Three intersections of March 8 come to mind in the memory of the Syrian who is interested in history, its days, and its occasions. Its middle is global (Women’s Day) and its two ends are specific to Syria, the formation of the state and political transformation.
Perhaps it will be more popular among them, if you ask any educated person in Syria, what was linked to what the Baath called a revolution on this day exactly sixty years ago, and attributed it to him and his military commanders specifically and their head (Hafez al-Assad), whose name cannot pass as an abstraction in the regime’s curricula other than He is preceded by all the attributes of exaltation and titles of wisdom and inspiration. But what is hidden from mention and history is what has priority in the contemporary history of Syria and the day it was declared a state. There is no doubt that the geography and people of Syria have been, since the dawn of conscious history, the cradle of successive civilizations, but it was not an independent state under this name (Syria) until March 8, 1920.
Not only did the Baath curriculum and its authors obscure that day from the memory of the Syrians, but they also obscured the political mechanism in which the first Syrian constitution that was completed was approved, and after three conferences of the (General Syrian Congress) composed of representatives elected by the people with controls and in two stages, it culminated in that. Today, by announcing the constitution and declaring the State of Syria a constitutional kingdom called (the Syrian Arab Kingdom).
What the Baath also missed after its alleged revolution, and to consolidate dictatorship and the cult of the individual, is that the king’s powers were limited and that the constitution did not give him the right to make any fateful decision, but rather placed it in the hands of the legislative authority despite the king’s dissatisfaction, and then his protest that the constitution made his authority symbolic and protocol, but The constitutional fathers had the final say so that the constitution produced by the elected elites would be respected and appreciated according to the testimony of historians and experts in law and constitutions, both in the West and in the East.
The General Syrian Congress, which produced the first constitution for the Syrian state, had its members elected in the democratic manner that had been approved since the establishment of the Council of Envoys in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which stipulated the selection of representatives in two stages, the first in which adult citizens directly chose their representatives, and the second elected representatives. In the first stage, those elected are their deputy to the Council at a rate of one representative for every fifty thousand, a method that scholars still view as protecting democracy from a drift towards populism. As for the Syrian General Conference, to speed up the process of convening the conference and to harass the British in Palestine and the French on the Syrian coast, where their forces were present, the election process took place in its second stage in the rest of the country (the Levant), and the proxy system was adopted in the areas where the British and French prevented elections.
A look at the names of those who were in the Constitutional Committee, and the names of more than a hundred who represented the Syrians in elections at their general conference more than a hundred years ago, from figures of politics, thought, law and legislation, and what their sessions were full of in discussing the proposed articles article by article with precision and detail to reach the final formula. It gives an idea of the responsibility the elites had and the extent of their qualifications to truly be “statesmen” who aspire with insight to establish a civilized civil state, and what makes the student or the informed person feel sad about the reality imposed by the military decades later when they jumped with coups to power and control the fate of a people and a nation, and those who used them to write Detailed constitutions imposed on the rulers make even the ignorant person ashamed of some of their contents, especially those that occurred after March 8, 1963, and the calamities that the Baath military unleashed on them that ended in a farce of inheritance, to which a constitution was used as a pretext when necessary, and then what was in it was not implemented despite its faults.
The recurrence and connection between the three intersections of today’s occasions that comes to mind, calls for mentioning about women on International Women’s Day, the extensive discussion that took place in lengthy sessions of the Syrian General Conference, over two days, about granting educated women the right to vote, which was not implemented at the time. Most of the countries in the world are only rare, and it almost saw the light of day as a constitution had it not been for the caution of those who were likely to open doors for its novelty and leadership to those lurking in the state’s founding phase. The most likely opinion was to postpone its approval without folding it, and if it had been implemented, it would have made that constitution pioneering among the first ten countries in the entire world to ratify that right. For women, and previously for many European countries, including France (the country of freedoms that occupied us) and many others.
The establishment of the Syrian state for the first time by its name on this day, March 8, one hundred and three years ago, and the completion of an advanced constitution in a record period of time within very difficult circumstances after a world war, and the occupiers sharing its spoils at the gates and even at the outlets, does not put us in a position only for comparison or research. About the Baath military’s absence of that shining memory in our modern history, nor what was stolen by those who shared the change in what they called a revolution exactly sixty years ago, nor what their party did with what it became by defining itself since its founding as a “coup,” so its coups became within it and against its basic goals. Of which the applied system has become its opposite, transforming, despite its horizontal expansion, into a utilitarian system that continues to this day with a reality that is damaged from within and lacking any real leadership or decision-making position, as it has produced a dictatorship that takes refuge in a security system that has gone beyond the concept of a security state to a “savage state” and clinging to “Mafiosi.” ) And above the ruin. Indeed, that establishment in its memory after generations makes us wonder, as the twelfth anniversary of the Syrian people’s revolution marks that reality and those systems, and after all the sacrifices and the catastrophic situation that befell the homeland and the people, about the inability of the revolution so far to present its elites, despite their many individuals, To be (statesmen) and at the forefront of establishing the homeland we hope for.
