Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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Salim motioned to me to follow him to the south-east corner of the graveyard, where crescents rather than crosses stood above four tombstones. “Musulmans,” he said. Two of them were simply soldats français inconnus, the third plaque had been painted over and was illegible, and the fourth, grave number 238, was marked, “Domani.” He may have been a cook or camp-follower, a Gunga Din in the service of the invaders remembered only by the nickname his French masters had given him. He had died with the army he served, but there was no indication of when.
In the centre of the far wall, nearest the sea, was a large cupola supported on four sides by Islamic arches, a structure blending the Western neoclassical with the Oriental. Carved into the stonework was the memorial: A LA MEMOIRE DES MORTS POUR LA FRANCE EN SYRIE-CILICIE. On either side were monuments to the Tirailleurs Algériéns, Tirailleurs Sénégalais, Zouaves de 3ème RM et 83 soldats inconnus, who had come from all over the French Empire to give their lives for nothing. The dome was like a temple, hovering protectively above a long slab of stone on the ground. Decorated with nothing more than a simple cross, the slab had no inscription, nothing to reveal who lay beneath it. Salim whispered, “Le Général.”
The general and 561 of the men under his command stayed behind while the survivors, Christian and Muslim, French and native, retreated to other corners of the dying empire. The last detachment in Turkey of the Armée du Levant remained, buried, numbered and for the most part named and dated, on the only remnant of French territory in the eastern Mediterranean. They had fought and died near here, but there was nothing about their battles worth remembering. Their army had passed through, like so many before it, and left its dead beside a port town which took little notice of history’s struggles. As we left them to begin our ascent of the Amanus Mountains, the sun was setting into the sea, extending a finger of dying red light through the darkness into the open tomb of the last commander of the Army of the Levant.
“Everybody is Turk,” the general said. He was speaking in English with a strong Turkish accent.
“Everybody?”
“Everybody,” he repeated impatiently, “is Turk.”
General Sami Oytun was the Turkish governor, or vali, of the last Arab province ruled, as almost all Arab provinces had been for four centuries, by Turks. He did not resemble the man in the large portrait behind his desk, the sophisticated and handsome, even dashing, man with blue eyes, dressed in white tie and tails, the familiar Moustafa Kemal Atatürk. Atatürk stared, as he did in one costume or another from walls in every government office in Turkey, over the shoulder of his vicar in the region he had forfeited but not forgotten for twenty years, Turkey’s southernmost province of Hatay.
General Oytun was short, wore gold-framed spectacles and had hair, cut close where it grew at all, nearly the colour of his brown striped jacket and trousers. The civilian suit was the new uniform of Turkey’s military rulers, and in it he might easily have been a small businessman or a brewer. A century earlier, his predecessor would have worn a red tarboosh, or fez, on his head and sported an imposing black moustache. He would have worn the uniform of an officer and ruled the province only long enough to make himself a rich man, before returning to a villa on the Bosphorus.
General Oytun was one of many retired military men rewarded since Turkey’s latest coup d’état with sinecures in the provinces. Fifty years old, speaking softly but forcefully, General Oytun governed more than one million people in nine districts covering 5,000 square kilometres. His seat was an 18th-century Ottoman palace in the centre of Antioch. “Except for the court,” a Turk explained, “he is responsible for everything.”
“Syria claims this province –”
“This is not our problem,” the governor interrupted.
“Does Syria do anything here about its claim?”
“You have seen that Syria puts Hatay on its tourist maps?”
“Yes.”
“That is all it does.”
On either side of the large door to his assistant’s office hung large maps of Hatay, the map on the left plastic and multi-coloured, the one on the right in relief and painted green and brown. The relief map gave the better impression of the Amanus Mountains towering over the shore and the depression through them to Antioch. In all maps published in Syria, the border was drawn further north to include General Oytun’s province, just as all Syrian maps called Israel Palestine.
“What are the percentages of Muslims, Christians and Jews?”
‘Ninety-five per cent are Muslim.”
“Sunni Muslim?”
“Of course,” he said. When he pressed a buzzer under the top of his large oak desk, I feared the floor beneath my chair might open. It didn’t.
“And the other five per cent?”
“They are Jews and Christian Orthodox.” In response to the buzzer, an assistant came into the office, and the general asked him to bring us tea.
“Any Shiah Muslims?”
“No.”
“Any Alawis?”
“No.”
I looked across the governor’s imposing desk and into his eyes. He was not a man to be contradicted.
“Everybody is Turk.”
The assistant returned carrying the tea, two small, clear glasses on a silver tray. I took a sip. With an inch of sugar at the bottom, it was as sweet as treacle. The governor, who had apologised for his English, offered me one of his Turkish cigarettes and lit one himself. He told me to enjoy the tea and wait for an interpreter before we continued.
I had arrived the night before, driving through the dark over the Gates of Syria, the Bailan Pass. The sun had set behind us, and where the mountain road took a sharp turn to begin its descent, we saw the moon. It was a sudden, spectacular vision, the full moon larger than I had ever seen it, its light reflected in the flowing waters of the wide Orontes and shining on the fertile plain below. The moon cast shadows from the high mountains which protected both sides of the vast plateau extending south through Syria and Lebanon, where it was called the Bekaa, to the Red Sea, and then on to the Great Rift Valley in east Africa. Ours was the northern pass east to Aleppo, but there were others which, like steps holding a ladder together, had since antiquity joined vibrant seaports with inland trading cities – Latakia with Hama, Tripoli with Horns, Beirut with Damascus and Jaffa with Jerusalem. The passages had always been open for caravans, invaders and refugees travelling in either direction. The larger, more powerful inland cities had always dominated the coast, a fact of history ignored at their peril by the Crusaders in the Middle Ages and by the United States of America when it stationed US Marines in Beirut in defiance of Damascus in 1983.
We continued along Alexander’s invasion route, guided by the moonlight. In the middle of the vast plain, straddling the overgrown riverbanks, lay the silent, ancient city of Antioch.
In the last century, the gates of the city were locked at night. Each quarter inside the walls had its own iron grilles locked shut by watchmen to keep marauders out. If I had arrived after dark in any century before this, I would have camped outside the walls. No one, whether native or foreign, would have travelled alone, and I could have had as many as fifty armed escorts for protection. In the morning, we would have requested permission to enter.
Luckier than an earlier generation of travellers or the first wave of Crusaders who laid siege to Antioch for months before massacring the Greeks, Armenians and Arabs inside I roamed undisturbed for hours on foot through the narrow, curving walkways that made up the streets of the old quarter. The ancient Zenginler Mahalesi, or Rich Quarter, had become the poor section long before my arrival. The place was deserted,