In the summer of 1925, a large revolt broke out in the French Syrian Mandate, a territory administered by France in conjunction with the League of Nations after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. The uprising began with the Druze in the semi-autonomous region of southern Syria, Jabal al-Druze. But given the unpopularity of French rule, it spread quickly throughout Syria and Lebanon and across sectarian lines. To their international humiliation, the French proved incapable of slowing its expansion, as major uprisings broke out in the cities of Hama and Homs (both centers of the civil war today).
In October 1925, as fighting raged in and around Damascus, the French army responded with brutal force: burning villages suspected of harboring insurgents, publicly parading the corpses of slain Syrian fighters, and indiscriminately shelling civilian areas in Damascus and its outskirts, which resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 civilians. The opposition was finally defeated in the summer of 1927. But the 1925 bombardment of Damascus sparked an international controversy: did the direct targeting of civilian areas in and around Damascus violate the laws of war as they had been established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
On the face of it, there seemed to be a strong case against the French. International law banned attacks against undefended and unfortified areas and direct targeting of private residences, schools, hospitals, and places of religious worship. The French attack on civilian areas in Damascus was clearly intended to break the population’s morale, which, according to the leading American international lawyer Quincy Wright, qualified it as an act of terrorism: “As a normal military measure,” he wrote, “the bombardment of Damascus cannot be justified.”
Syrian Resistance fighters circa 1926
Wright faced a serious difficulty, though, in making a standard international legal case against the French: the fact that their actions took place outside of Europe and against a non-Christian and non-European population (although Syrian Christians did fight alongside Muslims and Druze in the revolt). It was unclear whether Syrians, as a “savage” or “semi-savage” people, qualified for the protection of the laws of war. At the time, the bounds of international law were seen as limited to the “civilized” world—namely, Christian Europe and its settler societies in North and South America. (Two exceptions to this rule were Japan and Ottoman Turkey.) Non-Christian and non-European peoples were not trusted to understand or obey the rule of law; as such, they fell beyond its scope.
The division of the world into civilized and uncivilized realms went beyond mere matters of doctrine: official legal guides that accompanied imperial armies into the colonial theater stipulated that intra-European rules of war did not apply in “wars with uncivilized States and tribes.” Africans, Native Americans, and “Asiatic” tribes were all taken to be insufficiently advanced to obey civilized conduct in warfare; they could be dealt with as brutally as necessary.
Wright’s case hinged on whether Ottoman Turkey’s ratification of the Hague Convention of 1899 entitled the occupants of Syria, as a territory formerly under Ottoman rule, to its protections. He conceded, though, that the failure of one party to observe civilized conduct in war allowed the other to commit otherwise illegal acts in response, and that this was a claim often made by Europeans to justify brutal conduct in colonial warfare. According to Wright’s respondents, the Syrians insurgents had disqualified themselves from the protection of the laws of war for exactly this reason:
“When combatants and non-combatants are practically identical among a people, and savage and semi-savage peoples take advantage of this,” one wrote, “commanders must attack their problems in entirely different ways from those in which they proceed against Western peoples.” The Syrian rebels were “brigands” and brutal thugs, incapable of following civilized rules of western warfare. In facing them down, Wright’s respondent continued, the French should draw on lessons learned by the U.S. military in confronting the American Indians during westward expansion: “The long list of Indian wars … bear eloquent testimony…to the almost universal brutality of red-skinned fighters. With these, there can be little thought of international law.”
This distinction between those qualifying for civilized treatment in war and those who did not lay at the center of the imperial imagination: the Belgians in the Congo, the British and Germans in South Africa, the French in Southeast Asia and Africa, and the Americans in the Philippines—all made use of the most destructive instruments of warfare against civilian populations. It took Wright pages of elaborate legal reasoning to argue (ultimately, in vain) against the dominant view that, since the Syrians could not act decently in war, the killing of their civilians could not be considered a punishable offense.
Racial and civilizational hierarchies like these—used to justify the targeting of Syrian civilians in the 1920s—no longer exist in international law. […]
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