Introduction to These Memoirs

In my book on "Rushdi al-Kikhya, the Ascetic Leader, and the People's Party," I contributed, to the best of my ability, to the writing of contemporary political history up to the establishment of the Syrian-Egyptian Union in 1958. In that book I remained faithful to the principles and policies of the People's Party, which we founded on 8 August 1948 in the Lebanese town of Falougha, and which was dissolved, like the other Syrian parties, following the establishment of the Union.

President Abdel Nasser had made Egypt's acceptance of this union conditional on two basic requirements:

First: the dissolution of the political parties and the formation of a single body to replace them, the National Union.

Second: that military officers not engage in political affairs.

The newspapers of 25 and 26 February 1958 carried the news of the dissolution in the form of statements by the leaders of the Syrian parties, in response to the agreement reached between the Syrian officers who had negotiated the union and the Egyptian president. The parties accepted this and declared their acceptance, with the exception of the Communist Party. Khalid Bakdash, the leader of that party, had left the country since the session in which the Syrian Chamber of Deputies approved the union on 5 February 1958. A number of that party's members, however, broke away and joined the National Union, and some of them wrote books attacking the Communist leaders and denouncing the faults they attributed to them. The most prominent of these defectors was Mr. Qadri Qal'aji.[1]

The Secretary General of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, Michel Aflaq, issued a statement that was published in the newspapers, and its text read as follows:

"At six o'clock in the evening of Sunday, 23 February 1958, the council of the Arab Socialist Baath Party in the Syrian region held a meeting at which it heard the statement of the National Command and its decision to dissolve the party within the United Arab Republic. The Arab Socialist Baath Party in the United Arab Republic is accordingly considered dissolved, with all its organizations and institutions." [2]

Dr. Maarouf al-Dawalibi, of the People's Party, declared that "the party considers itself dissolved as of the announcement of the referendum results," and Rushdi al-Kikhya announced that the party (the People's Party, of which he was president) had ended its activities and halted its work, and that it was placing all its assets at the disposal of the authorities.

Dr. Bashir al-Qadmani (of the National Party) said:

"The party leadership of the National Party issued a decision to dissolve the party more than a month ago, and in that decision it also declared that it was placing all its resources at the disposal of the National Union soon to be formed in the Syrian region."

Dr. Mustafa al-Siba'i (one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood) said:

"The Muslim Brotherhood is a religious movement, and its involvement in politics was simply part of Islam. The Executive Bureau will meet to issue a statement regarding the suspension of political activity." [3]

From what Mr. George Sadiqni, one of the prominent leaders of the Baath Party, wrote,[4] it can be gathered that Abdel Nasser's decision to dissolve the parties came as a blessing to that party's leaders, who were at odds with one another: "Personal differences among the members of the triumvirate leadership (Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and Akram al-Hourani) were deep, lasting, and persistent, and no attempt made within the party succeeded in extinguishing the fire of these disputes. These disputes had begun in the earliest days that followed the merger of the two parties, the Arab Baath (Aflaq and al-Bitar) and the Arab Socialist Party (Akram al-Hourani).[5] In Akram al-Hourani's view, the merger had been a tactical move to meet an urgent situation arising from his break with Adib al-Shishakli in the spring of 1952. By the beginning of 1958, the merger had, in al-Hourani's view, exhausted its purpose, particularly since he had by then reached such a high political standing that he felt he no longer needed the party, having outgrown it.

"When the Syrian officers demanded complete and unconditional union with Egypt, and accepted Abdel Nasser's conditions, it was not to be expected that the three leaders would stand in the way of the officers' will, for that was not the habit of any of them. Even Akram al-Hourani, contrary to what is commonly believed, did not lead the officers but rather tried to make use of them or follow in their wake. In Abdel Nasser's demand and the officers' will, on the occasion of the union, the three leaders found a face-saving opportunity to achieve their wish of ridding themselves of their personal differences."

Although Mr. Sadiqni relates "the proceedings of the session that announced the party's dissolution,"[6] he tries to "prove" that the session in which its dissolution was decided was not a "legal" one (the session of 23 February 1958). Of the Syrian members of the National Command, only Michel Aflaq attended; neither Akram al-Hourani nor Salah al-Din al-Bitar was present, and the number of attendees did not exceed a few dozen (p. 228). He also claims that the triumvirate leadership was "compelled" to accept the dissolution, because Abdel Nasser had made the dissolution of all parties a condition for accepting the union. But whether the leadership's agreement to the dissolution was "coercion," a submission to Abdel Nasser's conditions (p. 253), or a "tactic," since "the Baath would take over the leadership of the National Union" (p. 243) that was to arise in place of the dissolved parties, and whether "the party council in the Syrian region is as innocent of the dissolution decision as the wolf was of Joseph's blood" (p. 259, an allusion to the Quranic story in which a wolf was falsely blamed for Joseph's disappearance), the fact remains that all the parties were dissolved and declared their own dissolution, the Arab Socialist Baath Party among them.

It is possible that some members of that party held a view opposed to the dissolution, but such opposition is properly voiced before a majority decision is taken, according to accepted rules. Once the dissolution decision had been announced by the qualified authority, Secretary General Aflaq, and published in the daily papers, arguing over the "illegitimacy of the dissolution" thirty years later serves no purpose.

As one who lived through those events, and who was on good terms with both Mr. al-Hourani and Mr. al-Bitar, I never felt that either of them was truly attached to the party, especially since both were at the forefront of the union movement, with a nationalist enthusiasm and drive that were the envy of others.

Honesty requires me to commend the Baath Party's position, steady for several years before the union, in pursuing a union with Egypt, proceeding from pure nationalist principles and from the Arab nation's need to defend itself against Zionism, which Western colonialism had sponsored and nurtured.

It was the first among all to call continuously and to work tirelessly for the achievement of this splendid national goal.

The day after the Baath Party dissolved itself in a session of its general assembly, the lawyer Abd al-Rahman al-Mardini and Dr. As'ad al-Istawani sent the following telegram to President Abdel Nasser:

"In the name of the members of the Arab Socialist Baath Party in the Damascus region, meeting for the first time upon being notified of the decision to dissolve the party in the Syrian region, we salute your struggle and pledge to you and to the Arab nation that we shall proceed under your bold and wise leadership in the service of the revolutionary goals."

When the first union government was formed on 6 February 1958, the (former) Baathists held the major posts in it. Akram al-Hourani became the (First) Vice President of the Republic, Salah al-Din al-Bitar took charge of the Ministry of State, Khalil al-Kallas became Minister of Economy and Trade, and Mustafa Hamdoun took over the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor. When the cabinet was reshuffled on 7 October 1958, additional Baathists joined it alongside those already in the first government: Abdul Ghani Qannout, Amjad al-Tarabulsi, Riyad al-Maliki, and Jamal al-Sufi.

When it was decided to hold elections in 1959 for membership in the National Union, a large number of Baath members put themselves forward as candidates; some succeeded and others lost.

Given all this, it is simply not accurate for Mr. George Sadiqni to claim that the party "did not dissolve itself."

Following the parties' voluntary dissolution, Abdel Nasser, after becoming President of the Republic and ruling by republican decree, issued a decision dissolving all parties, dated 12 March 1958.

I myself felt a great sense of relief at the dissolution of the People's Party, of which I was one of the founders, not because I disowned its progressive, evolutionary principles, which I still consider the principles best suited to our circumstances in the 1950s, but because its members were not in complete agreement on certain internal questions, such as nationalization and the expansion of the public sector. They were, however, in complete agreement on questions of foreign policy and on the tireless effort to resist Zionism.

This party has every right to take pride in the fact that it arose as a party carrying the banner of democracy, and remained faithful to that philosophy of government by the people. It therefore called, openly and publicly, for the army to stay out of politics and devote itself instead to strengthening itself in preparation for battles with the external enemy. For this, politicized officers held it in fierce hostility and attached false accusations to it.

It is one of fate's ironies that those who used to shout themselves hoarse insisting that the army was part of this people and had every right to a voice in internal political affairs, and who thereby helped split it into warring factions and encouraged it to carry out a series of coups that brought the gravest losses upon both the army and the country, were among the very first to support Abdel Nasser's wise condition that the army stay out of politics.

It is regrettable that they did not remain faithful to these convictions.

No one disputes that party life is prone to many faults. Not everyone holds to party integrity in equal measure, for among its members are those with private agendas, the weak of character, and those who merely wish to advance themselves. Yet despite all these shortcomings, party life, within the framework of national parties with declared orientations and programs, embraced by those who believe in their merit, without coercion or inducement, remains the best support for the democratic system, which itself remains, despite the objections raised against it, the best system of government. Churchill, the former British Prime Minister, was right when he said that democracy remains the least bad of all systems of government, not the best of them.

One might well ask: how, then, did you enter into a union headed by a single man wielding such vast powers, subject to no oversight or scrutiny by an opposition party or a free press?

The frank answer is that a combination of factors came together to impose that union, crude as the word "impose" may sound.

The political atmosphere at the time was dominated by a desire that must be stated plainly: to remove the army from politics, after a distressing series of coups in the 1950s, and to remove capable officers from their rightful positions, replacing them with political officers who had made a profession of meddling in day-to-day politics, corrupting it and doing themselves harm in the process. There is no need for us to spell out names and figures; everyone knows that the cafes filled up with young discharged officers, men on whose education and training in foreign military academies the state had spent hundreds of millions of lira, money taken from the sustenance of the poor and the needs of the widow, so that they might be the nation's shield and the guardians of its security against the external enemy. But when the two hosts met in the confrontation with Israel, Juhayza's word (an old Arabic proverb meaning that plain, blunt truth silences every speaker's rhetoric) cut short every orator's speech.

Alongside this fundamental factor, there was the factor of Arab nationalism, which surged powerfully in those decades, seeking liberation from the yoke of colonialism (French and British) and the reunification of the Arab nation that this same colonialism had torn apart. In this we were no different from other nations that had achieved their unity more than a century before us, such as Germany (under Bismarck's leadership) and Italy (under Garibaldi's leadership). Why, then, should an extraordinary man like Abdel Nasser not lead us to unite two countries of such weight in the balance of regional politics, without war and without bloodshed?

This union was not a theoretical political luxury; it was an urgent necessity for the security of the Arabs surrounding the Zionist state, and for warding off its danger, at the very least, if eliminating it altogether was not possible, given the support Western states gave it, supplying it with men, weapons, and money, until it managed to achieve two major victories over the Arab armies in 1948 and 1956.

Time proved the unionists right, for the Arabs lost a third war with Israel itself in 1967, some five years after the secession between Egypt and Syria took place, and they achieved no victory of any real weight in the 1973 war either, since its outcome was the fall of important parts of Arab land into the hands of the enemy.

The Hebrew state still occupies the Golan, part of Lebanon, and some Jordanian territory.

I have thought it useful to write a diary of that union as I lived through it, as a witness and not as a historian, drawing on papers I wrote at the appropriate times, or on my own memory, or recalling what certain historians and researchers, whether fair-minded or not, have written.

After the secessionists brought down the union on the treacherous night of 28 September 1961, striking the entire Arab nation in one of its dearest hopes, I stood with devoted brothers against the secession, and we resisted it by every means available to us.

Its dark, black period was brief in the span of time, lasting only about a year and a half, yet it had painful consequences and negative effects, both domestically and across the Arab world.

I have given it a place in these memoirs, as one who opposed its existence in principle and in its ultimate consequences, until it was finally done away with and became an ugly memory in our national history.

I took part, together with my brothers and other unionist political formations, in carrying the secession to its grave, and I took part in the government of the Eighth of March 1963, which was formed to cleanse the homeland of its traces. We found, however, that the unionist ship was not truly unionist, so we resigned from it, and our partners took sole hold of power. They decided to raise the banner of a calculated party unity in place of a broad national unity that would raise the standing of the Arab nation and enable it to defend itself against Israel and colonialism.

I shall hold myself to every requirement of historical honesty, doing no injustice to the truth and wronging no one. Yet I do not forget that I am human, and human beings by nature are affected by their emotions and passions, and therefore fall into error at times.

If something of this kind should happen to me, it will not be because I intended it, but because I mistakenly believed it to be right.

In any case, this study will not become a swamp of invective, as has been the case with some memoirists and researchers.

---

Endnotes:

[1] See Maxime Rodinson, Marxism and the Islamic World, second edition, Beirut, 1962, p. 269 and following.

[2] This statement was published in the daily newspapers, including al-Fayha, in its issue no. 2373, dated 25 February 1958.

[3] From the news reported in the newspaper al-Ra'i al-Aam, which had close ties to the Baathists, in its issue of 26 February 1958.

[4] In his book Sessions of the Party Council (the Arab Socialist Baath Party), 1947-1957, Damascus, Dar Talas, 1991, p. 273 and following.

[5] For the record, I took part in bringing about this merger and went to Hama to persuade Akram al-Hourani to accept it. Rushdi al-Kikhya held the same view, so that a unified bloc might be formed to resist the rule of al-Shishakli.

[6] P. 228 and following.