Chapter 12, Part 2: The Years of Anxiety: The Chamber Under Strain

It must be said that the army was not all politicized officers.. There were good men in it who knew no creed but soldiering and no policy but keeping away from politics.

Among them I remember the pilot officer, Major General Rashed al-Kaylani. He wrote the following in his memoirs about that period:

"The politicized officers went back once more to interfering in political life, so blatantly that a handful of young officers in control of the weapons were working to reach the commands they wanted, openly declaring their political positions and trying to influence governments..

At the same time the politicians were using some of these officers to strengthen their own positions. Things stayed like this until the union with Egypt was established."[1]

Mr. Heikal hit the nail on the head when he wrote the following about the state of the Syrian army:

"The truth is that in that period the Syrian army became a melting pot for every political struggle. The worth of the parties (more correctly, some of them) came to depend on their ability to influence the army, just as the influence of any Syrian politician (more correctly, some politicians) depended on how close his ties were to officers of the armed forces. Such a situation was bound to produce strange anomalies and, at the same time, dangers whose consequences were hard to calculate. For the officers' role to stand out in this way meant that a difference of opinion could at any moment turn into movements of brigades and battalions, guns and tanks.."[2]

The anxiety was not nesting only in the army commands; it was spreading through the corridors of the Chamber of Deputies and among the people.

In the Chamber of Deputies, the deputies of "the state" were speaking with an insolence never seen before.. One of them even answered the deputies who were calling for martial law to be lifted to protect individual freedoms by saying "in this country every freedom is forbidden except the freedom to commit treason".

In this feverish atmosphere the deputy Riyad al-Malki, who had been elected for Damascus in a by-election on 17 May 1957 in which his opponent was Mr. Mustafa al-Siba'i, and in which the government of the National Rally was accused of interfering without limit to hold back "the right-wing current",[3] put forward a bill providing for the removal of the seats of deputies absent from the country without leave. When the bill was referred to the Constitutional Committee, it chose me as rapporteur on this matter. The bill was supported by a number of deputies who could not have been expected to support it, such as Mr. Said al-Ghazzi, Dr. Mazhar al-Sharbaji and Dr. Lutfi al-Hajj Husayn.

My view was that this bill was unconstitutional in substance, and that it had a political aim, since it was directed against absent deputies whose seats were to be taken away for political reasons.

The majority of the committee went the way I had explained and supported with a lengthy study.

The Ministry of Justice also supported the committee's view.

The basis of my view was that a deputy comes to the Chamber of Deputies by popular vote, and his electors chose him because they trusted him.. He therefore holds a constitutional mandate of a contractual kind, and no public body may revoke it, because that would be an encroachment on, and an affront to, the popular will. I cited two cases from comparative constitutional law:

The first: voters in one French district elected a madman who was confined in a mental hospital.. This choice may have been a kind of silent protest against a general situation they were unhappy with.

Many attempts were made to remove this deputy's seat. But the Chamber of Deputies rejected every attempt of this kind, out of respect for the popular will.. and confirmed the seat to the deputy, even though he never took it up in practice.

The second: General Franco, after he seized power in Spain in 1936, removed the seats of the Republican deputies who had fled abroad. But the Inter-Parliamentary Union continued to regard them as deputies and to deal with them as such.

But I proposed that a deputy absent without excuse be punished by docking his salary for the period of his absence.. Mr. Rashad Barmada defended the committee's view, saying: "Constitutional scholars are agreed that the mandate the people give a deputy is an absolute mandate that cannot be taken back, cannot be seized and cannot be returned, unless the constitution provides for it. There are countries whose constitutions allow a deputy's seat to be removed, and they are the dictatorships. Since our Constitution contains no text allowing a deputy's seat to be withdrawn, constitutional rules cannot allow us to treat absence as resignation."[4]

Some deputies supported the bill, among them Dr. Wahib al-Ghanim, who described the deputies who were abroad as "insolent traitors".[5]

When the Constitutional Committee's report was put to the vote in the full session, 51 deputies supported it, only 13 voted against, and two abstained.

So al-Malki's bill fell. A great gain was won for legitimacy over dual rule! But the real struggle in the Chamber, in the name of defending public and individual freedoms, was the one that raged between the deputies who were demanding the lifting of martial law, which had been imposed on the country for a long time, and the deputies who were comfortable with it, regarded it as a national blessing and insisted that it stay.

Endnotes:

[1] The Memoirs, p. 159 (first edition).

[2] Heikal, the same source, p. 237.

[3] For reference, see the book by General Mustafa Tlass, Mir'at Hayati (The Mirror of My Life), second edition 1991, p. 622.

[4] Minutes of the session of 16 December 1957, p. 818.

[5] The same session, p. 846.