many Syrians became dissatisfied at playing second fiddle to the much more populous Egypt and in 1961 the union was dissolved when Syrian army officers launched a successful coup d’état.

Nine years later defense minister Hafez al-Assad, a member of the Alawi Shia minority who had risen from humble beginnings, launched another coup with the support of the military. The previous dictator, Salah Jadid, who had himself toppled a government led by the Syrian Baath party in 1966, was now replaced with Hafez al-Assad. Hafez’s rule began as he meant to go on, and his efforts to modernize Syria were marred by brutality, repression and the accumulation of great riches by a small clique of government officials.

The foreign policy of Hafez’s reign was not without its contradictions. Both Syria and neighboring Iraq were ruled by dictators who claimed to govern in the name of their country’s local branch of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, and both countries’ populations were majority Arab and Sunni, yet Hafez’s Syria was hostile to Iraq and instead allied with Iran after the revolution of 1979, an ethnic Persian state that mostly worshipped Shia Islam. During the Iran-Iraq war Syria supported Iran, while the US supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Syria’s relation with the US was seldom very good, one factor that contributed to this froideur was no doubt Syria’s long-standing enmity with the state of Israel. Syria fought against Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom-Kippur war of 1973. Following the Six-Day War, Israel occupied a large part of the Golan Heights, which Syria failed to retake when they went on the offensive in 1973. Israel maintains control of the occupied territory to this day, while the United Nations Security Council Resolution 497 states that this occupation is “null and void and without legal effect”. Another area of contention between Assad’s Syria and the West is Lebanon, where Hafez had no qualms about intervening if he felt it necessary. During the Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975, Syria intervened militarily to protect its interests in the region, as did Israel at a later date. According to McHugo, Syria’s involvement achieved some of Hafez’s goals, notably to keep Lebanon from falling into Israel’s orbit, but his indirect support of militant groups such as Hezbollah, which engaged in terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, made peace with Israel an ever more distant prospect, and neither Hafez nor his son has succeeded in regaining the Golan heights through diplomacy. This continues to be a formal Syrian requirement for a peace deal with Israel. Hafez’s opportunity to mend relations with the West came after his nemesis Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990. As George H W Bush busied himself assembling an international coalition, Hafez offered Syria’s full support.

On the domestic front, McHugo explains the Janus-faced nature of Hafez’s rule. Living standards for ordinary Syrians has improved. Life expectancy has increased, and infant mortality decreased as education, electricity and proper sewage systems were introduced to virtually the entire population. At the same time, the country remained a repressive police state where dissidents were liable to get rounded up by the Mukhabarat, the notoriously brutal secret police. When his eldest son and heir apparent, Bassel, died in a car accident in 1994, Hafez first thought his stone-faced aides were carrying news that he had been deposed in a coup d’état, an indication of his paranoia and suspicion.

After Bassel’s death, his younger brother Bashar was recalled from his medical studies at King’s College in London, where he studied to become an ophthalmologist. He was hastily enrolled in the army as a stepping stone on the way to the presidency and succeeded his father when he died of cancer in 2000. In his inaugural speech, Assad seemed to strike a reformist note, conceding that some government officials might be corrupt. He proceeded to say that even though the time wasn’t yet ripe for Western-style democracy, Syria might achieve democracy sometime in the future by engaging in the somewhat vague concept of “democratic thinking” and by strengthening the country’s institutions. Bashar’s wife, Asma, whom he had met while studying in London, was a British citizen of Syrian nationality and Sunni faith. Hopes that the glamorous new presidential couple would fundamentally transform Syria were not realized. The country continued to be mired in corruption and stagnation, and large parts of the impoverished rural populace continued to flock to the cities in search of work.          

When the protests of the 2011 Arab Spring spread to Syria, the regime responded with a brutal crackdown by the military and secret police. What followed these initial protests we know all too well, Syria descended into vicious sectarian conflict, and the Assad regime survives because of Russian support.

In the concluding chapter, McHugo reflects on what could have been if Syria had been left alone from outside interference and had the opportunity to develop at their own pace, something he understandably laments was not to be. Perhaps most interestingly he criticizes the Western habit of wanting to redraw the map and divide the region into new countries to achieve stability. Carving up Syria into a number of smaller states, even if this takes into account local ethnic groups is doomed to failure due to the complex circumstances on the ground, claims McHugo.

All in all, I found Syria, A Recent History to be very interesting and thought provoking. McHugo succeeds in introducing the Western reader to the history behind the bloody civil war in Syria, as well as the fiendish complexity of Middle East politics.