ABSTRACT
Several years following the exchange of direct diplomatic representatives between Turkey and newly-independent Syria in 1946, relations between these two neighbouring countries remained markedly chilly. Memories of the recent past seemed to have formed this attitude in no small way: Turks remembered the ‘treason’ of Arab-Syrian nationalist circles during World War I and the ‘stab in the back’ they suffered from the Arab revolt; Syrians remembered the misrule of their Ottoman masters and the heavy-handed methods the latter adopted in attempting to suppress the nascent Syrian-Arab nationalist movement More important, perhaps, Syrians were unable to forget what seemed to them as the arbitrary transfer of the province of Alexandretta by the French mandatory authorities into the hands of the Turks on the eve of World War II. In the eyes of the Syrians, Alexandretta (or Hatay, as it was named by the Turks) was the legal property of the Syrian people, and the Turks were nothing but usurpers. 2
