Sultan Pasha's Surrender

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, c1920s
Soruce: syrianhistory.com

In a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs back in Paris, the Secretary General of the High Commission of the French Mandate in Lebanon remarked triumphantly on the recent passage of independence celebrations on April 5, 1923 with what appeared to be a strong show of allegiance from the inhabitants of the Druze regions of Southern Syria. Over 8,000 individuals from throughout Jebel Druze and Hawran attended the festivities in Sweida and the local notables met with French representatives to show their support. Recent disputes between local groups had apparently been settled, and most importantly, the notorious Druze leader Sultan Pasha al-Atrash had finally surrendered to French authorities.

Sultan Pasha al-Atrash had not always been an outlaw. As a prominent figure in the Druze community, he had participated in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire that had resulted in Syria's independence and subsequent occupation by France. Trouble started when two years prior, a man named Adham Khanjar had attempted to assassinate General Gouraud, the High Commissioner of the French Mandate and a bearded symbol of French power in the Middle East following the First World War. As was often the case in incidents of rebellion in Syria, Khanjar had sought refuge in the home of a notable personage in the form of Sultan Pasha; however, the French army raided strayed from convention by raiding his home on June 7, 1922 in order to apprehend Khanjar. Sultan Pasha was outraged by this violation and demanded that Khanjar be released, but the French elected to destroy his house and issue a warrant for his arrest, sending Sultan Pasha to the Jordanian border where he and his men began launching raids on French convoys. At the time of his surrender, he had been sentenced to death. 

According to this letter, the "ever dissident" Sultan Pasha presented himself to the High Commission before everybody at the independence celebrations and asked for mercy (l'aman). His surrender was accepted and he was placed under house arrest in Sweida with 15 of his men. The Secretary General indicated that it would be imprudent to follow through with the death sentence that had been issued for Sultan Pasha, saying that the evidence against him was "more moral than material" and that it would be unwise to make him into a martyr who would be seen by his countrymen as an innocent man falsely sentenced to death in a French court, thereby delegitimizing the entire justice system. The letter suggests the complete subjugation of Sultan Pasha, who "had recognized French authority and humiliated himself by acknowledging his crimes" against the French state. Therefore, the Secretary General suggests that he be pardoned directly by the highest authorities in France as a showing of clemency towards a newly subject population. This, he says, would be in the best interest of France's prestige in the region.

The supreme confidence of the French administration is indicative of the triumphalism that accompanied their arrival in Syria. The Secretary General wrote, "the voluntary acceptance of our administration by Jebel Druze, as has already happened in the Alawite State, constitutes one of the best justifications of our Mandate." Perhaps this was a case of, as they say in French, selling the bear's skin before it has been killed, because by this very logic, there was cause for great concern regarding French claims of legitimacy in the region when just a few years later in 1925, the Druze regions of Southern Syria rose against French administration leading to a rebellion that spread throughout the Mandate remembered as the Great Syrian Revolt. Sultan Pasha would again play a prominent role in this revolt, once again earning a death sentence and fleeing to Jordan only to return some years later as a hero, outliving the French Mandate by many decades and passing away at age 91 in 1982.

The letter also raises questions about possible disconnects between French colonial administrations on the ground and decision makers in Paris. The frequency and comprehensiveness of communications between these two administrations belies possible silences or distortions of local realities. Emboldened French administrators in Syria likely believed in the success of their mission and had every incentive to represent the events in a favorable manner, giving the impression that all was well and quiet under French dominion in the Druze mountains. This false consciousness likely played a role in subsequent failures to assert hegemony in the region once contradictions proved too great to be brushed aside by a confident colonial discourse. 

Citation: MAE - La Courneuve, Série E (Levant) 270, 1-4.

Syria

rebellion