The Second Year of the Union - Part 6: The North-South Military Budget Dispute and a Private Meeting with Nasser at Home

Saturday, 16 May

We held a meeting at Dr. El-Kaissouni's home that lasted several hours, attended by Minister Hassan Salah al-Din.

The house was a large villa with a garden facing four streets in the center of Cairo, once belonging to a wealthy Greek, confiscated by the Egyptian government following the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and sold at "public auction." I was told El-Kaissouni had bought it for a mere four thousand pounds.

He was, without doubt, a man of excellent financial learning, a former senior official at the World Bank in Washington, and a graduate of American universities, having previously taught economics at the Egyptian University before the burdens of the ministry were placed on his shoulders in the wake of the Free Officers' revolution of 1952. He remained in office until Abdel Nasser's death, though I do not know whether he continued as a minister under Sadat.

He had been close to the President, and we knew the President trusted him and took his advice. Yet he did not remain true to their bond of "affection," for he wrote two articles in an Egyptian newspaper after Abdel Nasser's death, complaining that he "had never been free to do or say as he wished, because of his dictatorship."

I was genuinely astonished when I read these two articles.

At this session, I explained to El-Kaissouni that achieving a proper balance in the Northern Region's budget required first achieving a proper balance in defense burdens between the two regions, and so I proposed reducing the Syrian defense budget.

El-Kaissouni said he had no authority to decide such a grave matter, and suggested I meet with Vice President Abdel Latif Boghdadi and discuss it with him instead.

Sunday, 17 May

By an appointment I had requested, Mr. Boghdadi received me.

I already knew he was the second man in the state after the President, and once we met and our conversation ran long, I understood why he held this standing.

Beyond this, he was the very picture of courtesy and tact.

His own view was that I should take up the matter of the army's budget with the Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, Mr. Ali Sabri, and Field Marshal Amer, and, ultimately, with the President himself.

I had dinner at the Casino Fontana, on the Nile, with my brother and his family. We enjoyed an excellent dinner, the enchanting view of the Nile, electric lights shimmering on its two far-apart banks, the casino itself appearing to its own patrons like a ship resting at anchor on the deep blue water.

I am a son of Aleppo, deprived of a river to nourish my own city.

The Queiq is a river that dies out each summer, so that they have to sprinkle its bed with water just to keep the dust from rising off it. The Barada, in Damascus, fares somewhat better than the Queiq, but it is no larger than an irrigation channel in summer, its breath failing, so that anyone looking at it might mistake it for a sickly black snake, slithering shamefully between the rocks, out of sight of prying eyes.

It is no wonder the Egyptians call their own river "the Sea of the Nile."

Even so, those celebrating the Union used to sing of "a union watered by the Barada and the Nile." Abdel Nasser could scarcely believe that this trickling stream he saw beneath the foot of the hill was the famous Barada itself.

The dinner "bill" came to about one Egyptian pound per person.

Today, the Egyptian pound is worth barely a quarter of an American dollar, and the dollar itself is now barely enough to buy 150 grams of mutton in Damascus.

One wonders at the hidden secret behind the manipulation of world currency prices by the Western, Jewish-controlled houses of finance, whose first victims are always the oil-producing states and the peoples of the Third World, along with the old women who tuck away "a lifetime's savings" beneath their bed pillows, to face the darkest of days.

Monday the 18th

Mr. Ali Sabri, Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, received me at his office. He was one of this refined group that had seized power.

I presented him with the financial situation in the Northern Region, and pressed the point that it was impossible for me to present a balanced budget so long as our Northern armed forces' budget exceeded 50 percent of the total general budget, while this same proportion stood at only about 18 percent of the total general budget in the Southern Region. I told him that the Northern armed forces were demanding 243 million lira be allocated to them, out of a budget whose real revenues did not exceed 400 million lira.

I pointed out to him that these sweeping dismissals within the ranks of the First (Northern) Army, along with pensions granted at 75 percent of the top salary of the rank they had held, would place a crushing burden on whatever remained of the general budget.

He said: "This is a temporary situation. The officers must be allowed to live comfortably, so that they don't throw themselves into the arms of communism."

I found no answer in the man that was not, in truth, outside his own authority to give, and so asked him to arrange an appointment for me with His Excellency the President.

Wednesday the 20th

I met with Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, Vice President of the Republic and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, at his office in the building of the (former Syrian-Egyptian) Joint Command in Heliopolis.

The man, whom I had met many times before, was easy to approach, clear in conscience, closer to the simplicity of a good-hearted peasant than to a marshal presiding over an imposing army.

He was the very picture of warmth and good cheer, his features open and relaxed. He opened our conversation with "his own complaint about the Baathist party members' domination of state posts."

This was not the kind of thing I was accustomed to hearing from officials.

We returned to the budget figures, and the imbalance between the two regions' budgets.

He surprised me by saying that the "First Army" had initially requested 350 million lira, and that he had only managed, with great difficulty, to bring the figure down to the 243 million they were now requesting of me. He added that he promised to try not to use nine million of that sum, except in cases of the utmost necessity.

So the sum of 243 million had to be set aside, with a possibility of saving 9 million of it. When I pointed out to him the disparity between the two regions' proportions, he said: "You're entirely right. But there's an existing situation we've inherited, and remedying it takes time. Your own army, before the Union, contracted to buy weapons that flooded into your warehouses faster than you could absorb them, so that some were simply left out in the open. Since the Union came about, we've cancelled a series of these contracts, since their weapons weren't needed and their costs couldn't be paid." He gave a concrete example: the purchase of three Russian submarines, without a single Syrian officer trained to operate them, and forming crews for them would take a full three years.

The Field Marshal added: "I almost came to believe there had been a deliberate policy in Syria aimed at drowning the country in debt to the Eastern bloc, so as to keep it tied to them through its own inability to repay these debts."

I later had occasion to see these very submarines, lying beached north of Latakia on the sandy shore, like three whales that had come to our own country to die, the way some whales beach themselves in mass strandings on the shores of certain warm seas.

Wednesday the 21st

Minister Ali Sabri contacted me at the (old) Semiramis Hotel, and told me the President was expecting me at his home, in Manshiyet al-Bakri, at twelve noon.

I knew this house well, its modest construction, its simple furnishings. It was the very house he had bought on installments back when he was still a junior officer, and he never changed it, right up until he met his Lord there.

I was received in the "reception salon," which was really just a single room. On its mantelpiece, I noticed photographs of a number of his own friends: Tito, Nehru, Sukarno, and Shukri al-Quwatli, and beside them the photograph of a man I could not identify, along with President Rajendra Prasad of India. The secretary then showed me in to the President in his adjoining office, seating me in a leather chair facing his desk, while he sat in another chair opposite me.

Warmth filled his face, and the smile never left it. We spoke of various matters for an hour and a half.

The first thing he asked me about was my own opinion on the question of the National Union.

I told him: "I was in Cairo when the decision forming it was published a few days ago, but I would point out that the roots of partisanship have not yet been uprooted from people's hearts, and it might be wiser to wait a while longer." He answered this observation by saying that the communists "had begun to stir," and that it would not do to leave the field empty for them, free to toy with people's opinions.

He then made a subtle jab at the Baathists, regarding their own seizure of state posts and their exclusion of others, sometimes under the label of "reaction," sometimes under "lack of faith in the Union."

He expressed his own conviction that the coming elections should be left entirely free, with people choosing whomever they wished, "because these people aren't against the Union, but they may well be against certain local practices," as he put it.

I seized the chance to tell him: "I believe it serves the Union's own interest not to exclude anyone from the former parties from the elections. I'm an old party man myself, and I know there are sincere patriots and unionists free of self-interest in the other parties as well."

The President assured me this was exactly what would happen, and, in this assurance, was answering the Baathists' own calls for "isolating the reactionaries" and "the communists," striking them from the electoral lists.

I found no need to explain the state of the army's budget in any real detail, since I found the President genuinely understood the true situation. He answered what I had said by explaining that reducing the First Army's budget was simply not possible: it included 136 million lira for officers' and soldiers' salaries, while the salaries of the officers and soldiers of the Southern Army came to only two million pounds.

Beyond this, Syria's border with Israel was an extremely sensitive one. If the Jews were to push southward, the Second Army could halt them at the Canal, but only after they had already crossed more than 300 kilometers, during which Egyptian aircraft could tear them apart in the Sinai desert. But if they surged northward instead, where could we possibly stop them? They would be a mere 60 kilometers from Damascus. For this reason, it was essential to maintain the nine "Syrian" brigades, which we had reinforced this year with an additional two million pounds. This was on top of the fact that Iraq now formed a kind of fifth division that might yet be thrown onto the scales of any future battle.

As for the Northern Region's general budget, he promised me he would set aside, from the Southern Region's own budget, whatever was necessary to cover the Northern financial deficit.

When I told him: "This weighs on our conscience, Your Excellency, since I know how difficult your own financial situation is," he laughed with genuine warmth and said: "Haven't we become one people?"

He was, however, embarrassed on the matter of "hard currency." I told him: "We'll manage that ourselves." He said: "Then we'll give you rice, rubber, and other goods instead. The government can sell them to the people, and their price will go into the general treasury as revenue, a gift from the Southern Region to its Northern 'brother.'"

I asked his leave to take my departure, and he insisted on walking with me himself all the way to the outer door.

Upon my return to Damascus, I studied the budget with each minister individually, reserving whatever we could not agree on for the Executive Council.

I did not find it useful to contact the tripartite ministerial committee the President had formed, made up of Boghdadi, al-Hourani, and Zakaria Mohieddin, to study the region's affairs, in order to discuss the budget with them. I chose instead to make the President himself my own point of reference, following in this the advice of al-Mutanabbi, who said:

Those who seek out Kafur turn away from all others,

and whoever makes for the sea thinks little of the streams.

Thursday the 22nd

On the plane, my mind wandered back to the subject of our own language. I have always favored simplifying grammar and spelling rules, and enriching our vocabulary with words that keep pace with the evolving needs of society. I had delivered the opening address at the Second Conference of Arab Writers and Language Academies in Bloudan in 1956, as its president, and in my own capacity as Minister of Education of the host state, and I had pressed hard on these very linguistic necessities. I once read, in Ibn Durayd al-Azdi's book on the description of rain and clouds (223-321 AH), edited by Mr. Izz al-Din al-Tanukhi, the following passage:

"A Bedouin was once asked to describe a rainstorm, and he said:

"A cloud bank rose as dusk spread and swelled high, climbing until its horizons darkened and its great masses turned black, its outer wisps scattering, its fringes trembling, its banks growing thick and heavy. The thunder rumbled, the lightning flashed and vanished, and the water burst forth, filling every pool to overflowing and flooding the low ground, mingling the mountain goats with the gazelles and joining the wild cattle with the young ostriches, driving the ibex and the sheep down from the lofty, towering peaks to the dark valley floors, until nothing remained on the heights but a creature clinging on for dear life, or one slipping and tumbling down. And that is part of the decree of the Lord of the Worlds upon His sinning servants."

Let him understand who is able to.