The Second Year of the Union - Part 7: The Founding of the National Union and Palazzoli's Errors About the People's Party

Monday the 18th: The National Union

The President issued his long-awaited decision forming the "National Union," an event we had waited for so long. This union is the sole "political party," replacing the former parties, though without carrying the name "party" itself.

Abdel Nasser had set, as his own condition to the officers who proposed union to him, in place of the federation the Syrian Chamber of Deputies and the Egyptian National Assembly had already approved, the dissolution of every political party and the establishment of a "national union" in their place.

And so, once the decision dissolving the political parties was issued, the matter of establishing the National Union became an event everyone was waiting for. And now, political life, one the people themselves take part in, has returned.

I hasten to say that I lived in France for seven years, and witnessed its own genteel party battles firsthand, battles that naturally came to a halt during the German occupation. I then took part in Syrian party life myself, from the French withdrawal in 1946 until the Union came about, and the party I helped found, the People's Party, stood as one of the most prominent features of Syrian political life. Beyond this, given my own legal training, as a professor at the Faculty of Law, which teaches people the rights of the individual and the citizen, I lean toward a multiparty system, so that parties may serve as platforms for citizens, through which they can express their own wishes as to how their country is run, in fulfillment of democratic principles.

For this reason, I was never enthusiastic about this fledgling "National Union." Indeed, I never found its own taste to my liking at all. But I had no choice but to accept it, in keeping with the general will, and it was, in any case, one of the conditions of the Union itself, one we had already accepted.

In all honesty, I will say that some of the parties before the Union were hardly respectable parties at all. Some of them disowned our own national identity, some were run from abroad, and some were mere gangs of "thugs" who formed their own "party" simply to dominate individuals and serve governments accustomed to buying politicians with money for their own ends. But these were merely diseased blemishes, unable to corrupt the political life genuinely respectable parties themselves practiced.

One of these was our own party, the finest of them all, given the moderation of its own political direction, the firm national conviction rooted in its members' own conscience, its members' own integrity, and the great number of prominent intellectuals in its own leadership, along with its own progressive leftist leanings.

The second was the Arab Baath Party, led by two secondary-school teachers, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, who drew in an excellent group of the finest intellectuals. Mr. Akram al-Hourani's own party later joined them, and it took the name the Arab Socialist Baath Party.

This was the very front that led political activity toward the Union.

And so it was the party that played the active role on this national path.

I would have liked to mention the National Party as well, heir to the glories of the struggle against the French occupier, which drew in the masses of the people, had its own historic leadership not passed on, honored and revered, into God's own presence, only for Husni al-Za'im to lay hands on it afterward, striking down its own radiant face, Shukri al-Quwatli, and removing him from the presidency of the Republic. None of its own prominent figures remained on the political stage, save Sabri al-Asali and Fakhir al-Kayali, and these two found "safety" working under the wings of the "National Gathering," dominated, on the civilian side, by Akram al-Hourani, and moved by the suggestion of the politicized officers.

I laughed a great deal when I read, in Mr. Palazzoli's own book,[1] that "the People's Party leans toward Baghdad, and took part in several projects to achieve union between Damascus and the Hashemites of Baghdad, its own center of strength being the city of Aleppo, deeply interested in opening markets for its own trade in the Mesopotamian plains." There is a great deal of confusion in this account, one far removed from the truth.

But what truly made me laugh was the author's own precise knowledge of the party's leaders, for he said, on this very same page: "This party was founded at the Faloga Conference in 1947, and grew rapidly under the leadership of Maarouf al-Dawalibi, a son of the Sanjak of Alexandretta" (it was, in fact, formed in 1948).

Dr. Maarouf, one of the party's own brilliant leaders, is a great university professor, from Aleppo, from the very quarter where Sulayman al-Halabi, who killed the French General Kléber in Cairo, grew up. Nor was he ever, in fact, president of the People's Party at all.

I likewise laughed when I read, in Dr. Najah Muhammad's own book,[2] of "Lieutenant General Jamal al-Faisal's own appointment as a minister," when he was, in truth, a great unionist officer, who commanded the First Army during the Union, and went home once the secession took place, never once entering the cabinet at all.

History has a right to expect "historians" to be more precise in what they relate, so that they are not accused of carelessness, or worse, ill intent, to say nothing of outright fabrication.

Anyone looking closely at the definition of the "National Union" will find nothing to recoil from in it, but will, rather, feel a real sympathy for it, since it seeks to steer the people away from the tragedy of "class conflict," gathering them instead into a single vessel, far removed from hatred and discord.

Below is the text of Article 1 of Decision No. 935 of the President of the United Arab Republic, dated 16 May 1959:

"The citizens of the United Arab Republic shall form a National Union, working to fulfill the mission of Arab nationalism and to spur efforts toward building the nation soundly, politically, socially, and economically, by establishing a cooperative, democratic, socialist society, free of political, social, and economic exploitation."

The following articles set out the organization of the election process.

Article 26 imposed a fine of no more than 10 Syrian lira on anyone registered on the electoral roll who failed, without excuse, to cast his own vote. This gave constitutional lawyers occasion to debate the question of the voter's own freedom, whether he should be left to judge for himself whether to cast his vote or not, or whether he should be compelled to cast it, as a citizen obliged to contribute to building the state, under threat of penalty.

Supporters of "compulsion" hold against the principle of leaving the voter free that this principle of freedom results, in practice, in the country being run by a minority.

For if we assume there are 1,000 voters, and only 600 of them actually come to the ballot boxes, a candidate would win with 301 votes, since this represents a majority of those who actually voted. This means the country would end up governed by whoever secures the support of a mere 30 percent of its citizens, a situation rejected in theory but common enough in practice. Even so, a penalty of a mere 10 lira could hardly serve as any real deterrent.

Republican Decision No. 140, dated 15 May 1959, was later issued, concerning the posting of voter rolls and accepting applications regarding them.

The executive regulations issued by the central Minister of Interior, Zakaria Mohieddine, on 16 May of that same month, set out the method for forming the National Union's local committees, announcing the decision summoning voters, the procedures for nominating candidates to the local committees, and organizing the voting process.

A decision issued by this same minister, No. 25, dated 25 May, regulated the form of the voting card, and what it had to contain.

On 8 June 1959, Republican Decision No. 987 was issued, summoning voters to elect the members of the National Union's local committees, in the cities and villages of the Republic, on 15 July 1959, a date later amended by Decision No. 1056, moving the elections to 8 July of that same month.

President Abdel Nasser noted, in the tripartite union talks of 1963 (between Egypt, Syria, and Iraq), that Nasserism, which went beyond a dictatorship of a single class, sought "to resolve social questions by peaceful means, unifying every stratum, feudal landlords, capitalists, and reactionaries alike, within the National Union."

In his own view, the National Union "is not a party, for it represents the whole of the people. Nor is it the sole party, for a single-party system is a dictatorial system, unsuited to the nature of our own people, a democratic people, or to the nature of our own revolution. It is, rather, a framework encompassing the interests of every class."[3]

He set aside for workers and peasants no less than 50 percent of the seats in its own general congress, this general congress being the country's own highest authority.

On this very basis, Dr. Mamoun al-Kuzbari became Secretary-General of the National Union, considered, in the political arena, the representative of the enormous capitalist Five-Man Company.

There is no doubt that the feudal landlords and capitalists, especially, found real comfort in the National Union organization, since it opened its own arms to them, for they had genuinely feared, before the Union, the dominance of the leftist current.

I once spoke with President Nasser about the requests these feudal landlords, hit by agrarian reform, kept bringing me, to collect payment for their own expropriated lands, and their own urgent need for money, and asked whether he would agree to my setting aside a sum for them in the general budget. His answer was: no. It is enough for them that this agrarian reform saved their own lives from the peasants, and that they now enjoy the very security they had once lost. No one is unaware that the peasants had repeatedly risen up, before the Union, against their own "masters," threatening to kill anyone who set foot on "their own lands," swayed by a leftist slogan proclaiming that the land belongs to whoever tills it, so that fear gripped these landlords, and they greatly reduced their own visits to their villages.

The elections were held at their own appointed time.

Among their results was the fall of certain Baathist leaders.

Resignations were submitted, and the state's own stability began to falter.

Sunday, 24 May 1959

Owing to the poor agricultural seasons, brought on by the lack of rain, the municipalities, the smaller ones especially, began to feel their own need for money, to be able to pay their own staff's salaries and carry out the essential duties they owed their own citizens.

The President issued Decision Law No. 147, dated 24 May, "permitting the Minister of the Treasury (chairman of the Public Debt Fund) to guarantee, in the state's own name, municipal loans from private banks, up to a maximum sum of ten million Syrian lira."

It is hoped this law will relieve the hardship of the municipalities, some of which have fallen into a real, palpable inability to carry out their own duties.

Tuesday, 23 June: Drawing Up the 1959-1960 Budget

I traveled to Cairo today, to finalize the budget.

It was only natural that I begin by meeting with Dr. Abdel Moneim El-Kaissouni, in his capacity as central Minister of the Treasury. He found nothing to say against the plan I presented to him.

We did, however, pause over ten million lira the President had asked to have included in the unified budget, to be spent on bringing water to certain parched areas of our own Northern Region. El-Kaissouni's own view was that this sum ought to fall on this region alone, since it was meant for its own people's benefit, and could not fairly be placed on the Southern Region's own budget. But I held firm to the President's own wish, and the sum remained within the unified budget, for otherwise it would have been, as the saying goes, "adding insult to injury."

Even so, we remained at odds over establishing a television broadcasting station in Damascus, and certain sums allocated to the Ministry of Culture. Its own minister, Thabet al-Aris, a professor of French literature from our own city of Aleppo, and a brief companion of mine at the Sorbonne, kept pressing me to be "generous" with his own ministry, since it needed "theaters," "music," "recordings," and "artistic troupes." But one can only give from what one actually has.

The Minister of Finance is his own people's two hands, scooping from their pockets with the right, and distributing what he collects to the state's own facilities with the left.

In years of drought, every single lira spent must be weighed a thousand times over.

"The generous give us of their own wealth,

and we, in turn, give of the generous men's own wealth."

Noting, of course, that tax is an obligation, not an act of generosity or charity.

It may well have come, in the modern age, to replace the jizya once paid by the slave, from the fruit of his own labor, to his master, and paid by the non-Muslim, into the treasury of the Muslims' own funds, for his own protection, in exchange for his exemption from military service.

Tax corresponds to the French word "impôt," carrying within it the very sense of compulsion and coercion, and once amounted, before the French Revolution of 1789, to three days' labor a year. Some revolutionaries so disliked this name that it was replaced, for a time, with the word "contribution," meaning a shared contribution. At certain times, it came to exceed seventy days of labor. For this reason, one scholar of financial law mocked it, wondering aloud: which is the luckier man, the one subject to tax, or the one who merely "contributes"?

So long as a country has no natural resources of its own to extract and export abroad, bringing in scarce cash, that is, hard currency, as our Egyptian brothers put it, it finds itself forced to impose taxes, and the more its own expenses grow, the more it finds itself forced to raise tax rates or introduce new taxes altogether. At the Ministry of Finance, we used to hold that the budget ought to grow by 10 percent a year.

For the state's own treasury is nothing but its own subjects' pockets.

Our own professor of public finance at the University of Paris, Barthélemy, used to teach us that "a good finance minister is one who can pluck the chicken without making it feel any pain."

Among his own words I have never forgotten is his definition of the finance minister as "the state's own watchdog," the guardian of its money, on which its very backbone rests. There is nothing in this comparison to a dog meant as any kind of insult.

To raise the citizen's own standard of living, I set aside the greater share of the budget for economic development.

I was invited to dinner at al-Tahira Palace, one of the palaces confiscated from members of the royal family.

The invitation was held in honor of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.

He was a small man, with a famous black beard, known for his own poor treatment of his Muslim subjects, said to make up more than half of Ethiopia's own population. He leans very heavily toward Israel, and one of his own official titles is "Lion of Judah." For this reason, I felt not the slightest ease listening to him deliver his own address, in his own harsh-sounding language.

30 June

Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer invited me to a session held at his own headquarters in Heliopolis, to discuss the armed forces' own budget. I expressed my own astonishment at this unusual invitation, and when he asked me the reason for my surprise, I told him plainly: no Syrian finance minister has ever before attended a discussion of the army's own budget line items.

They ask us for a single sum, one they themselves set, and we approve it "in good faith." After that, we never learn another thing about it. What do they actually do with it? How much of it goes to salaries, and how much to armaments? We simply do not know.

I recall a senior officer once coming to me at the Ministry of the Treasury, some months earlier, with a typed sheet of paper for me to sign. I looked at it, and found it was the final page of a contract running to 25 pages, for the purchase of weapons from Eastern European countries. I asked him where the rest of the contract's pages were, and he said: they are classified, sir. I remarked to him: classified even from a minister of the government, whose own signature is required for the other party to the contract to accept it? I told him: if you do not bring me the contract, and leave it with me for a while so that I can read it, I will not sign it, for I am a trusted, reliable citizen just as you are, and I cannot be trusted and suspected all at once.

The man left, and returned with the contract, and I leafed through it without understanding a single thing in it, kept it in the safe for a few days, and then signed it. I confess I never once did this in any of the ministries before the Union.

Had I done so, it might well have brought down the government.

I sat beside the Field Marshal, surrounded by the army's own commanders, El-Kaissouni, and my own fellow Egyptian regional minister, Hassan Salah al-Din.

We discussed the military budget with real "boldness."

This was an "event" I never expected, for it was simply not the "custom" of government in Syria.

In a cabinet meeting in 1955, President al-Quwatli asked me what the finance inspectors were telling me about the spending of the defense budget, and I answered him that a provision existed barring them from access to these "secrets." He said: this is an anomaly. Is this not the state's own money, and is it not our own duty to know where it goes? I asked him whether he would agree to my bringing a draft law placing the army's own budget under the Ministry of Finance's oversight. He said: absolutely necessary. We had a Council of Ministers meeting that very evening.

I had scarcely gone down the staircase at the Republican Palace when he called out to me in his own booming voice, and said: postpone bringing the draft to the next session.

It was postponed, and I believe it remains postponed to this very day.

I was delighted to see Major General Hafez Ismail again, who had come to Damascus just before the Suez War, for the British had shot down a plane near Cyprus carrying him, one of the armed forces' own senior officers. I felt real sorrow and grief for him, and continued to count him among the dead, until I saw him again, and learned from him that he had, in fact, boarded a different plane from the one shot down that day. He reminded me of a dinner we had shared in the garden of the Republican Palace in Damascus, an evening of truly wonderful warmth.

Two days later, the British-French-Israeli attack on the Canal began, in 1956.

At the end of the session, the Field Marshal kept me on for several more days, to go back over the entire draft budget.

---

Endnotes:

[1] Claude Palazzoli, La Syrie, le rêve et la rupture, Paris, 1977, p. 76.

[2] The Arab National Movement in Syria, p. 392.

[3] Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, al-Ahram, 7 July 1959, cited in Adel Zaabub, The Arab Charter, 1979, p. 56.