Current Affairs

In 1791, France published a constitution, which defined France as a secular republic based on three pillars – liberty, equality and fraternity. One hundred years ago Syrians based a draft constitution on  the ideas of the French constitution, the Syrians argued at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference for a state based on a monarchy that was underpinned by a constitution with the principles of religious freedom, the freedom of opinion and freedom of expression. The intellectuals that put together the constitution believed that Syria would gain independence after fighting with the allies against the Ottomans and the axis powers in the 1914-1918 conflict.

Ahmed al Sharaa, the defacto ruler of Syria today, has said that it will take Syria three years to put together a constitution. Like anything in the Levant there are stresses that pull the levers of states and especially the weakened Syrian state. Syria has to move past the Baathist promises that had been put in place by a constitution that argued for principles determined by Baathist ideology.

The 1919 Paris Peace Conference was a disaster for Syrians, the British and French carved the Ottoman territories up, while a passive United States under the stewardship of Woodrow Wilson warned the British and French that “self governance was a precusor to world peace.” Furthermore, Woodrow Wilson argued that if France insisted on occupying Aleppo and Damascus “there would be an instant war.”

Wilson persuaded the British and French that a fact finding delegation should be sent to Syria and Palestine. King and Crane were sent by the allied powers to survey the thoughts, beliefs and political aspirations of the Arab people and found that they wanted independence. King and Crane stressed that the people were impressed by Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen point plan with elements such as open democracy, self governance and free trade, which were all elements that Arab people aspired to.

According to Nael Georges, a Syrian constitutional lawyer, the translation of the original text of the 1920 constitution in Syria declared a bill of rights and Syrians were “equal before the law, it guaranteed personal and religious freedom, freedom of the press and the right to associate and organise.”  However, this did not make any difference to the French who invaded Syria in November 1920, and for the next twenty three years Syria suffered the indignity of becoming a colony (Mandate) under French martial law. Riots throughout this period broke out – merchants shuttered their shops, activists circulated petititions and the underground movement for Syrian independence grew.

The final days of French colonial rule littered the streets of Damascus with bodies. The French under the pretext that the Syrian Gendarme were responsible for the deaths of three French soldiers bombarded Damascus on the 29^th May 1945. According to WF Sterling the British liason officer to President al-Quwatli,  French “artillery  and machine gun fire broke out simultaneously […] followed by heavy artillery and mortar fire.” The British envoy Shone sent a transmission to London in which he described the French forces as “behaving as madmen, spraying the streets with machine gun fire from vehicles and buildings.”  In less than 3 days, as many as 800 hundred Syrians had been killed. On 4^th June 1945, De Gaulle hinted that he would take revenge on the British for stopping the bloodshed, he said that the British “had insulted France and betrayed the West.” Within a year Syria had its independence.

Ther 1950 constitution written in the heady days of independence pushed the ideas of a stronger independent judiciary and a state that is responsible for guaranteeing the “most noble expressions of individuality, dignity and humanity.” The constitution also argued that the “state shall guarantee freedom of opinion and all Syrians entitled to express their views freely in writing, speeches, graphically or by any other means of expression.”

Syrians gained freedom and the press was free until the 1970s when the Assad regime gained power. Though the state was unstable because of numerous bloodless coups, which caused political instability, the country was surprisingly free. Political ideas thrived, even to the point of feminist ideas and arguments being put into the mainstream in the 1950s, when women received the right to vote and got universal suffrage.

But today it is the make up of the Syrian state that confuses matters. There are Druze, Christians, Kurds, Alawites, Sunni and Shia Muslims as well as Islamists all vieing for a voice in the new constitution. With Ta’hir al-Sham (HTS) in power, they reason that within three months there will be a government of consensus. But with different ethnic councils vieing for a voice in the new state, there are other arguments that are challenging Syria. The Gulf states are already challenging the de-facto arguments of the state and it is the influence of Türkiye on the region that has unsettled the Gulf powers and sniping from Iran has already upset the balance of the new Syrian state. Israel has bombed the sites of the military and where they suspect the Syrian regime under Assad had developed biological and chemical weapons.

Syria has had an unfortunate history of great power rivalry and today it is no different. The arguments coming from the Gulf are unsettling the state. When the shrine of al-Khasibi the founder of the Alawite sect was set alight in Aleppo days before the fall of the Bashir al Assad regime, there was uproar among the Alawites. The argument of who desecrated the tomb has been hard to pin on a single group. It was widely thought that HTS were behind the desecration, which led to protests in Latakia where 5000 took to the streets to condemn the desecration of the site. But there have also been arguments of who was really responsible for the desecration and whether it was the HTS, the Assad regime or Iranians responsible.

It is HTS desire to build consensus and a new constitution that is pushing HTS to bring about a one thousand person conference that will discuss the reformation of the military, the state and ultimately the political make up of the parliament. In many ways it is this argument that is spooking the different ethnicities who are trying to build councils to govern their interests. But Alawites argue that they have been stopped from building the necessary consensus to bring a delegation to Damascus and take part in the conference. They argue that they are being discriminated against even though they had their own greaviances against the Assad regime, which included corruption. But it was the Alawites that the Assad regime depended on and there is suspicion that they are part of the future problems that Syria will face.

But there are also points of negotiation that HTS to bring Kurdish separatists into the fold; and though at their core HTS is an Islamist movement, they have been tasked to bring Syria back from the brink by unifying all the factions that make the state. If HTS fail to bring economic growth and peace they will follow the same fate as the Islamists in Algeria (1992), Tunisia (2021) and Egypt (2012). The country needs to be unified and a constitution employed to unify the different ethnic and religious groups.

Though the war is over, there is a lot of change that needs to take place. The elements that make up the Syrian state have been fighting for a unified Syria for the past one hundred years. But it is critical that the HTS find a means to unify the country through a constitution that is unifying rather than self serving. But at the moment Syria is free of the vagaries of a government that had been repressed by colonial powers that negated the rights of Syrians in the first place, but the new state has an opportunity to find a future that is brighter than at any time in the past one hundred years.