Retreat on the Levant

Safe in the back hills of Lebanon, some 35 miles from Beirut, a Lebanese rump government sat tight last week and awaited developments in its struggle for independence with the French Mandate authorities (TIME, Nov. 22), Its best game was to wait, to let the pressure of a general strike, uneasiness throughout the Levant and the Arab world, powerful influence from Britain and the U.S. force the French Committee of National Liberation to come to terms.

Lebanese President Bechara El Khoury and Premier Riad Solh were still detained by the French. All titles and portfolios of the rump administration were held by Habib Abou Chala, shrewd, cautious Beirut lawyer, who had been Solh's Vice Premier, and fiercely mustachioed Emir Mejid Arslan, Defense Minister. Indolent, fun-loving Arslan is the reigning prince of the battlewise mountaineer Druses, who gave French forces a mauling in 1927, asked nothing better than another chance to fight the hated Faranji.

French Advance. When troops attempted to arrest the rump officials in their hill-country headquarters, Arslan whistled up his Druse riflemen and for three hours skirmished with French forces. The mixup ended when British troops moved in between and clamped down.

In Beirut, diplomats labored and negotiated. General Georges Catroux, rushed in as trouble shooter for General Charles de Gaulle and the French Committee, worked late, his sunken cheeks grey with fatigue, his deep-sunk eyes blazing with anger at "the plot." The existence of "the plot"--to build up British influence in the Levant at French expense--was taken for granted even by sobersided Frenchmen, although any such sinister motives were hotly denied by British Minister Sir Edward Spears and U.S. Diplomatic Agent George Wadsworth.

French Backdown. At week's end the French yielded to pressure. Delegate General Jean Helleu (who had arrested the Lebanese officials) was invited to return to Algiers "for consultation"--i.e., to become the goat. President Khoury was ordered released and reinstated. Ardent nationalist Premier Solh was freed, but nothing was said about reinstating him. Negotiations were to be opened at once to restore "constitutional life in Lebanon." After that, broader negotiations would be held in Damascus for the "harmonizing of the French Mandate with the regime of independence promised by France to the States of the Levant [Syria and Lebanon] in the proclamations of 1941." Whether this would calm the troubled waters of Levantine nationalism remained to be seen. Plot or no plot, the British in Cairo had their doubts.

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