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Alexandretta and Hatay
In the extreme northeast corner of the Mediterranean, the Taurus Mountains join the sea, separating Anatolia from the Levant. There, on the Gulf of Iskenderun, lies the port city of Iskenderun (known historically as Alexandretta), and in the mountains inland, Antakya, the ancient city of Antioch. During the Ottoman Empire the region was administered as the Sanjak of Alexandretta. Like most borderlands, it has long been ethnically mixed, Arab and Turkish, with Armenians as well. Historically, Antioch was usually considered a part of Syria, looking inward to the other cities of the Levant, while Alexandretta was a more cosmopolitan port.
In the carving up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, France won the inclusion of the Sanjak of Alexandretta in its League of Nations Mandate over Syria-Lebanon. French policy was to maintain separate administrations for ethnic or religious groups with a geographic identity, and thus in addition to Christian Lebanon, the Druze mountain of Syria, the Alawite areas around Latakia, and the Sanjak of Alexandretta were given special status.
In the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, Turkey had renounced any claim to its former territories. But in 1936, when Syria was slated for independence under the mandate, Kemal Atatürk approached France over the question of Alexandretta. Turkey insisted that a majority of its population were Turks, and that it should revert to the Turkish Republic. France insisted that the Sanjak would maintain its own autonomy within independent Syria.
But this was 1936, and France remembered that Turkey had joined the Central Powers in World War I. In an effort to keep Turkey from drifting towards Germany again, efforts were made to accommodate the Turks. The matter was referred to the League, and Syrian independence delayed. In May of 1937 the League recommended an autonomous Sanjak which would control its own internal affairs, but whose external affairs would be under Syria; it would be demilitarized.
Arab nationalists insisted there were 125,000 Arabs, Christian and Muslim, and Armenians in the Sanjak and only 85,000 Turks; the Turks insisted there was a Turkish majority. A French census found a Turkish population of 46%, a minority but the largest single group in the population. Neither side readily accepted those numbers. But France and Turkey subsequently agreed to a Turkish “preponderance” of influence in the region, which in late 1938 elected a Turkish President and renamed itself the State of Hatay.
Since Syrian independence had been postponed, Hatay was technically still under French mandate. In June of 1939, with European war imminent, France signed an agreement on mutual assistance with Turkey and separately ceded the Hatay to Turkey. Turkey took over, and pressured non-Turks who would not accept Turkish citizenship to leave.
Preoccupied with the coming catastrophe, Europe gave little thought to the effect on the Arabs of this grovelling territorial compromise in 1939, just as it cared little about the consequences for the Arabs of the foundation of Israel nine years later. But of course the Syrians did not forget. They have never officially given up their claim to the land of Alexandretta, named Iskenderun by the Turks, nor its ancient Biblical city of Antioch . Every evening on Syrian television, the local weather programme shows a city in the north-west of the country called Alexandretta, inside the frontiers of Syria.
Locally produced maps, printed in association with Oxford University Press, also show Alexandretta, Antioch and the town of Suweydiyah firmly inside Syria, a mere dotted line representing the real border that cuts Syria off from its former possessions.
Turkey regards Syria's claim to Alexandretta as mischief-making. From Syria's perspective, it is just one more piece of land which has been stolen from it since 1920. In the aftermath of the 1914-18 war, France separated Lebanon from Syria. In 1939, it gave Alexandretta to Turkey. Then in 1967, Israel occupied - and subsequently annexed - the Golan Heights. France carved off Lebanon to satisfy its Lebanese Christian Maronite allies. Israel captured Golan in a war. But France's "gift" of north-western Syria to Turkey was handed over to the Turks without the slightest thought for the Syrians, or for the city's indigenous population.
In 1921, there were only 87,000 Turks amid a population of 220,000. But after a referendum in which Turkish peasants were trucked into the city, a 63 per cent Turkish population was announced in 1938, its fate sealed in a subsequent Franco-Turkish Treaty of Friendship. Arabs had boycotted the elections.
All foreign Christian institutions in the new Iskenderun were closed down; the Turks bought the French missionary hospital; and about 14,000 Armenians, many of them survivors of the Turkish genocide against their people 24 years earlier, fled to Lebanon, where they created an entirely new city at Aanjar, in the Bekaa Valley, complete with Armenian churches and Armenian-language schools.
From the French, now Syria's principal allies in Europe, there comes no comment. After all, they tried to buy Turkey in 1939 and failed. Turkey did, of course, join the Allied cause against Nazi Germany - but only when Hitler's Reich was in ashes in 1945.
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