Before These Memoirs - Part 21: The Intelligence Assault on Ratib al-Husami in the Halbouni Quarter

Wednesday the 27th

In this gloomy atmosphere, dripping with rancor and malice, in which the President of the Republic and his government had come to resemble the caliph of the second Abbasid era:

A caliph in a cage,

between a Wasif and a Bugha,

saying only what he is told to say,

the way a parrot speaks.

Mr. Rushdi al-Kikhya came before the nation with a surprise statement, once again declaring his own withdrawal from all political activity.

Mr. al-Kikhya had refused to support the secession.

He had not put himself forward as a candidate in the parliamentary elections, keeping to his own home, though he had not hidden his own displeasure at Dr. al-Qudsi's acceptance of his return to the presidential chair after his arrest on 28 March 1962, and at his signing of the "ill-omened" document binding himself to pledges that satisfied neither Rushdi al-Kikhya nor the country.

There was, then, nothing new in al-Kikhya's renewed announcement of his own withdrawal from politics, beyond what this sincere, upright, honorable man's absence had already left behind on the political scene. And who knows? Had he only accepted the presidency of the republic on the very morning of the secession, the course of this region's history might have taken an entirely different turn.

One of our own Aleppan brothers visited me and told me frankly that "our own supporters" in Aleppo held it against me that I had taken up the Nasserist line, and "assured me" that I had suffered a great political loss because of it.

When he named the circles that "held this against me," I understood exactly who these supporters of the secession were, and told him that these were people with no homeland but their own interests, who support no one but whoever makes it easy for them to exploit the people and drain its own wealth.

Yet he softened the mood by telling me that "the First President" had remarked to him "that he would never forget my own chivalry," seeming to refer to the stand I had taken in supporting his own nomination as director of the Arab World Bank during the union, a post he was in fact appointed to.

When we nationalized the banks, Dr. al-Qudsi kept this same post.

Today President Abdel Nasser delivered a new speech, attacking Akram al-Hourani, branding him an apostate, a turncoat, a career politician, and one who had made himself an agent of colonialism. The President was addressing the members of the Legislative Council in Gaza.

He told them plainly, without mincing his words, "that he acknowledged he had no ready project at present to save Palestine from Zionism, and that the Palestinians must therefore organize themselves to be ready for the day of real action."

He remembered us kindly, saying: "Among the Syrians with us were AbdulWahab Homad, Nihad al-Qasim, Amjad al-Tarabulsi, and Farid Zeineddine. They held themselves to a high moral standard, and worked with us for many long years, yet never once let slip a single word of the state secrets they came to know. They were never men of deceit, for they were honorable citizens, and never career politicians."

Thursday the 28th

Mr. Rashad Barmada, Deputy Prime Minister, contacted us, asking us to visit him at his home since he was unwell, and since he had important information he wished to share with us.

I went to see him, accompanied by Mr. Ali Bouzo. What he told us did not rise to the level of credible fact.

He claimed that "Abdel Nasser is training saboteurs in Lebanon," and that "he is making a major effort within the Syrian army to bring about a new coup," and that "British forces are massing heavily in Jordan."

He also said that "Turkey has mobilized its own armed forces, increasing its readiness and its own buildup along the Syrian border."

We asked him whether he wished one of us to travel to Cairo at his own request, in his capacity as Deputy Prime Minister. He answered, sorrow dripping from every word:

"It's too late now. We expect strife to break out within forty-eight hours."

We were left in a state of real confusion, for here was a responsible official, sensing the danger of the situation, expecting an imminent coup.

When we left him, deeply uneasy, we decided to sleep away from our own homes that night, for his information might well be accurate.

An armed clash might break out, and no one could predict its outcome or its course. Caution in such circumstances is a duty, not a luxury.

And yet we harbored real doubts about what we had heard from our friend, for he had frightened the members of the chamber of deputies, warning them of dire consequences should they fail to resign, and once they had resigned, they accused him of having "exploited" them, entering the ministry at the cost of "cutting off their own livelihoods," having sworn to them "on all that is sacred" that he would accept no post himself after this resignation. The deputies now resented him, and were trying to do him harm.

Nor did they "sleep on the injustice," for they submitted a sharply worded petition to the President of the Republic, published by the newspapers, in which they took on the army itself, in terms no one before them had dared to use. It was as though they had decided to "go for broke," all or nothing. It was dated 24 June 1962.

Among what it contained: "The cause of the instability is the tendency of certain individuals or groups to overturn the system whenever they feel matters are not proceeding to their liking." Stability, it said, requires certain conditions be met, so that the people may feel secure in its own fate, among them:

1. The disappearance of any notion of domination by any single body whatsoever. (It is clear this remark points to the frequency of coups and the domination of a handful of adventurous officers over the destiny of the country and its people.)

2. Submission to the people's own will, as expressed through fair elections.

3. Confining the efforts of bodies and groups strictly to their own proper domain, with no authority interfering in matters outside its own original jurisdiction.

The memorandum continues: "Is it true that resentment over the amendments the (chamber of deputies) introduced to certain laws was what led to its own suspension?"

This is a reference, in the memorandum, to the amendments introduced to the Agrarian Reform Law and to the socialist laws of July, issued during the union in 1961.

Legislative decrees were subsequently issued canceling every amendment made to the Agrarian Reform Law and to the gains the workers had won during the union, in addition to renationalizing the Five-Man Company, once Dr. al-Qudsi had been restored to the presidential chair.[1]

The memorandum continues: "The government has itself admitted, through the words of its own head, that it does not represent the people's own will, and that the Prime Minister's statements show a clear retreat."

In closing, the deputies' memorandum demands the necessity of "the return of parliamentary institutions and the constitution, and the establishment of a parliamentary government to fill the political vacuum."

Our late friend Rafiq Bishur, who had served as Minister of Culture in the first secessionist era before returning as a member of the chamber of deputies, handed me a copy of this memorandum, and told me that not a single deputy had agreed to sign it under his own name, which is why it was submitted to the President of the Republic bearing only this signature: "The Executive Committee of the Deputies."

On this same day, intelligence agents attempted to abduct our colleague Mr. Ratib al-Husami in the Halbouni quarter of Damascus, while he was with his own wife and children. Two cars of the kind used by the intelligence directorate cut off his vehicle, and their occupants got out and tried to force him from his own car to go with them, but he resisted them fiercely, and the women accompanying him raised their voices in distress, drawing a large crowd around this "novel spectacle." The intelligence men then pounced, slapping his face with their palms and kicking his body with their feet, the way rabid dogs behave in a fit of madness. Once they had carried out their own "national duty," they fled the scene, before a crowd of the neighborhood's own merchants and residents.

Our friend Rashad Barmada was informed of the incident, and expressed his own regret, promising to look into the matter. I contacted Major Suhail Sharqiya and asked him to open an investigation to learn who had sent the attackers, and he too "promised" his own good will.

But no one is unaware that these vile acts were, in fact, planned and ordered by the commander of the internal security forces, Mati' al-Samman, who does not recognize the government's own existence in the first place.

Friday the 29th

Telephone calls and letters reached us from a number of honorable citizens, expressing their support for our own boldness in speaking the truth, the soundness of our own purpose, and the sincerity of our own devotion.

Below is the text of a letter from Prince Bahjat al-Shihabi and the distinguished scholar Izzat Darwaza:

"To His Excellency the President of the Syrian Arab Republic,

Peace, God's mercy, and His blessings be upon you. To proceed:

We have read the text of the memorandum submitted to Your Excellency by Messrs. Nihad al-Qasim and his colleagues, and we believe they have said in it everything that serves the highest national interest, with truth, sincerity, and devotion, and we support it with our whole hearts, appealing to your own sincere Arab conscience, in which we place our faith, to exert every effort of your own toward the positive steps needed to realize what it contains, and second, to exert every effort of your own to halt the raging, feverish, poisoned current now sweeping through Syria, fed by narrow regionalism, by personal ambitions and grudges, and by ethnic chauvinism both at home and abroad, a current that amounts almost to a bitter, powerful moral ordeal, one capable of destroying every possibility of establishing national unity and clearing the Arab atmosphere.

We ask God to guide your own steps toward whatever serves Arabism's own good and the realization of its sacred goals, and peace be upon you."

28 June 1962

Bahjat al-Shihabi

Izzat Darwaza

To these two distinguished signatories was joined the freedom fighter known for his fine reputation and his own long record of struggle on both the battlefield and the political stage, the freedom fighter Nabih al-Azma, who wrote on the memorandum:

"I too share the view of my two honorable brothers," signing his own name beneath what he had written.

This memorandum, no doubt, unsettled those responsible for the crumbling regime, for it opened their eyes to the fact that "the Nasserist Five" stood not alone in this national struggle, but drew on strong, deeply rooted popular support.

Saturday the 30th

We finalized the text of the memorandum we would submit to the President of the Republic, protesting the assault on Ratib al-Husami.

The local press continued spewing its own poison against us, and against any thought of unionist rapprochement with Egypt.

It had become certain to us that the secessionist officers were the ones truly controlling and directing the civilian government, pushing "mercenary" journalists to publish their own obscenities and slanders.

We entrusted our assaulted brother himself with submitting the memorandum personally to Dr. al-Qudsi.

Sunday, 1 July

Our brother Ratib met with the President of the Republic, and told us the following:

The President told him he was at a loss over the matter, and did not rule out that his own attackers might have been men of the Syrian secret police, or Saudi or Jordanian agents.

The President asked Ratib: do you think I should submit my own resignation from this post?

And if I resign, will the citizens not ask, to whom have we been left in these difficult circumstances?

He added: today I met with the Prime Minister, Dr. al-Azma, and al-Azma was complaining bitterly of the general situation, saying he held no real authority over the Ministry of Interior, and that matters had slipped entirely from the government's own hands.

Confusion was plain in the President's own words, for he had nothing real to say.

On this same day, General Muhammad al-Jarrah, a member of our own secret leadership, told us that Bashir al-Azma had confessed to him that he did not know what to do, and found himself forced to change his own positions under the influence of "certain threats" directed at him. It had become clear to anyone with real insight that the President of the Republic no longer held any real power at all, and had become a prisoner in his own palace, without strength or resource.

How much better off you would have been, Nazim al-Qudsi, without this ruinous position, one you yourself had anticipated the very day you accepted the presidency! We were then surprised to learn that the Minister of Interior had issued a decision banning all political activity, though the Prime Minister broadcast a statement saying that he alone spoke in the state's own name, and that the Minister of Interior spoke only in his own personal capacity, and that the Interior Ministry's decision banning political activity therefore carried no weight at all.

Rumors say that the next attack will fall on me.

I must wait, and prepare myself.

The newspapers today broadcast a statement from Akram al-Hourani, demanding that Abdel Nasser form an investigative committee of five people "whom Abdel Nasser himself trusts," to investigate the charge President Gamal had leveled against him, that he "took Saudi money" that had made him rich, even though he barely had enough to live on from one day to the next.

He proposed the committee be made up of three Syrians, AbdulWahab Homad, al-Qasim, and Amjad al-Tarabulsi, and two Egyptians, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer and Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi, though he also demanded that Abdel Nasser himself be investigated over the money he takes in.

With every passing day, the gulf between "the Baath Party's own wings" grows wider still.

Here stand Aflaq and al-Bitar, one wing. Akram al-Hourani and Riad al-Maleki, another. And there exists as well the wing of the Unionist Socialists, who broke from the Baath Party and remained "Nasserists." No one quite knows which camp Hafez al-Jamali belongs to, since he grows more obsessive by the day in his attacks on Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian army, and "beloved" Egypt itself.

Afif al-Bizri wrote that Abdel Nasser had informed American intelligence of the Iraqi revolution before it even took place.

Even this police colonel, named Zalfou, has taken to fabricating claims that he was burned in the intelligence service's own oven during the union, over his own Communist affiliation. One of his own friends took him to task for this unjust outburst, and he told him he had decided to defame the union era, even by way of outright fabrication.

Today, the referendum on Algeria's own independence, so hard-fought, is being held. General de Gaulle managed to rein in the French extremists, realizing that the killing, the demolition of homes, and the burning of schools the French colonists were carrying out would lead France nowhere at all. He therefore chose the path out of a crisis that had begun threatening France's own finances and sowing the seeds of division among its own sons.

What has unsettled the Arabs, though, is the removal of Colonel Boumediene and two other officers, on the very eve of the referendum vote. In protest against this measure, Ahmed Ben Bella left Tunisia for Libya, and from there broadcast a statement denouncing this removal.

Has the dispute over dividing the bear's own skin, before it has even been hunted, already begun among Algeria's own freedom fighters?

Monday, 2 July

A writer in the newspaper Al-Nasr, owned by Wadih Saydawi, one of the most bitter opponents of any rapprochement with Egypt, claimed that Syria would soon become the stage for violent unrest, citing as evidence threats by "Nasserist" workers to declare a strike in the factories, paralyzing economic activity, and the possibility they might resort to sabotaging machinery and burning down buildings, along with the "Nasserist" teachers' union's calls not to grade examination papers, and the movements of "Abdel Nasser's American agents" stirring unrest within Syria, "baring their own fangs of malice," as the honorable writer, Sharif al-Ra's, put it.

Al-Azma's government feared every such movement, and so it banned the General Federation of Workers from holding its own meeting scheduled for 29 June.

What unsettled this government, as Al-Nasr reported in a prominent column, was the Five-Man Company workers' threat of an open-ended strike, should the government decide to reinstate the workers the union government had dismissed from this factory, along with news reaching it that a military movement would erupt before 23 July, the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution.[2]

The local press carried what the Egyptian magazine Rose al-Youssef had written in its own latest issue, that Syria was headed for serious events in the very near future, and that "the Syrian army will not remain idle."

A New Statement from Dr. al-Azma

Dr. Bashir al-Azma issued new statements to the press and foreign news agency correspondents, saying:

1. That Abdel Nasser had himself cut off the path of contact with us, since the answer to our proposal to negotiate with him did not come in his own voice, but took the form of an article written by Al-Ahram's own political editor.

2. That federation or union were both matters left to the chamber of deputies, since deciding questions touching the very being of the state falls within the jurisdiction of this council, which represents the people, the true holder of authority.

3. That he would not stay silent over acts of sabotage that might occur before 23 July, the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, and that he would suppress them with every available force.

4. In answer to a question from a Daily Telegraph correspondent about his own view of Abdel Nasser, he said, "that despite our own disagreements with him, Abdel Nasser remains one of the Arab figures truly devoted to the Arab cause."

An Aleppan friend of mine, a practicing lawyer, visited me today, and told me that some members of the People's Party were working to gather its own scattered remnants, to bring it back to life. He said Akram al-Hourani's own articles and statements had begun tarnishing the very halo of union, and wounding Abdel Nasser's own standing personally, but he assured me that two-thirds of Aleppo's people remained steadfastly unionist, and that any free elections would tear the secessionists out by their very roots.

I was not surprised by this conversation, for I remain in constant contact with my own city, and know full well who makes up the secessionist triangle there. A hint, in such matters, often speaks louder than an open statement.

Nor did my visitor forget to describe the Prime Minister as a wretched clown, wondering aloud how he could bring himself to accept such humiliation.

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Endnotes:

[1] See the issue of the newspaper Al-Wihda al-Kubra (as it was called during the secession era), dated 22 April 1962, which contains the full text of Bashir al-Azma's government's ministerial statement, along with the decrees canceling every amendment the "chamber of deputies" had introduced to the socialist laws referred to above.

[2] Lieutenant General Zahreddine wrote at length about the news of this conspiracy, pp. 281, 305.