FRANCE IN THE LEVANT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23858, 12 July 1939, Page 10

FRANCE IN THE LEVANT

The announcement of the assumption of full control by France in Syria is in keeping with the trend of recent events in the mandated territory. The circumstance that the Franco-Syrian Treaty of 1936, which provided for the emergence of an independent Syria within three years, has never yet been ratified, has been the cause of considerable unrest in Syria, which found particular manifestation early in the present year, and apparently the position has not materially improved. The French reasons for nonratification have been mainly of a strategic-political nature. At bottom, it has been pointed out, the situation in the French and British mandated territories of Syria and Palestine is the same. In cither territory there is a pair of communities, one stronger in numbers and the other in attainments, which claim a home in the same country. In either territory the mandatory Power lias committed itself to the task of bringing about a satisfactory and enduring settlement between the two local disputants, and, after twenty years of trial and error, finds itself not much nearer the accomplishment of its mission, while still obliged to go on shouldering its responsibility so long as internal strife persists. In Syria the policy of partition was put into effect by a French Military High Commissioner, General Gouraud, in 1920, when he created the Greater Lebanon after having overthrown the independent Arab State which had established itself in the Syrian hinterland of the Lebanon in 1918. His aim was to give the Lebanon Christians a State of their own with a certain amount of elbow-room. He found, as the British have found in Palestine, that it was impossible to confer this benefit upon the numerically smaller of the two local communities without including within their frontiers a substantial minority of the larger community—with the result of creating a political grievance calculated to be a constant cause of bad blood between two States which it was necessary to induce, if possible, to live side by side as good neighbours. Between the Lebanon Christians and the Sunni Muslim Arabs inside the frontiers of the Lebanon, and outside them in the State of Syria, the gulf is not much less wide than that dividing Jews and Arabs in Palestine, though in Syria the common language is Arabic, and, historically, the Lebanese have a stronger case than the Zionists since there has never been any break in their occupation of their mountains. Failure of the endeavours of the French Government for months past to appease the Syrian Nationalists has led to developments which seem to spell abandonment of the vision of a united independent Syria.