The Unity Project Unanimously Approved - Part 2: Secessionist Leaders Referred to Security Courts, and Homad and Qasim's Memorandum of Resignation

Wednesday, 1 May

It seems the National Council for the Leadership of the Revolution had its own memory jogged, for it reconsidered itself and issued two decrees, dated 30 April 1963, referring a number of "enemies of the people" to the National Security Courts, in two separate lists.

The first list contained the following names:

"Nazim al-Qudsi, Khaled al-Azm, Abdel Karim Zahreddine, Maarouf al-Dawalibi, Akram al-Hourani, Amin al-Nafouri, Khalil al-Kallas, As'ad Mahassen, Afif al-Bizri."

The National Council found, from the reports and investigations submitted to it, that these individuals, already barred from civil life, had committed acts of entrenching the secession, undermining the people's own morale, killing its national spirit, stirring regional bigotry, leaking military secrets, criminal slander, abuse of authority, squandering state funds, and other charges to emerge during the investigation.

The second list contained the following names of enemies of the people:

"Ma'mun al-Kuzbari, Fouad al-Adel, Haydar al-Kuzbari, Muwaffaq Assasa, Mati' al-Samman, Abdel Ghani Dahman, George Mahassel (the hero of the Aleppo massacre), Hisham Abd Rabbo, Fakhri Omar, Bassam Asali, Adel al-Hajj Ali, Zuhair Barzanji."

...for having committed the crimes of carrying out the September 1961 coup, tearing apart the union of the United Arab Republic, entrenching the secession, undermining national feeling, damaging the state's own standing, inciting armed mutiny against the constitutionally established authorities, killing workers, farmers, and other citizens who stood against the crime of the secession, contacting a foreign state and conspiring with it, and other crimes that might yet emerge from the investigation.

I recall being with General al-Hariri once, and he asked me a specific question about two men, Mr. Mustafa al-Zarqa and Dr. Abdel Salam al-Tarmanini, and their own conduct during the secessionist era. I gave both of them a strong recommendation, saying they took no part in politics, and were men of outstanding expertise in their own fields. It seems my own testimony spared them from being barred from public life, as I learned afterward.

Nihad al-Qasim, my colleague, and I agreed to lay bare the reasons behind our own resignation, presenting them to Mr. Salah as a final attempt, despite our own conviction that he had already been swept along by the current determined to remove Syria from the union, and to dominate it instead, in keeping with a narrow party doctrine. We reckoned, in advance, that should this fresh attempt fail, its failure would come as no surprise to us at all, and would then serve as a kind of clearing of our own conscience, before God and before the homeland.

I requested an appointment with the head of government, and he set it for eleven o'clock on Monday, 6 May 1963.

We met in his own office, and exchanged our own reproaches, though everything I told him amounted to nothing more than a cry lost in the wilderness. He was a unionist, he said, firmly committed to the tripartite charter, but the fault, he insisted, lay with us, the "Nasserists."

I tried once more to remind him that we were unionists, not "Nasserists," for Abdel Nasser, however important he may be to the Arab nation at this present moment, given that he is the one boldly leading it down the path of union and dignity, is still only a man, and will not be granted immortality. We, like the Baathists themselves, are simply men devoted to a unionist "mission," no more and no less. We believed the time to establish it had now come, and that it was wrong to delay pursuing it, or to obstruct it, whatever the reason given. God grants no excuse, and time has no patience to spare.

But who was I to sing my own psalms to David?

I handed him the memorandum in which we had explained our own reasons for resigning, and he refused to accept it. I extended it to him once more, telling him: as of today, we consider ourselves resigned, and have cut all ties to the ministry. This is a document we sincerely hope you will read, in some quiet hour of your own. I bid him farewell, and saw him only twice again after that.

Once, after he had resigned (or been expelled) from the Baath Party and lived outside Syria for a time before returning, when he asked to see me at his own home, and I visited him. And a second time, when he visited Kuwait some fifteen years later, staying as a guest of its own government at the Sheraton Hotel.

Here is the text of our own memorandum:

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

6 May 1963

To His Excellency the Head of the Council of Ministers

Greetings. We had submitted to you our own resignation from the government formed under your own presidency on 9 March 1963, in a letter dated the 25th of that same month, for reasons we chose, at the time, not to elaborate on, since the 8 March revolution was still in its own infancy, and it was not in the country's own interest for the resignation letter to appear in any form other than the one in which it was submitted.

In that letter, we explained our own withdrawal from government as follows:

1. "That we placed the homeland's own highest interest above every other consideration, and bowed to our own military brothers' wish, to take a direct part in restoring Arab union."

2. "But the discussions that followed, touching on the very heart of the work and its own course, have convinced us that our own interest lies in stepping back from responsibilities we were never truly given the means to carry out in a manner that would satisfy our own conscience."

Now that events have developed as they have, we find ourselves obliged to follow up the view we set out in our own resignation letter with this memorandum, to clarify certain of our own views. We reaffirm our own resolve to resign once more, having already ceased entirely to carry out our own official duties.

You may recall that we, together with our brothers among the members of the United Arab Front and the other unionist forces, including the unionist wing of the Baath Party, which you yourself represent, stood in complete harmony and accord, confronting the sinful secession, and standing firm against every method of pressure and terror the forces of evil, operating at its command, criminals, reactionaries, ethnic chauvinists, and agents alike, brought to bear against us.

We all worked together, backed by the sweeping popular forces, to tear down the resentful secessionist philosophy, one that recruited the minds of mercenaries posing as "men of thought," and deviants posing as "men of politics," to entrench the secession, and to drive this people to disown its own unionist, socialist principles, principles the union era had made into a present reality, resting on clear foundations, moving resolutely toward liberation and social justice, offering equal opportunity to every citizen, warding off the scourges of hunger, disease, and ignorance from the great mass of our own good people, doing away with feudalism and the exploitation of capital, and standing firm and faithful against the colonial conspiracies whose own architects can only realize their own interests through fragmenting the Arabs and entrenching false entities, established for political and economic ends, and ultimately to protect that monstrous state, "Israel," itself set up as a spear driven into the Arabs' own side, to sever their own East from their own West, and to serve as a weapon of threat in its own hand, brandished whenever it senses its own interests under threat.

The union of Egypt and Syria was, in truth and in fact, the very first practical answer to the Arabs' own resolve to free themselves, and to prepare the means of real strength needed to wash away the shame of Israel, which had until then been fought with empty speeches and false accusations, whose own authors knew, better than anyone, just how hollow and baseless they were, but which now found itself facing a single command, encircling it from both north and south, standing as an impenetrable wall against its own suicidal adventures.

It was well known that those caught off guard by this union's own establishment were never truly pleased by it, and once the shock of surprise had passed, they set about mobilizing their own followers to fight it by every dishonorable means available, exploiting every one of their own vast resources to do so, until they finally destroyed it, on one black night, through an act of betrayal history has never seen the like of, defying the nation's own will, the rights of its own generations, and the truths of its own history. The valiant Syrian people, its masses of intellectuals, soldiers, workers, and farmers, and its own sincere general public alike, refused to accept what its own enemies wished to impose on it: division, weakness, mutual hostility, and a desperate campaign to drag the greatest of Arab powers, its own great sister Egypt, into disbelieving in its own Arabism, and turning it away from every Arab cause, so as to preserve the very factors of weakness and unease within the Eastern Arab region. The farce of the "Chtaura conference" marked the very peak of this reckless policy, and the yellow press's own campaigns against the Arab army, which threw its own cavalry and infantry into the battle for Yemen, to free it from a regime that had become unique in the world for its own reaction, backwardness, and corruption, offered yet another example of these campaigns of rancor and hatred, and of the attempt to tear the Arab nation limb from limb. The very first answer to these ethnic chauvinists and apostates came from Baghdad, on the spearheads of Arabism's own blessed heroes, on the eternal 14th of Ramadan.

The second, fatal blow came on the night of 8 March, when the columns of victory stirred from the militant front, washing away the shame of the secession, answering the people's own will, and clipping the claws of the colonizer and his own agents in the region, kings and collaborationist rulers who had usurped the will of their own sister Arab peoples, ruling them with the colonizer's own bayonets, and with iron, fire, and blood. And so the road stood clear once more, for establishing the liberated Arab state, stronger and more complete than it had ever been before.

On that day, we were called to take part in government, and we came forward with a believer's own heart and a confident, hopeful will. But the talks held between us over forming the government soon struck us hard, for we, who had believed our own fellow comrades in resistance would meet us on the road to union, to raise it up again from beneath its own ruins, found ourselves instead facing solutions imposed upon us, allowing no real discussion, no room for sincere counsel, and no benefit drawn from the lessons of similar events we ourselves had lived through in recent years.

You may recall that the very foundations these talks rested on, agreed upon unanimously, were tripartite Arab union, respect for the rules of justice, which we consider the true measure of a nation's own civilization, the establishment of a socialism serving the whole of the people, never resting on the dictatorship of a single class, the unleashing of genuine, non-destructive public freedoms, to serve as a protective framework for the labor and birth of union under the best possible circumstances and conditions, and the full participation of the militant unionist forces in every process of this new construction, on sound foundations of true equality and mutual trust.

But the solutions imposed on us, ones you personally championed, at odds with your own well-known commitment to methods of consultation, and with what was known of your own party's unionist wing, resistant as it was to individual domination and control, your own insistence on retaining the sensitive ministerial portfolios, and your own overwhelming majority in both the Council of Ministers and the Revolutionary Command Council, all led us to decline taking part in government from the very first hours. We proposed instead that your own party alone take up the responsibility of government, while we remained, outside it, in support of you, for as long as you kept to the right path. We were genuinely sincere in this position, but the delicate circumstances the revolution was passing through at the time, as we were told that very night, along with the moral pressure and the insistence brought to bear on us by everyone present at the Ministry of Defense headquarters, led us to yield, unconvinced, and take part in the government, after sixteen hours of exhausting discussion that changed nothing in the actual situation, in the hope that the unionist forces might present a united front, contributing to the revolution's own success and dispelling the confusion in hearts that stood in the greatest need of reassurance and trust. We say plainly that many doubts weighed on our own hearts that night, and we are certain now that this was one of the gravest errors committed at the very dawn of this era, for the new government set out, from that very moment, from this same mistaken starting point, and events since have only confirmed that a deliberate policy exists, aimed at the Baath Party's own sole domination of the machinery of the state, in every one of its sectors. Our own resignation, coming only fifteen days after the government's own formation, was itself an expression of our own refusal to let our participation in government become a mere formality, covering for the rule of a single party. We consider it our own duty to insist on how wrong it is to proceed under these circumstances, in which focus, gain, and partisanship must never become the true goal of party men, given that this stage is a national one, and that once the people is called upon to have its own say on who truly holds the majority, every faction must yield to this final, decisive word. Until the people decides where to place its own trust, we believe it is in everyone's own best interest that partisan gains take a distant second place behind national considerations.

There is no need for us to dwell at length on the negotiations to re-form the ministry, the Revolutionary Council, and the National Front, negotiations that had already begun before the delegation ever left for the Cairo talks on establishing the federal state. Suffice it to say that full agreement was reached on every question, and so our own resignation was set aside, so that the delegation could turn its attention to more important work, freed from these internal problems, and the announcement of the federal union charter came as truly wonderful news, one we hoped would bring a happy conclusion to the hidden partisan struggle that had erupted, far too soon, over the complete seizure of real power. But, regrettably, the present government forgot this delicate stage entirely, turning instead against its own comrades in the unionist struggle, bringing back to their minds exactly what they had once endured under the secession. The wave of discharges and the various methods of pressure brought to bear on the unionists, in every shape and form, only confirm to us that we cannot bear an illusory responsibility that others, in truth, wish to shape however they please. It is better that this be done without us.

We therefore declare the following:

1. That our own insistence on our resignation, and our own demand that it be accepted at once, is a plain declaration of our own wish, that we cannot accept shouldering the burdens of government without genuine participation and true equality.

2. That a policy of force, absent sound application of the law, has never once succeeded in taking the place of genuine popular support, and that any government wishing to continue fulfilling its own mission must win the public's own trust, by responding to the people's own firm wishes, and through the good and the services it provides to the people. We therefore feel bound to draw your attention to the fact that what we, and you alongside us, once held against the arbitrary eras of the past, must never be repeated, and that your own democratic principles must stand in the way of repeating its own tragedies.