Lebanon’s hollow victory: The last Syrian soldiers leave Lebanese soil

April 2005: The Syrians’ sin, of course, was to outlast their welcome, writes Robert Fisk

Syrian soldiers sitting in Chtoura, in the Bekaa Valley, head to the Lebanese-Syrian border on 6 April 2005 (AFP/Getty)

They’ve gone. After 29 years in Lebanon, the very last Syrian soldiers – men who were unborn when their army arrived – travelled through the border station here, making victory signs and waving. What victory? What was there to wave about? Mission accomplished. That was what we were supposed to believe: this was an army of peacekeepers returning triumphantly home to Syria after decades of sacrifices. They even took their statues with them. Some Lebanese didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

But at least the Syrian army, which originally came here on an Arab League peacekeeping mandate in 1976, was not humiliated in its last hours. The Lebanese army paraded hundreds of troops alongside the red-bereted Syrians and both presented arms to their respective commanders. There was a tinny Lebanese band and a rather more melodious band from the Syrian army that struck up “The Keel Row”, to which the Syrians – rather than marched – actually bounded along in time to the music, running past the reviewing stand of Lebanese and Syrian officers. Across the border in Syria, it all looked good on the state-run television, not least because a party of Syrian civilians had been brought by truck to the frontier to shower their soldiers with flowers.

The Syrian departure still seems unreal to many Lebanese despite the villagers from Majdal Aanjar, who performed the dabke dance at the frontier to express their joy at the final withdrawal, and their mayor who said that at last he was no longer suffocated. I arrived to report in Lebanon the day after the Syrians crossed the frontier in their tanks in June 1976, and yesterday I realised that I had outlasted them.