Syrian Social Nationalist Party
| Parti Social Nationaliste Syria Syrian Social Nationalist Party |
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| Party leader | Lebanon: Assaad Hardan Syria: Ali Haidar |
| founding | 1932 by Antun Saada |
| Headquarters |
Beirut , Lebanon Damascus , Syria |
| Alignment | Greater Syrian nationalism , secularism , anti-Zionism |
| Colours) | Black, red, white |
| Parliament seats | 3 out of 128 in the Lebanese Assemblée nationale 7 out of 250 in the Syrian People's Council |
| Website |
www.alqawmi.info www.ssnp.net |
The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP, Arabic الحزب السوري القومي الإجتماعي, DMG al-Ḥizb as-Sūrī al-Qaumī al-Iǧtimāʿī , often translated in French as Parti Populaire Syria ) is an extremely nationalist political party in Syria and Lebanon . She advocates the establishment of a nation state that unites present-day Syria, Lebanon, the Turkish province of Hatay , the areas of the former British Mandate Palestine ( Palestinian Autonomous Areas and Israel ), Jordan , Iraq and Kuwait in one Greater Syria .
The party was founded in Beirut in 1932 and has played an important role in Lebanese politics on several occasions. She was involved in the failed coups in 1949 and 1961. She has been active in the resistance against the Israeli occupation since the 1982 Lebanon War . It is now part of the pro-Syrian bloc, which includes the Amal movement and Hezbollah , but has limited popular support. In Syria, the SSNP became a political force in the early 1950s; however, it was completely suppressed in 1955 and not legalized until 2005, when it joined the National Progress Front led by the Syrian Ba'ath Party . In the course of the Syrian civil war , the Syrian branch split into two wings, one led by Assaad Hardan from Lebanon, which belongs to the ruling NPF , and another branch led by Ali Haidar, the "Syrian Social Nationalist Party (al - Intifada)", part of the opposition alliance “ Popular Front for Change and Freedom ” represented in the Syrian parliament .
founding
The SSNP was founded by Antun Sa'ada , a journalist from a Greek Orthodox family . Sa'ada emigrated to South America in 1919 at the age of 15 . After returning to Lebanon about ten years later, he worked as a journalist and lecturer at the American University of Beirut for Middle Eastern Civilization . In November 1932 he founded the first cells of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party , which for the first three years of its existence only worked underground. After the party began to take public action, it quickly became an object of repression by the French mandate administration . Sa'ada was arrested several times and emigrated again to South America in 1938.
The party he founded corresponded in its organization to the European fascist parties, organizations and movements of the 1930s. The political scientist Gilbert Achcar describes it as “a Levantine clone of the Nazi party in almost every respect: in its political ideology, including hostility to the Enlightenment , and its geographical-racial-nationalist theory with a pseudo-scientific tinge as well as in its organizational structure and in the Leader cult. Even the party flag in red and black with a four-pointed screw instead of the swastika is modeled on the Nazi flag ”.
The similarity by name between "social nationalist" and "national socialist" is cited by some as an indication of an ideological relationship. In Arabic, however, this similarity does not exist ( iǧtimāʿī stands for "social", ishtiraki for "socialist" in the common Arabic term for NSDAP ).
The party had an authoritarian-hierarchical structure and a leader with unrestricted powers. Their ideology was a decidedly secular nationalism, which envisaged the complete separation of religion and politics as a condition for real national unity. The second condition was economic and social reform.
The SSNP initially completely opposed pan-Arabism . Sa'ada's Pan-Syrian concept of a nation was a geographical one, not one determined by ethnicity, language or religion. That is why he believed that the Arabs can not form a nation. The thought leader of the Arab nationalists Sati 'al-Husri concluded that Sa'ada “misrepresented” Arab nationalism by falsely equating it with the image of the Arabs as Bedouins and with Muslim sectarianism. The historian Maher Charif sees Sa'ada's theory as a reaction to Syria's religious diversity and cites the later expansion of Sa'ada's vision of a Syrian nation to include Iraq, another country with considerable religious diversity, as evidence of this. The party accepted that because of “religious and political considerations” the existence of an independent state Lebanon was necessary for a certain period of time.
The German consul in Beirut reported to Berlin in November 1935 that he had discovered an attempted coup led by Sa'ada. In the spring, the latter asked him to receive military training and arms deliveries from Germany, but he firmly refused this request. Sa'ada's later rejection of fascism and National Socialism is justified with this rejection.
The Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi gives a different interpretation and points to the position of the Greek Orthodox community as a large minority in both Syria and Lebanon, for whom "the concept of pan-syrianism was more meaningful than the concept of Arabism," since they too the time in Lebanon opposed the dominance of the Maronites . Sa'ada did, according to Salibi
“Found a ready-made following among his confessional members. His idea of a secular pan-Syrianism also proved to be attractive to many Druze and Shiites; to Christians other than the Greek Orthodox, including some Maronites repulsed by both Lebanonism and Arabism; and also for many Sunni Muslims who attached great importance to secularism and who felt that they had much more in common with the Syrians, whatever their religion or name, than with the other Sunnis or Muslim Arabs elsewhere. Here the idea of nationalism broke out again, which was sufficiently credible to make it valid. In the Lebanese context, however, it became a cover for the somewhat more archaic, fundamental Greek Orthodox independence. "
From 1945 onwards, the party adopted a slightly more nuanced position on Arab nationalism, with Syrian unity seen as the first step towards a Syrian-led Arab Union.
The party in Lebanon
Sa'ada returned to Lebanon in 1947. After the cancellation of the parliamentary elections in 1949, in which Sa'ada had promised himself electoral success, the party attempted a coup , which failed. Sa'ada fled to Syria, but the Syrian dictator Husni az-Za'im extradited him to the Lebanese authorities, where he was executed.
During these years the party was classified as right-wing , anti-communist and pro-Western. In the Lebanon crisis in 1958 , party members took part on the government side and fought against Arab nationalist rebels in northern Lebanon. The party was subsequently legalized.
In 1961, the party launched another takeover attempt, which resulted in renewed persecution and imprisonment of many of its leaders. The SSNP members discussed their ideology in prison, which was influenced by Marxism and other ideas of the left. At the beginning of the 1970s, the party underwent a remarkable ideological transformation. It was now left-wing and no longer hostile to Arab nationalism. This ideological turn, however, led to secession from smaller groups, which still followed Sa'ada's ideas.
Civil war, resistance
The practical test for this new direction came in 1975 with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war . The SSNP militias fought alongside the Lebanese national movement against the Phalangists and their right-wing allies. Another important development was the establishment of contacts between the party and its former bitter enemy, the Syrian Ba'ath Party .
After the Israeli invasion in the Lebanon War in 1982 and the subsequent destruction of the left forces, some left organizations regrouped to take part in the resistance against the Israeli occupation. Between the Lebanese Communist Party , the Ba'ath Party and some smaller left-wing groups, the SSNP played an important role in this. One of the earliest known actions by the party in the resistance was the killing of two Israeli soldiers in a cafe on Rue Hamra in West Beirut by party member Chalid Alwan. A party member, Habib Shartouni, was also responsible for the bomb attack on then Lebanese President Bachir Gemayel on September 14, 1982 . Several female suicide bombers, including Sana'a Mehaidli , were members of the party. In 1983 the party joined the National Salvation Front, which was founded to prevent the implementation of the May 17 agreement signed by Israel and Gemayel's brother and successor in office, Amin Gemayel .
Since the end of the civil war
The SSNP remained active in the resistance until the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied Lebanese territories in 2000, although the role of all secularized groups in later years was almost completely overshadowed by the militarily and propagandistically effective, Shiite fundamentalist Hezbollah .
The SSNP took a pro-Syrian position in the debate over the Syrian presence in Lebanon . The political following is now rather limited. It is currently represented by three members in the Lebanese parliament.
The party in Syria
In Syria, the SSNP grew to a position of considerable influence in the years following the country's independence in 1946 and was an important political force immediately after the restoration of democracy in 1954. It was also a serious opponent of the Syrian Communist Party and the radical pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, the other two major parties in Syria at the time. In April 1955, Colonel Adnan al-Malki , a well-known leading Ba'athist in the Syrian army , was assassinated by an SSNP party member. Communists and Baathists took this opportunity to eliminate their main political rivals. Under their pressure, the SSNP was practically wiped out as a political force in Syria.
The SSNP's position during the civil war in Lebanon was roughly the same as that of Syria. This enabled a rapprochement between the party and the Syrian government. During the presidency of Hafiz al-Assad , the party was increasingly tolerated. After his son Bashar al-Assad succeeded him in 2000, this process continued. Although still officially banned, the party was allowed to attend meetings of the Ba'ath Party-led National Progressive Front as an observer from 2001 onwards. In the spring of 2005, the SSNP was the first non-socialism and Arabist party in Syria to be legalized. The party is believed to be one of the largest political parties in the country after the Ba'ath Party, with perhaps 90,000 members. In the course of the Syrian civil war, the party split: a branch led by Assaad Hardan in Lebanon and Issam al-Mahayri remained in the ruling National Progressive Front, an opposition part under Ali Haidar, the "Syrian Social Nationalist Party (al - Intifada)" , which was not licensed by the Syrian state, founded the opposition Popular Front for Change and Freedom together with the Party of the People's Will . On the day it was founded, May 2, 2012, Haidar's son Ismail and other party members were murdered by anti-regime militias in Homs.
In the course of the Syrian Civil War , the SSNP gained strength in Syria and entered into a tactical alliance with the Syrian central government.
The party worldwide
Aside from Lebanon and Syria, the party also has a following in the Lebanese and Syrian diaspora . The party has branches in Australia , the United States , Brazil , Argentina and various states in Western Europe . It is less popular in the rest of the Middle East and has very few followers in Jordan and the Palestinian Territories .
literature
- Charif, Maher: Rihanat al-nahda fi'l-fikr al-'arabi , Damascus, Dar al-Mada, 2000.
- Hourani, Albert : La Pensée Arabe et l'Occident (French translation of Arab Thought in the Liberal Age ).
- Irwin, Robert: An Arab Surrealist. The Nation , Jan. 3, 2005, pp. 23-24, 37-38.
- Salibi, Kamal: A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered, London. IB Tauris , 1998. ISBN 1-86064-912-2 .
- Seale, Patrick, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988. ISBN 0-520-06976-5 .
- Information about Lebanese parties on a nationalist website: www.cedarland.org .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Irwin, p. 24; SSNP website ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ("Our Syria has distinct natural boundaries ...") (accessed September 2, 2006).
- ^ Aron Lund: Divided they stand , An Overview of Syria's Political Opposition Factions, Uppsala 2012, p. 58, pdf
- ↑ Charif, pp. 243-244
- ↑ a b Achcar, Gilbert: The Arabs and the Holocaust . Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-89401-758-3 , pp. 77 f.
- ↑ Daniel Gerlach: The Middle East is not going under . 1st edition. Edition Körber, Hamburg 2019, p. 108 .
- ^ Hourani, p. 326
- ↑ Sati 'al-Husri: The Islamic Band, in Andreas Meier, Ed .: Political currents in modern Islam. Sources and Comments. Federal Agency for Civic Education , BpB, Bonn 1995 ISBN 3-89331-239-0 ; and Peter Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal 1995 ISBN 3-87294-724-9 pp. 54-61. This edition also as a special edition. the state center for political education North Rhine-Westphalia with the same ISBN. All editions are abridged versions of The Political Mission of Islam. Programs and Criticism between Fundamentalism and Reforms. Original voices from the Islamic world. Peter Hammer, Wuppertal 1994
- ↑ Charif, p. 216
- ^ Hourani, p. 326
- ↑ Salibi, pp. 54-55
- ^ Hourani, p. 326
- ↑ Seale, p. 50
- ^ Edmond Melhem: The Lebanese Crisis of 1958 and the SSNP. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on September 25, 2004 ; Retrieved June 4, 2014 (English, article on a pro-SSNP website on the party's role during the 1958 Lebanon Crisis (also known as the 1958 Civil War)).
- ↑ Seale, p. 349
- ↑ Debra D. Zedalis, Female Suicide Bombers , Strategic Studies Institute, US Army, 2004, pp. 10-11
- ^ Asia Times : Asia Times article by Syrian political analyst Sami Moubayed , date, accessed September 4, 2006
- ^ Aron Lund: The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (al-Intifada) , Syria in Crisis, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- ^ Joel Veldkamp: Resurgence of the SSNP in Syria: An Ideological Opponent of the Regime Gets a Boost from the Conflict , Syria Comment, December 19, 2014.
