ISLAM-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE

91 Kemal since 1923: discrimination at the beginning of the 40's and then a series of pogroms at the beginning of the 50's led to mass departures. No less the Tur- kish Republic punished the instigators of pogroms: going so far as to condemn the Prime Minister of the time, Adnan Men- deres, to the gallows. Nowadays there are only 100,000 Christians left in Turkey. SIRIA At the beginning of the 20th century Christian communities (Greek Orthodox, Melkite, Armenian, and Aramaic) formed a quarter of the Syrian population. They still represent 7% of the current popu- lation: 1.5 million out of 20 million. This relative survival is explained by the par- ticularities of the local politics: the Assad regime, placed since 1970, relies on the Alauite Moslem minority which, in order to counterbalance the Sunnite majority (a little more than 50% of the population) has made alliances with the other minorities of the country, Christians but also Druze or Kurdish-speaking Sunnis. Therefore, Christians have not ceased to question the future and to emigrate, when they had the opportunity. In order to benefit from charitable aid or political sympathy, when abroad, they pass themselves off as Palestinians. An "honest lie": some Pale- stinians are of Syrian-Lebanese origin. LEBANON In 1932, 800,000 Christians formed 55% of an estimated 1.5 million Lebanese po- pulation. Today, after various turbulences and above all the long civil war at the end of the 20th century (1975-1990), there are 1.5 million Christians, 27% out of 4.5 mil- lion. More than half of them are refugees "from the inside", driven out of their city or village of origin and forced to re-enter the last strongholds with a Christian majority, such as the eastern suburbs of Beirut. A Christian Lebanese diaspora has formed in Europe, the United States, South Ame- rica, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia. In total it would number 6 million people, of which 2 million in the United States. If the President of the Republic is still a Christian (a tradition since 1943) the real power is now in the hands of Sunni or Shiite Mu- slims. Certain Christian clans have allied themselves with the Syrian Alautians "protectors" and occupiers of Lebanon since 1990. Others, in particular the Ma- ronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, serve for the restoration of national independence. PALESTINE At the beginning of the 20th century Chri- stians formed almost ¼ of the Palesti- nian Arab population, a little more than 100,000 people out of a total of half a million. In 1948 they probably made up 20%: 300,000 out of 1.2 million. After the first Arab-Israeli war there were about 70,000 Christians displaced, in addition to 500,000 Muslim refugees. Between 1949 and 1967, the Jordanian regime, the power occupying the West Bank, multiplied the harassment of Christians and encouraged their emigration: the Christian population of East Jerusalem decreased from 28,000 to 11,000 people in that period, which means that 17,000 people (61% of the population) were dri- ven out. On the contrary, the Israeli re- gime, from 1967 to 1993, favoured the maintenance of Christians on the spot, but without ever uniting the Christian lo- calities on the outskirts of Jerusalem, as the Christian mayor of Bethlehem Elias Freij had hoped. The creation in 1994 of the Palestinian Authority, the Muslim quasi-State directed by Yasser Arafat, is a catastrophe: continuous persecution le- ads to the departure of ¾ of the commu- nity. Some of them find refuge in Israel, others in Europe or the United States. In