The 9 March Government - Part 1: The All-Night Coup Negotiations and the Author's Appointment as Minister of Finance

Friday, 8 March 1963

Friday mornings are normally quiet in this country, since people from every walk of life settle in for a restful morning, having either enjoyed whatever television offered them the night before, or returned home late on Thursday night from an evening out at some public venue or at friends' houses.

Traffic is therefore always light, especially since Friday is an official holiday, when even the state's own cars retreat to their own designated garages.

People are slow to rise from their beds, except those accustomed to performing the dawn prayer at its own proper time, before sunrise.

It was my own habit to rise early, perform the dawn prayer, listen to the radio, and begin my own reading and writing.

While I was at my own desk, I heard the doorbell ring. I wondered, uneasily, who could be calling at sunrise, since this was not the hour coups usually struck, typically between one and two in the morning. I opened the door. It was one of our own neighbors in the building, a fellow Aleppan, working as a civilian employee at the General Staff headquarters, sympathetic to our own cause. He spoke with obvious unease: a coup has taken place, he said, though I don't know who is behind it. Look after yourself. He offered to have me come stay at his own house, as a precaution against whatever might happen.

I thanked him sincerely and returned to the radio, straining to catch whatever news it might offer. The announcer was the son of Mr. Muhammad Sulayman al-Ahmad, the famous poet Badawi al-Jabal, his own voice distinctive and well known to listeners. Between bursts of military music, he kept repeating:

Stand by for an important announcement. He repeated this many times over.

I hurried out to Mr. Darwish al-Alwani's house, hoping to find some reassuring news there, and to be away from my own house during this "surge of blood." But he assured me he knew nothing at all of who was behind the coup, once I told him one had taken place.

I then decided to go to Mr. Ratib's house, about a kilometer and a half from my own, so that we might summon our brothers Ali Bouzo, Abdel Samad al-Fatih, and Nihad al-Qasim from there, to consider the matter together.

They came, and Mr. Youssef Muzahim came with them. Ali and Muzahim pressed us to hasten to declare our own support for the coup-makers, since they could not possibly be secessionists.

But within the first few minutes, it became clear the radio had begun attacking the secessionists fiercely, accusing them of treason and of weakening the Arab nation. At that, we breathed a sigh of relief, sensing the winds were not blowing against us after all, and felt a real sense of joy and comfort. But we still did not know who the coup-makers actually were, nor their own true goals. Among what the broadcast said:

"Since the very dawn of Arab history, Syria has played an active, militant role carrying the banner of Arabism and union. Syria and its people have never recognized the borders of their own single country, living instead, always and forever, within the borders of the great Arab homeland, so much so that the Syrian national anthem contains not a single word about Syria itself, its every word instead a tribute to Arabism and an eternal celebration of the Arabs' own glories and heroism.

When the Arab League was founded, Syria threw itself into supporting it and pushing it forward.

Then came the union of Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic, a model for our own people's hopes of realizing its greater union, and the Arab people in Syria, in its entirety, threw itself in, with heart, faith, and spirit, giving it every ounce of strength and support it asked for.

But treacherous reaction, colonialism, and opportunism refused to do anything but reveal their own true nature, exploiting the errors of that era to conspire against that very republic to the fullest extent they could, and so came the calamity of the secession.

O Arab people in Syria: a year and a half has passed since the secession, and you have endured the harshest period you have ever known. Elections in the early days of independence overseen by colonialism and reaction, a paid press gnawing at your own aspirations rather than expressing your own convictions and feelings, and your own distance from the liberated Arab states growing wider by the day, until isolation became Syria's own defining trait.

O Arab people in Syria:

Through all of this, your own army was never an army indifferent to its own duty, and its own scheming, professional command served only to encourage the realization of the people's own wish. This morning, it carried out a revolutionary movement, expressing principles it summarized as Arab unity, positive neutrality, solidarity with Iraq's revolution, and a meeting with Cairo."

The new coup-makers sent a telegram to President Gamal Abdel Nasser, telling him: "We have avenged the secession, and washed away its shame."

I found myself asking who these new coup-makers actually were. I knew Colonel Ziad al-Hariri had been considering, and preparing, a coup of his own. I have already recounted the conversation between myself and his own messenger, Captain Aref al-Jaja, who assured me he was working to restore union.

We knew, and the country knew, that the officers of the Fifth Brigade in Homs and the naval forces in Latakia, backed by military units scattered across certain regions, were likewise preparing to overturn the secessionist order and establish a unionist system, whether by restoring the former union exactly as it had been before the secession, or through a revised, "carefully studied" union.

We ourselves, and President Abdel Nasser as well, were leaning toward a federal union, since experience had taught us that full merger union had come before its own time.

But should there be real insistence on it, we would certainly support it, without reservation. We likewise knew that Lieutenant General Zahreddine and his own aides had come to realize that the state the army's own factions had sunk into, having lost all military discipline, had become a danger to itself and to the country, and had begun searching for a "unionist" way out. I mentioned earlier that the Lieutenant General had contacted us secretly, and that we sent Mr. Ratib to meet with him, a long meeting, though he did not return to us with anything reassuring about the true direction of this group, made up as it was of so many different creeds and leanings. Nor did we rule out the "repentance" of al-Nahlawi's own group, some of whom had come to their own senses, remembering their own unionist past, and their own family's honorable record working for Arab unity, coming to despise the "brand of secessionism" people kept taunting them with, and deciding to wash away the shame they had brought upon their own nation, by scattering the secession's own idols, one fine morning.

We sent Lieutenant Muzahim, Mr. Youssef's own brother, to the General Staff headquarters at Umayyad Square, hoping he might bring us back "sure news from Sheba." But all he could learn was that the movement was unionist, without being able to identify who was actually behind it. Within the hour, though, the telephones began deafening our own ears with their own constant ringing throughout our houses, and it was then we learned that Ziad al-Hariri was the one who had carried out the coup.

At four in the afternoon, Captain Munib al-Rifai came for me, to take me in a military jeep to the General Staff headquarters building. I trusted him, and felt at ease with his own leanings.

He carried a paper with eight names on it, which, as I recall, were:

Myself, Nihad al-Qasim, Salah al-Bitar, Mansour al-Atrash, Sami al-Droubi, Abdel Karim Zohour, Jamal al-Atassi, and Hani al-Hindi.

I judged these to be the members of the coming government.

I entered the General Staff's own vast hall, and found a large crowd of officers gathered there, many of them in field dress.

I began recognizing some of their names. I found no senior officers among them. There, I met Dr. Abdel Halim Suwaidan and Mr. Darwish al-Alwani, and felt real relief, for I had been feeling, amid this churning crowd, utterly out of place. I was also reunited with Mr. Salah al-Bitar, Abdel Karim Zohour, Sami al-Droubi, and Jamal al-Atassi.

Mr. Salah spoke of the subjects dearest to his own heart: union, freedom, and socialism, striking at feudalism and doing away with the monopolists.

The officers gathered around us, listening to what we, the civilians, had to say. I wanted them to know exactly what we thought politically, and what goal we hoped to achieve, should we be granted a share in this new coup government, and so I spoke, in everyone's own hearing, pressing three points:

a. Embracing the socialist doctrine, with its own measures aimed at the feudal landowners and the great capitalists, sparing the middle class any real harm, a moderate, conscious socialism, then.

b. Working to establish a federation with Egypt, and with every liberated state, with the question of establishing a full merger union to be considered later, one that could well wait the reasonable, necessary period needed to properly prepare for it, and for the Arab masses to absorb it fully.

c. Upholding the rule of law, and strict enforcement of it.

What drove me to speak on this third point was seeing two officers working together, writing down certain names. When I glanced at the paper, I saw names of people I knew, politicians and journalists alike, and was genuinely alarmed. I asked them the reason for drawing up this list, and they answered, without so much as blinking: these are the enemies of the people, and they will get exactly what they deserve, before dawn. I found this deeply objectionable, for I genuinely feared the coup might turn into physical purges, and told them that should anything of the kind happen, my own friends and I would withdraw from the whole affair entirely, and broadcast a statement to the people condemning any action that violated the law.

I believe one of the two was Major Abdel Karim al-Jundi, dressed in civilian clothes with a military jacket over them, carrying a submachine gun. He had certainly heard the call to duty on the radio while sitting in some café, and had no time to change into full military uniform, contenting himself with whatever he had on hand.

I say "I believe," since I knew only a few of the senior officers, given how long they had served in the armed forces, and how rarely work brought me into contact with them. But I did have the "pleasure" of Abdel Karim al-Jundi visiting me at my own home, a month or so later, once we had fallen out with our own partners in power, when he came with a delegation of his own party colleagues to persuade us of the soundness of their own direction, and urge us to keep taking part.

While we stood in the great hall, one of its own doors opened, and the officers who had been meeting privately for close to an hour emerged. Their own spokesman, Louai al-Atassi, who had been brought straight from Mezzeh prison, where he had been held since the Aleppo events, and had been promoted to Lieutenant General and named army commander, announced the following:

"The officers have sworn by Almighty God to establish union with Egypt." The officers' own caps flew up toward the hall's own ceiling, like flocks of birds released from their own cages, cheers rose, and tears fell freely. It was a deeply moving sight, one that left me nearly choking with emotion. After that, the real troubles began.

For we were suddenly surprised by Abdel Karim Zohour nominating Mr. Salah al-Bitar for the premiership.

We had two objections to this nomination, which we voiced directly to those speaking with us:

First, that Mr. Salah had signed the ill-omened secession's own petition, the very day it happened.

Second, that he was a Baathist, and we wanted a "Nasserist" Prime Minister, to guarantee the unionist course. The Baathists had proven, during the union, that they wanted to rule regardless of whether they possessed sufficient popular strength to justify their own hold on the reins of the state. When Abdel Nasser refused to let them govern Syria on their own, they resigned and joined the enemies of union, working within it toward destruction and sabotage.

Mr. Salah may well have come to regret bitterly his own betrayal of his principles, but the ugly document still bears, and will always bear, his own signature.

Besides, we believed the coup itself was "Nasserist" in character, since Ziad al-Hariri, who had proposed to me the formation of the government only days before his own coup, was considered part of the unionist wing of the armed forces. We therefore saw no reasonable ground for handing Mr. Salah the premiership.

When the question of who would head the government stalled, we moved on to discuss how the ministerial portfolios would be distributed, and Mr. Salah said:

You may have the Ministry of Defense, and he proposed the name of the Fifth Brigade's own commander, Brigadier General Muhammad al-Sufi, who was promoted to Lieutenant General. He handed the Ministry of Interior to Brigadier General Amin al-Hafiz, who had been serving as military attaché in Argentina, alongside my own brother, Ambassador As'ad Homad. We accepted this arrangement, since I had genuine hope in Amin al-Hafiz, given my own prior acquaintance with him and the recurring reports of his own integrity, uprightness, and neutrality among the military factions. Besides, he was related to me by kinship, and I calculated I might well find common ground with him, enough to bring him to stand beside us.

After this bold agreement, the Baathists proposed splitting the remaining ministerial seats evenly with us. But we found this "unfair" division shortchanged the Arab Nationalists, led by Hani al-Hindi, and the Unionist Socialists, friends of Sami Sawfan and Jamal al-Atassi, and so we proposed dividing the portfolios instead among four blocs, fairly and equitably.

The Baathists flatly rejected our proposal, since it would leave them a minority, as they put it.

The back and forth dragged on, without reaching any solution.

My colleague Mr. Nihad al-Qasim did not put my own name forward for the premiership, nor did I put his forward, since he would have met with the Baathists' own flat rejection, considering him, as they did, one of the Muslim Brotherhood (Abdel Nasser's own enemies in those days), and besides, he was not among the well-known politicians.

At three in the morning, with the hall as cold as Siberian ice, Mr. Salah told us they agreed to include Mr. Ratib al-Husami as a member of the Revolutionary Council. We sent for him at his own home.

At the same time, Imad al-Harakeh and Sami Sawfan were summoned as well.

I proposed the names of Ali Bouzo and Abdel Samad al-Fatih for the ministry, but the Baathists rejected them both, fearing they would become a minority in the Council of Ministers, just the same.[1]

We returned to the question of the premiership, and the Baathists held firm on it.

We were then surprised by Lieutenant General al-Atassi himself intervening in the discussion, backing Mr. al-Bitar's own nomination to form the government. I expressed my own surprise to him, since I had believed he belonged to "our own group," and voiced my own opposition to this nomination, but he threatened me with arrest, should I "wreck the formation of the government." I answered him that his own threat was both improper and regrettable, and that it would not frighten me in any case.

It became clear that the coup's own leader, Ziad al-Hariri, had begun leaning toward the Baathists' own side, for among the officers who had taken part in his own movement was a Baathist officer who had seized the radio station, Salim Hatoum, along with Fahd al-Shaer, who carried real weight in the coup, and who spoke ill of two of our own brothers.

I proposed to al-Hariri that he end the discussion and agree to entrust Rushdi al-Kikhya with forming the ministry. He reached for the telephone, handed it to me irritably, and said: call him yourself. If he agrees, I'll send a plane for him at once. I told him: no, it's you who must persuade him. A proposal from you carries a different weight than one from me.

Naturally, I knew this nomination stood rejected, both in form and in substance. But I was convinced that, had it succeeded, his own nomination would have been far preferable to either Salah al-Bitar's or my own, for he was a singular figure, one who inspired real confidence in the country, and would have led it toward union with Egypt, a cause he believed in deeply. Abdel Nasser himself held him in real esteem and trust.

The hour approached five in the morning, without our reaching any acceptable solution.

I spotted, in one corner of the vast hall, General Rashed al-Qatini, whom I knew personally, and knew to be one of the unionist officers, surrounded by a cluster of fellow officers. I approached him and whispered in his ear:

Tell me honestly, is this coup unionist, or Baathist?

He answered, visibly bewildered: by God, I don't know what to tell you.

General Rashed had just been appointed Deputy Army Commander, by unanimous vote of the National Council for the Leadership of the Revolution, formed that very night.

I spoke with "General" Fahd al-Shaer, one of the officers who had "staked their own lives" on this venture, though he did not belong to the Baath Party. He backed the unionist direction strongly, though he objected to two of our own brothers, as I noted earlier.

We were told that the officer Salim Hatoum was summoning discharged Baathist officers over the radio, even specifying which units they should report to.

We were also told, repeatedly and with certainty, that some military units, led by secessionist officers, had gone on alert and were taking up their own positions, some of them already moving.

The air force commander at the al-Dumayr base ordered one of his own aircraft to bomb the fuel depots at Adra, setting some of them ablaze.

Which is why Lieutenant General al-Atassi insisted so strongly on the necessity of forming the ministry at once, so that any resistance to "legitimacy" would be considered an outright violation of the law, and so that anyone tempted to fish in these troubled waters would give up hope.

At that very moment, an incident occurred whose own significance ran deep. Lieutenant General al-Atassi was sitting behind his own table in the hall, and I was speaking with him, when I suddenly heard the voices of two officers quarreling, both armed with submachine guns, right in front of the table. One of the officers said to them: shame on you both, His Excellency the General is sitting right here. One of them shot back, threatening him: to hell with the General and...

I stepped between the two armed men, holding one back from the other, fearing the situation might escalate from mere threats into a real, all-out brawl. I realized, regrettably, exactly how much "weight" this General's own rank actually carried. But the incident itself was an ugly one, and boded nothing good.

Salah al-Bitar and Abdel Karim Zohour then took our colleague Nihad al-Qasim aside, into one of the rooms.

They offered him the post of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, and he accepted the offer. But, perhaps out of courtesy, he asked them to persuade me to take part in the government as well. Once they had left the room, Abu Umar told me he had accepted their offer. I confess I was genuinely astonished that he would accept a "separate settlement" of his own, and I reproached him for what he had done. He answered me sharply: "Abu Ghassan, we formed the Front to bring down the secession. The secession has fallen, and so nothing remains to bind us together any longer."

I sensed that reproach would serve no purpose, and that I now had to face reality exactly as it was, for better or worse, after this stab from a fellow traveler on our own long road. In the interest of salvaging what could still be salvaged, I proposed expanding the ministry, and al-Bitar agreed to represent the four unionist blocs, our own United Arab Front, the Baath Party, the Arab Nationalists, and the Unionist Socialists. The officers sent men to fetch the various nominees.

We drew up the names, after renewing our own pledges that everyone agreed on union with Egypt, and they asked me for a nominee from Aleppo. Mr. Ahmad Abu Saleh came to mind, an ardent unionist who had served as a member of the union's own chamber of deputies. I nominated him, and was surprised by the eagerness with which the Baathists welcomed this nomination, agreeing to it at once. I later learned the reason why.

And so the Baathists secured half the seats, with the other half going to the unionists.

Around five o'clock, Mr. Michel Aflaq arrived from Beirut. We had a brief conversation, in which he pledged himself to "walking steadily along the path of a carefully studied union."

As seven in the morning approached, we settled on the ministerial list, to be broadcast on the radio within the quarter hour, exactly at the time set for the news bulletin.

This is what we managed to reach after seventeen hours of back and forth, exhausting, grinding discussion, and ugly maneuvering, standing on our own feet the whole while in a freezing hall, tasting nothing but bitter coffee, itself a fitting match for the harshness of that night.

The ministerial lineup was issued under Decision No. 1, dated 9 March 1963, from the National Council for the Leadership of the Revolution.

Mr. Salah al-Bitar secured the premiership and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Mr. Nihad al-Qasim became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice.

The Ministry of Finance was entrusted to me.

Lieutenant General al-Atassi spoke, during the tripartite union talks, of an agreement having been reached with the unionists that the Revolutionary Command Council would be split evenly with the Baathists, just as the ministry had been.

We accepted this, given the Baathists' own insistence on it, and because we found no one to give us any real nationalist backing of our own. We "slept easy" on the glittering promises that the direction was unionist, federalist, aligned with Abdel Nasser and sister Egypt. We told ourselves: Baathists are better than secessionists, in any case. We should have remembered that "the believer is never bitten twice from the same snake's den."

The other ministers were:

Lieutenant General Muhammad al-Sufi: Minister of Defense

Brigadier General Amin al-Hafiz: Minister of Interior[2]

Mansour al-Atrash: Minister of Labor and Social Affairs

Abdel Halim Suwaidan: Minister of Agriculture

Sami al-Droubi: Minister of Education

Abdel Karim Zohour: Minister of Economy

Jamal al-Atassi: Minister of Information

Darwish al-Alwani: Minister of State, acting Minister of Religious Endowments

Hani al-Hindi: Minister of Planning

Al-Walid Taleb: Minister of Municipal and Rural Affairs

Sami Sawfan: Minister of Supply

Jihad Dahi: Minister of Transport

Ahmad Abu Saleh: Minister of Public Works

Shibli al-Aysami: Minister of Agrarian Reform

Ibrahim Makhous: Minister of Health

Talib Dammad: Minister of Industry

Sami al-Jundi: Minister of Culture and National Guidance[3]

I confess I was unable to place some of these ministers' own "affiliation" with either side of the government.

I asked Mr. Salah about Ibrahim Makhous's own "identity," and he told me: he isn't a Baathist. Yet when the ministry first convened, I met Ibrahim Makhous myself, and asked him whether he was a Baathist, and he denied belonging to this party at all, indeed had nothing good to say about it. It was later proven to us that the opposite was true.

In any case, the ministry as a whole included ministers whose own unionist direction no reasonable person could doubt. There was nothing more I could have done than what I did, especially once Mr. al-Qasim broke away on his own, and I feared we might be blamed for the failure of this "new era."

The official car arrived the moment the ministers' own names were announced. I found, in my own car, the very same driver I had before, from my last ministry, and the policeman Abu Fawaz.

I had scarcely taken my own seat in the car when a wave of "chivalry" stirred within me, for the image of that sick old man, Nazim al-Qudsi, leapt into my own mind, and I told myself: this is the hour for true nobility, not for settling scores. I genuinely feared, sincerely, that some incalculable harm might befall him.

I instructed the driver to head to the Presidential Palace, where al-Qudsi and his own family were staying. I could sense the policeman's own eyes nearly bulging from their sockets, in sheer astonishment.

He knew full well the harm his own era had done to me and to my own brothers. But I feared certain officers who had been drawing up lists at night, to eliminate whoever was on them, and who could say?

The car stopped in front of the presidential residence's own door, and I got out. A lieutenant stopped me, but I did not argue with him, simply introduced myself and walked into the hall without waiting for his own approval, as he looked on in evident bewilderment.

There stood Dr. al-Qudsi, the deposed President, now under house arrest. We embraced. I felt as though his own soul had been returned to him, and his tears fell, unbidden.

What could he possibly have been thinking, at a surprise no one could ever have imagined? He, the President of the Republic, head of state and Commander-in-Chief of the army, in whose own era we had been subjected to the ugliest curses, his own "press" branding us with the vilest accusations, accusing us of treason, one of them even demanding "we be burned alive, in reverence for God and for the homeland." In his own era, Ratib had been physically assaulted, my own car blown up with explosives, on the orders of an official whose own name I had once mentioned to the President, who answered me irritably: we're living in Tangier. The foulest curses had been heaped on Nihad al-Qasim as well. Certainly, he could never have expected this visit.

At a time when "execution stood closer to him than his own jugular vein," as Brigadier General Mati' al-Samman wrote in his own memoirs. Al-Samman, in fact, did more harm to the very era he claimed to have dedicated himself to defending than his own enemies ever did, through his own extremism and zeal in harming citizens and lording it over them.

I sat with him for nearly two hours. His own only request was "that I help him leave the country, for anywhere at all." He insisted he had "sworn off politics for good," that he had become an old man, and wanted nothing but to live out whatever days remained to him in peace.

Naturally, I had no say over his own fate. But I pledged to him that I would do everything within my own power to secure his own passage to wherever he chose to go.

No one ever "reproached" me for this visit.

I took up my own duties at "my ministry." My reception there was "enthusiastic," so much so that even people who had once been close to me, only to curse me during the secession, now came to me beaming with joy, burning with eagerness to welcome me back.

How quickly some people change, dressing themselves to fit whatever circumstance comes their way!

But having entered and left ministries so many times before, seven times in all, I had by then developed a real immunity to hypocrisy, and to hypocrites.

---

Endnotes:

[1] Louai al-Atassi mentioned, in the tripartite union talks, that AbdulWahab Homad and Nihad al-Qasim had insisted on entering the ministry alongside al-Fatih, Bouzo, and al-Husami. This is true, since we wanted to form a majority alongside our own allies, the Arab Nationalists and the Unionist Socialists.

[2] Adel Reda writes, in his own book A Reading of Hafez al-Assad's Thought, p. 142, that Amin al-Hafiz joined the Baath Party in 1963.

[3] I confess I did not know Sami al-Jundi had been a member of our own Front. He writes, in his own book Al-Baath (p. 115), that he had indeed been one of its members. Yet when we resigned (he refused to resign with us), he was later tasked with forming the ministry, following the resignation of Salah al-Bitar's first government on 11 May 1963, though he failed, his own mandate lasting no more than a single night. It is said of him, a dentist by training, that he threatened his own opponents "with having their tongues pulled out," anyone who dared criticize the regime. People laughed, for, under the influence of his own profession, he had confused pulling a tooth with cutting out a tongue. He printed his own slim book at Dar al-Nahar in Beirut in 1969 (p. 124).