Year 1961 - Part 6: The Generals' Revolt Against de Gaulle in Algeria and Nazim al-Qudsi's Confession of Poverty

Saturday, 22 April: A Military Coup in Algeria

Radio stations carried news of a coup mounted by French generals in Algeria against President de Gaulle.

These military commanders were the senior officers of the army stationed in the "three French overseas departments" (the Algerian region), the most prominent among them Generals Challe, Salan, Jouhaud, and Zeller.

They justified their coup by claiming de Gaulle was a traitor to his own country, wishing to hand over "French soil" to lawless rebels, meaning the Algerians, the country's own original inhabitants.

They claimed to have seized control of every military unit, both in France itself and across the empire, and that they would march on Paris, to arrest de Gaulle and put him on trial.

We felt as though some enormously heavy catastrophe were about to befall us.

For no sooner had a glimmer of hope appeared for the Algerian freedom fighters than the horizon darkened once more into total blackness.

French officers are known to be reckless fools.

They had tasted the sweetness of comfort and extravagance in a country whose riches they had plundered and impoverished, and, to preserve their own privileges, they showed no hesitation at all in taking up arms against their own president.

The great majority of constitutions provide that the President of the Republic is the supreme commander of the armed forces. Fortunately, the coup collapsed within forty-eight hours, since the officers under the four generals refused to obey them, and declined to carry out their orders.

De Gaulle proved himself a courageous leader, declaring he would resist them on the field of battle, and would never back down from his own decision, even were he to be killed for it.

Large units of the army rallied behind him, declaring their own loyalty to their great commander.

With every avenue closed off before the rebels, their leader, Challe, announced his own surrender, while the remaining generals fled to unknown destinations, begging whoever would take them in to grant them "political asylum" in Spain or Italy.

My memory carries me back to those days of 1940, when Marshal Pétain, who took power in the wake of the French armies' defeat before the German hordes, announced his own country's surrender, accepting the armistice terms the victorious Hitler imposed upon it.

De Gaulle refused to accept his own supreme commander's decision. He was, at the time, still a young officer, and fled France to join the British forces in Britain.

He founded the "Voice of Free France" broadcast.

When the Allies defeated the Fascist powers, they liberated France and handed it back to de Gaulle, indeed granted it a permanent seat on the Security Council, so that it became one of the world's own five great powers.

With the right of veto.

The "Algerian" generals had no right at all to invoke de Gaulle's own precedent in their own defense.

For de Gaulle's own defiance had been against his country bowing before a foreign conqueror, whereas these men had rebelled against their own president, exercising legitimate civilian authority.

His own leanings differed little from their own colonial, exploitative ones, but he came to realize that the Algerian war would humiliate France, damage its own international standing, and threaten its economy with collapse, and so decided to pursue a path of accommodation with the leaders of the Liberation Front, for his own country's sake before anything else.

It is worth noting that these very rebellious officers were the ones who had returned de Gaulle to power in 1958, through pressure and threats. Once he sensed he had become a prisoner of "their own revolution," and began contemplating a solution to the Algerian problem, he decided to rid himself of them by removing them from the army. But they beat him to it, launching their own revolt under circumstances unfavorable to them, so that it failed, and they fell, like autumn leaves scattering underfoot.

It is entirely possible that Abdel Nasser had a similar "de Gaulle-style" maneuver in mind, when he resolved to rid himself of the threat of a coup against the Republic by the very officers who had "imposed" the Union upon him, removing a great many of them into civilian and diplomatic service, and transferring around five hundred officers to the Southern Region. But caution can never truly outrun fate.

Monday, 8 May

Mr. Aref Jazmati, National Assembly member for Aleppo and a lawyer, visited me at my office. He had taken part in an unfair campaign against certain ministers at one of the National Union's sessions in Aleppo.

He spoke at length, explaining what he saw as the general state of affairs.

In his own view, a deep recession gripped the city, factories were on the verge of shutting down for lack of any market for their own goods, and merchants lived in constant fear of decisions nationalizing their factories.

He told me of two Egyptian officials who had decided to return to the Southern Region, "fearing they might one morning find themselves hanging by their own necks from a tree."

Communist propaganda, and that of those who go along with their own anti-Union direction, remains active in certain circles, fabricating falsehoods and spreading poison.

I advised him to work, on his own part, as a member of the Assembly, to explain these fears to Anwar Sadat, Speaker of the National Assembly, or to Mr. Rateb al-Hasami, deputy speaker. I promised him I would work, for my own part, to convey these impressions to the Vice President at my earliest meeting with him.

There is no doubt that Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj is tightening his own grip on the Union's enemies, but it would hardly make sense to leave the field entirely open to them, to sow corruption across the land under the guise of a "freedom" they themselves never respected, back when they operated under the banner of the politicized officers.

Tuesday the 9th

My friend, the historian Dr. Abidin Hamada, speaks with me always out of a genuine concern for the Union. We debate each other back and forth.

Today he told me a truly striking piece of news, its gist being that Mr. Akram al-Hourani, who leads the campaign against the Union in secret, had asked him to contact Mr. Rushdi al-Kikhya, and inform him of his own complete readiness to march under his banner.

He would prefer to meet him secretly, at Abidin's own home.

Dr. Hamada conveyed al-Hourani's own wish to Rushdi al-Kikhya, but he told him he would take no action at all against the Union, and considers any harm done to it a national crime, not a political or partisan matter.

This is exactly what I know of Rushdi al-Kikhya myself.

The ascetic leader, who refused the presidency of the Syrian Republic three times, once in 1950, when the first constitution of the independence era was drawn up and he served as chairman of the Constituent Assembly, a second time in 1955, when he had behind him the unanimous backing of every faction and party in the Chamber of Deputies, and a third time in 1961, after the secession took place.

Despite these noble stances, he remains, even now, "held in disfavor" by the intelligence services.[1]

That evening, Thabet al-Aris, central Minister of Culture, spent the evening with me, on his way to his own post in Cairo, coming from Aleppo, and told me of the deteriorating psychological and economic state of our own city.

He stressed how widely poisonous propaganda against the Union was spreading, though he assured me it found little real echo. Even so, something had to be done to ease the poor economic situation, along with some adjustment to the National Union's own composition.

We agreed to convey these sentiments to the chairman of the Executive Council, so that he would not remain dependent solely on unfair intelligence reports.

And indeed, a lengthy conversation took place between myself and Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj, who said, at its close, that he would convey what we had discussed to President Abdel Nasser.

I hope he did not doubt my own words, lest that poet's own line prove true of us:

"I see, amid the ashes, the glow of a flame,

one that may well soon flare into a blaze.

For fire feeds on but two sticks of wood,

and war, too, begins with mere words alone.

Should the wise among a people fail to put it out,

its fuel will become their own corpses and skulls.

I find myself wondering, in astonishment, oh, if only I knew,

are the sons of Umayyah awake, or still asleep?"

Wednesday the 10th

To ease the burden of unemployment, we resorted to amending the tax laws, adding a modest increase to their own rates.

I will not deny that the circumstances were hardly favorable for such increases.

I said as much plainly in the Council of Ministers.

But I approved it, so that the state could create 6,000 jobs within the government apparatus, to ease the burden of the drought.

The universities graduate growing numbers of students every year, and something must be done to absorb them, and find them a means of living.

There is no doubt this problem will only worsen with time, just as it is worsening in Egypt and across the rest of the Third World.

Someone might well ask: and what of the slogan "Arab oil for the Arabs"?

The blunt answer to this tiresome question is: Arab oil belongs to its sheikhs and princes.

And to secret accounts in Swiss banks, and to middlemen, and agents, and the gambling halls and nightclubs of Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, and the clinics treating AIDS (or SIDA, in French).

All that remains for the resentful is their own "absolute national right" to sing:

"The Arab lands are my homeland,

from Damascus to Baghdad,

and from Najd to Yemen,

to Egypt, and on to Tetouan."

Monday the 22nd

I do not know what led Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi to leave his post at the Arab World Bank, whose chairmanship he had taken up, or whether he left of his own accord, or was pushed out by the bank's own owners. But I never heard, officially, whether he had actually left the post, or remained in it temporarily.

He telephoned me today, and we agreed he would be our guest at home that evening.

I am not sure whether I have the right to publish a summary of what he told me, or whether, in publishing it, I abandon my own duty of discretion and propriety.

I felt I was doing a service, both to al-Qudsi himself and to the historical record, in faithfully passing on what he told me, especially since he confided it to me as a member of the government, not merely as a friend.

Dr. al-Qudsi belongs to an old Aleppo family.

He earned his doctorate in law from the University of Geneva.

He was elected, repeatedly, as deputy for Aleppo, and was appointed ambassador to the United States in 1945. He held the Foreign Ministry in His Excellency Hashim al-Atassi's own government during General Sami al-Hinnawi's coup (from 14 August 1949 until 14 December of that same year).

He then took up the premiership and the Foreign Ministry (for three days) between 24 and 27 December 1949.

He returned to hold these same two portfolios from 4 June 1950 until 27 March 1951, and was later elected chairman of the Council of Ministers, following the overthrow of Adib al-Shishakli's own rule in 1954. He was the second most prominent figure in the People's Party.

That night, he told me the following:

I inherited, along with my siblings, three thousand gold lira from my father, and I squandered my own share of it in my own political career.

I gathered a sum of 55,000 Syrian lira, and mortgaged it against the house I live in, meaning I take no interest on the sum I paid the house's owner, and pay him no rent for living in it either.

Then the lean years came, and I found myself forced to borrow.

He is now in debt, to some of his own relatives and friends, for a sum of eighty thousand Syrian lira. He added: were it not for my own wife, who spends money she inherited from her own father on our children, my own social and family situation would be in the very worst state imaginable.

I have served this country as ambassador, deputy, minister, prime minister, and speaker of parliament, and I now find myself without any private income of my own, holding no post that pays me a salary at all.

I believe it is my own right, from my own country, that it recognize my situation, and extend me a helping hand in this time of hardship.

He then turned to me directly:

Now, you are chairman of the ministerial committee that recommends to the President of the Republic the names of those deserving an exceptional retirement pension from the state, and I am asking to be granted this pension, given my own dire need for it. I bear witness that I was truly stunned to hear this request from him, for I had no idea he was in such a state of hardship.

He, who had held the very highest posts in the state, and maintained wide connections both at home and abroad.

But I also know him to be a man of clean hands, of genuine honor, and a fierce sense of his own dignity. He was never, not for a single day, the object of any suspicion at all.

I found myself in real confusion over what to tell him, especially since I knew he was never entirely at ease with me to begin with.

I decided to be candid with him, so that he would not console himself with false hopes.

I told him: Abu Saad, you will get nowhere through our own committee, for some of its members grow visibly tense the moment they hear the names of certain well-known families.

I had already had an experience with them, over an exceptional pension for a great freedom fighter, and it was hardly encouraging. I advised him to write directly to President Abdel Nasser, for I knew with certainty that he would understand his own situation, and to send me a copy of his own letter, so that I could raise the matter with him myself, when I next met him privately in Cairo.

This "copy" never reached me, for he preferred not to write to anyone at all about his own need.

This, then, is my own salute to you, upright, respected statesman.

And were I writing here of "men of integrity," I could name a number of great statesmen, once household names, whom God took unto Himself while they still labored under the weight of real need.

I know them well, may God have mercy on them, and may He help those among them still living, suffering the ailments of old age, relying, where they had children, on their own children's own labor to see them through.

Were I to name names, I would mention, with gratitude, Nasib al-Bakri, Ahmad Qanbar, Rashad Barmada, Ali Bouzo, Abdel Samad al-Fatih, Rateb al-Hasami, Abdul Hamid Duweidri, and Rafiq Bishour, and Nabih al-Azma and his brother Adel, and these are but a drop from the ocean.

I have not included Rushdi al-Kikhya's own name among them, for he stood at the very peak of patriotism and integrity, having lived his life a bachelor, and enjoying considerable wealth, inherited from his own forefathers.

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Endnotes:

[1] See what Dr. Abdel Latif al-Younes, our own colleague in the Chamber of Deputies before the Union, wrote of him in his own memoirs, published in 1982, Dar al-Ilm, p. 398.