Chapter 12, Part 1: The Years of Anxiety: The Army Blocs

When the Chief of the General Staff, Brigadier Shawkat Shuqayr, arrived in Homs from Damascus on 28 February 1954 and told President al-Atassi and the politicians that the army had given up interfering in politics for good, we took his words as a firm pledge and were glad of it, as a remedy for faults whose harm, to the army itself and to public life, we had all felt over the previous years.

But this pledge came to be revised by certain military men who were bound by party principles and who had formed blocs of their own inside the armed forces.

The first of these "revisions" we noticed was two military cars driving back and forth in front of the Chamber of Deputies on the day of President al-Quwatli's election, hurling foul abuse at him..

The two officers who led this crude demonstration were no strangers to the deputies.. they were members of a party known for its long immersion in coups.

After that, trouble began to come to the surface whenever governments were formed: this minister is unacceptable.. that one must be removed.. And these hints were heeded by those charged with heading cabinets.. to avoid exposing the new era, still young and tender, to shocks it could not bear..

And so dual rule began to reappear in force, and the tug of war began.

I chose "The Years of Anxiety" as the title of this chapter because that is what political life was like in that period, which covered the years 1955 and 1956-1957. I often heard military men say: Why are you uneasy with us? Are we not sons of this people, with the right to have our say in our country's destiny? And is it not in the public interest that we stand up to the saboteurs?

Our answer to them was that this dual rule robs the country of its immunity and its ability to stand firm in the face of events.. and strips those in charge of the ability to maneuver and move carefully through the turmoil of crashing events.

The truth is that some of the politicized officers came to relish ruling from behind the curtain and immersed themselves in political games, to the point that they neglected to prepare the armed forces for the day they would be needed against the enemy.

After that several blocs emerged in the army, very visibly in 1956 and 1957. There was rivalry and struggle among them.. which one day almost turned into an armed clash.

Here I quote what Mr. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal wrote on this subject: "In this period before the union with Egypt, six main blocs emerged in the Syrian army:

First: Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj emerged as an individual force, belonging to no party or group.

Second: the Baath bloc, whose most prominent members in the army were Mustafa Hamdun, Abd al-Ghani Qannut and Bashir Sadiq.[1] And Jamal al-Sufi and Hasan Hidda..

Third: the Liberation bloc (founded by Adib al-Shishakli), which included a group of officers opposed to the Baathist bloc. The group was led by Amin al-Nafuri, and its members included Jadu Izz al-Din, Ahmad Abd al-Karim and Husayn Hidda (the brother of Hasan Hidda).

Fourth: a bloc that swung between the Baathist bloc and al-Nafuri's bloc, led by Tu'mah al-Awdatallah and Ahmad al-Hunaydi..

(Most of these officers later became ministers in the cabinets of the union (to come), and through my work with them I noticed that Amin al-Nafuri, Jadu Izz al-Din and Ahmad Abd al-Karim worked with Ahmad al-Hunaydi and Tu'mah al-Awdatallah as a single group, against Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj and the Baathist bloc represented by Mustafa Hamdun and Abd al-Ghani Qannut..).

Fifth: the Damascus bloc, led by Akram al-Dayri (a relatively small bloc).

Sixth: the bloc of Afif al-Bizri, whose sympathies lay with the left.." (End of Heikal's words.)

But alongside these blocs there were personal forces with influence on the course of events.. who also came to the surface when Abdel Nasser took away their weapons and dressed them in civilian clothes.. in the period of the union.. and won grand titles..

So any friction between the leaders of the blocs might very well have set off a fire whose consequences no one could foresee.. for the weapons were divided among them, and they were their masters and commanders.

And this possibility very nearly came true one day.

The Chief of the General Staff, Major General Tawfiq Nizam al-Din, who was known for his neutrality and his distance from politics, drew up an order in June 1957 for a number of transfers among the officers.. among them sending Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj as military attaché to Moscow.

When those affected by the transfers learned of it, they gathered at the Qatana camp and decided not to carry out the order, and they sent a telegram to the President of the Republic, al-Quwatli, threatening that unless the transfers were cancelled they would march on Damascus.

Fearing a clash between the supporters of the transfers in the General Staff and the units and their opponents, those affected by them in person or through their friends, the Prime Minister, Sabri al-Asali, moved and called the heads of the army blocs to a meeting at the house of Khalid al-Azm (the Minister of Defense), which lasted from evening until dawn.. He managed to reconcile them, the government froze the transfers.. and the fuse was put out.

Al-Asali spoke of that dark night at a session of the Council of Ministers. He was known for his frankness, whether it served him or not, and he said: Our throats went dry as we begged them, by their honor, by the homeland and nationalism and the interest of the army and the state.. to be one hand against the enemy and to trust in the soundness of civilian rule.. If you fall on one another, we told them, we will have to starve the country.. to replace the arms wasted without just cause.. and we may lose you all in battles that are not the nation's battles. And he promised them that the transfer order would be withdrawn.

He added: When the meeting ended in reconciliation, I was not entirely reassured.. so I stood at the door of the room.. as I made ready to leave at dawn, and asked them: Brothers, we need two hours' sleep before going back to our offices, so is there going to be a coup or not?..

When they reassured him, he went to sleep.. a sleep broken by nightmares.. And yet Prime Minister al-Asali, his Minister of Defense Khalid al-Azm and some politicians kept meeting these military men and discussing public affairs with them, especially political ones, and in the end relying on their "advice and guidance". That was the gravest mistake of these politicians.. of whom the proverb was true, "Your own hands tied the knot and your own mouth blew it up"..

Khalid al-Azm admitted the existence of this harmful dual rule in his memoirs, saying: "As was our custom, we would meet at my house once or more for a political meeting attended by al-Asali, al-Hourani, al-Bitar and al-Kayyali, as well as the five heads of the branches in the army and Khalid Bakdash. These meetings represented the ruling group in the National Rally and the army.. We studied political matters and decided the general direction..". So the government of al-Asali and al-Azm had thrust the heads of army branches into the very heart of government policy and given them a legitimate status.. on the admission of the Minister of Defense in his memoirs.

All of this was happening for the sake of staying in the seats of "the presidencies".

At this "historic" meeting Major General Nizam al-Din resigned (or was dismissed), and Colonel Afif al-Bizri was appointed in his place as Chief of the General Staff and promoted to the rank of major general.

What frightened people about his being at the head of the army and the armed forces was his extremism in his convictions.. and his violently leftist leanings, so much so that he was accused of openly belonging to the Communist Party.

His appointment caused a reaction in the Western countries, which saw it as a link in a chain of steps by which Syria was moving into the socialist camp.

What helped spread this wariness of him was his harsh conduct in presiding over the military court that tried the group of "the Iraqi conspiracy".. and the harshness of the sentences he passed..

Western propaganda exploited his appointment to this sensitive post, and the appointment of some leftist officers like him to influential army departments, and began broadcasting night and day that Syria had become a communist state.

On Major General al-Bizri's position among the army blocs, the British journalist Patrick Seale wrote in his book "Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj", quoting al-Sarraj, the following:

"Al-Bizri's appointment had nothing to do with his supposed communist leanings (which in any case only appeared later), or with Khalid al-Azm's visit to Moscow. It was simply that we asked Nizam al-Din to remove a number of senior officers connected with Ibrahim al-Husayni's coup conspiracy, but Nizam al-Din refused, so we then had him removed and replaced him with al-Bizri. He seemed a figure who aroused no controversy; he had no personal following in the army and no connection with any of the wings in conflict inside the General Staff, and so his appointment was acceptable to everyone."

Syria was then moving fast toward a deeper meeting of minds with Egypt, so President Abdel Nasser took a close interest in what was happening in Syria.

Mr. Heikal says that Abdel Nasser summoned Afif al-Bizri and Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj to Cairo in order to understand Afif al-Bizri's real thinking and the extent of his sympathy with communism.

He met them on 11 September 1957 and expressed to al-Bizri his concern about his sympathy with communism, and said that this, if true, created a dangerous situation, the least of which was that it gave those campaigning against Syria credibility in their psychological war on it."

Major General al-Bizri replied "that he sympathized with all the forces hostile to colonialism. He imagined that if Syria were invaded, the Soviet Union could, as it had done in the Suez battle, take part in repelling the aggression.. And we must not forget that no great power can risk a nuclear war for the sake of others."[2]

Abdel Nasser's view was that he feared the existence of blocs in the army whose leaders controlled armed camps under heavy psychological pressure, which might create room for friction between these blocs leading, even through a misunderstanding, to the turning of disputes into armed conflicts.

This is exactly the firm and constant position the People's Party had held from the first days of its formation.. until it left politics, along with the other parties, on the threshold of the union.

Endnotes:

[1] I heard from Major General Bashir Sadiq that he was a soldier devoted to soldiering who never joined any party.

[2] Heikal, the same source, p. 267.