What to do when a country is majority Christian but desired by pan Arabist? Don’t ask Lebanon because standing together against outsider threats is not possible. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Todays stamp as the look of a French Mandate over an Arab country. Yet the country was independent and Christian. Welcome to the fertile crescent. Where if one side is up, the other side is down. The French had sensibly ran for the door after the war and their lackeys try to fill their shoes. This stamp is surprisingly honest about the situation.
Todays stamp is issue C296, a 5 Piaster airmail stamp issued by the Republic of Lebanon in February 1961. It was a three stamp issue in various denominations that displayed an Arabic map of Lebanon and Christian President Fuad Chehab. According to the Scott catalog the stamp is worth 25 cents used.
During World War II, the French Mandate in Lebanon and Syria initially sided with the Axis aligned Vichy French. This was an embarrassing situation as France was originally an Allied power. The French colonial troops with Lebanese volunteers standing beside them fought the mainly Australian Allied force sent to liberate them. The Australian forces prevailed and promptly turned over the area to Free French forces. France came to understand that their situation in the area was untenable and Syria was turned over to Arabs to declare independence and Lebanon separated out and turned over to Christian rulers who also declared independence from France. The leaders picked were Maronite Christians whose sect originated in Antioch and was a rival of the Eastern Orthodox Christian church and closely identified with the old Phoenician culture. This group was about 22 percent of Lebanon.
Fuad Chehab got his start in putting together military units of Lebanese that were willing to fight with the Free French Forces. When Lebanon declared independence the units under Chehab’s command became the new army of Lebanon. An imperfect power sharing system was in place that guaranteed Maronite Christian domination but granted some representation to the Arabs. Among the Arabs of Lebanon, there were many followers of the pan-Arabist Syrian Social Nationalist and their armed wing, the Eagles of the Whirlwind. They imagined a greater Syria that included Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and even Cyprus and Cilicia in Turkey.
The first two Maronite Presidents faced much armed opposition. Despite being Maronite himself, Chehab’s army would not be under civilian control and did not lift a finger to support the elected President when trouble came. With no help from his own army, President Chamoun asked for and received American armed intervention to put down the Arab uprising of 1958. Then the Americans did what Chehab had really wanted and gave him the Presidency as a formerly neutral consensus candidate.
No one will be surprised that once Chehab was President, things changed in one respect. When the Eagles of the Whirlwind rebelled against him. the Lebanese army was finally on guard to keep Chehab in power. The army was not much help in the later civil wars or against the armed incursions of Palestinians that so destroyed Lebanon later. That is what happens when it is turned from a national stabilizing force to the lever of power of one man. Lebanon goes on ever trying to perfect a power sharing arrangement between Christians and Muslims and to stay independent from Syria. The Eagles of the Whirlwind are still around themselves and fight alongside President Assad’s army in the long running Syrian civil war.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the French for leaving after the war. Imagine the hopeless effort required to stay. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.