100 years ago this week, March 8, 1920, the Syrian Congress declared Syria was an independent nation with Emir Faisal as its King. Faisal lead the Arab Revolt against the Turks during WWI and represented the Hijaz (Arabia) at Versailles. In referencing the Declaration of Independence and President Wilson’s 14-Points, the Syrian Congress declared that Syria was not the spoils of war and that it would govern itself as a democratic nation with a King. An odd mix, but not so odd for the time, when the modern system of nation-states was still forming following the collapse of the world’s great empires as a result of the war to end all wars.

To put Syria’s declaration in context, it is helpful to understand its role in the Great War, which is a lesser known, but equally as important as the story of the Arab Revolt. During WWI, the Syrians ardently opposed the Turkish-German alliance and a war against Europe. The eastern Mediterranean was blockaded by the British navy in order to cut-off Germany from the Suez Canal, but it also cut-off Syria, which was not a front in the War.  In response to their lack of support, the Turks brutally suppressed the people of Syria who refused conscription and resisted the Turks at every turn. As a result of the blockade, Turkish oppression, a plague of cicadas (true story) and a freezing winter of 1916-17, Syria fell into a famine that resulted in over 200,000 Syrians dying of hunger. Emaciated corpses littered the roadways as starving Syrians roamed the country looking helplessly for food. The Germans called them serferberlicht, the walking dead. In Syria, it is known as the safir barr, literally “in country travels”, but more accurately translated as internal displacement. No nation outside the theater of war suffered more during WWI than Syria.

Syria’s Declaration of Independence was swiftly condemned by the Entente powers of France and Britain, who had their own designs on the Middle East. But, they were bogged down implementing the Treaty of Versailles in Europe, while at the same time the French military chased the Turks around the Anatolian peninsula. The cries for America’s involvement went without a response as President Wilson had his own troubles trying desperately to obtain the votes he needed in the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations covenant.

Wilson’s silence caused the Syrians and the Europeans fits. He was asked by the Europeans to elaborate on his 14-Points, particularly point XII, where he decreed that the nationalities under Turkish rule would be assured an “undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” France and Britain sought Wilson’s input on the limits of Article XII before finalizing the treaty with Turkey to no avail. In Wilson’s silence, the Syrians concluded that (1) Turkey would be left only with Constantinople and the Anatolian peninsula, if they could keep it amid other nationalist movements by the Armenians and the Kurds, (2) Syria (including Mt. Lebanon), Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia would be left to pay Turkey’s war reparations, and (3) they would be occupied by France and Britain.

The Syrians saw their moment and they seized it. Anticipating that the Ottoman Empire would be broken up and divided between France and Britain as the spoils of war, the Syrians united around independence. As the New York Times reported on March 12, 1920, “Although they cherished the French for their culture and the British for their business, the Syrians cherished more than either their independence, which they insisted on if the Turkish Empire was to be broken up.” (NYT, March 12, 1920, p. 1.)

What followed was the first Arab Spring from March to July, 1920. The First Arab Spring is described in historic detail in The Peddler by Stephen Louis Moses.