Syria's Angry Neighbors

Peaceful, pro-Western Lebanon, where Americans usually send their dependents when disorders occur in other parts of the Middle East, rang with the sound of gunfire last week. With elections only a week off, the neutralists and leftists felt that they were getting nowhere by orthodox politicking, and ordered a general strike. They demanded the resignation of Premier Sami Solh's government which recently approved the Eisenhower Doctrine. At the end of sporadic fighting, seven rioters were killed, 70 wounded, including onetime Premier Saeb Salam, and 341 arrested. Police captured one demonstrator armed with a Czech-made automatic pistol, and accused others of slipping in across the Syrian border.

Syria may not be to blame for everything troublesome in the Middle East these days, but it tries to help when it can. Nasser's only devoted ally in the Arab world, and Communist-infiltrated to a degree that Egypt is not, Syria is finding itself unpopular on every one of its borders. The Syrians dislike the Turks to the north only a little less than they hate the Israelis on the south. They quarrel bitterly with the pro-Western Iraqis on their east. And last week, after Syria had glumly withdrawn its 4,000 troops from Jordan, the Syrian army issued an angry statement accusing the Jordanians of having at one point in last April's crisis requested "three Iraqi divisions, placed at the frontier, aiming to attack the Syrian forces."

The accusation was too much for Jordan's 21-year-old King Hussein, whose reply was even hotter. "Syrian forces encircled towns in northern Jordan at the moment of the plot against the government," answered the Jordanians, "lent assistance to Communist leaders" and "armed and largely paid criminals to assassinate certain personalities in Jordanian territory; 160 of these criminals, provided with Czech arms, have been arrested." Naturally, Jordan continued, it was bringing these charges not "to embitter relations between Arabs," but just to help "Syrian public opinion to guard against its deceitful hypocritical leaders."

Some Syrians, long unhappy with their country's role as instrument of Soviet policy in the Middle East, acted. At week's end 35 Shaabist Deputies resigned from Syria's 132-man Parliament, and 25 sympathizers were expected to follow. The middle-class Shaab (People's) Party comes closer than any other important group in the country to being pro-Western, even though its campaign propaganda talks as loudly about "positive neutrality" as anyone else. The resignations may bring on a general election, but there is no evidence that in such an election, the ruling clique of leftist politicians and army nationalists would lose.

In the midst of these signs of division in the Arab world, the Arab League Economic Council was meeting in Cairo last week. The Saudi Arabia delegation proposed the formation of a huge Arab company to build and operate a network of pipelines all over the Middle East. Presumably Saud's proposal was designed to offset the oil companies' plans to build a pipeline from Iraq across Turkey to the Mediterranean, bypassing Syria. Saud himself, for all his distaste at the present leadership in Syria, likes to keep friendly with the Syrians, since the Tapline pipes that carry Saudi oil to the Mediterranean cross Syrian territory.

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