Before These Memoirs - Part 1: The Morning of the 28 September Coup and Meeting Nasser at Cairo's Command Headquarters

On 5 February 1958, the first union in modern Arab history was formed between two progressive Arab states, Syria and Egypt, on a foundation of complete mutual consent and a determination that it should become a nucleus drawing in other Arab countries, by its own brilliance and stature, should those countries sense in themselves a free desire to merge into the new state.

Yet some officers, most of them from the city of Damascus, dealt this union a fatal blow, in a night of betrayal, on 28 September 1961, citing errors that are bound to occur in the building of any great structure, and which it was the duty of every honorable citizen to work to correct over time.

That correction was certainly possible, for most of those errors were nothing more than personal sensitivities. The men who err will one day be folded into death, and after them will come successors who set right what was crooked.

When a man senses a flaw in his eyesight, he does not resort to gouging out the eye, but treats it.

The plotters found unexpected support from several groups whose material interests, they claimed, had suffered during the union. Among these groups were people I had worked alongside in public life, the very least of whom should have stayed in their homes, rather than brand themselves with the disgrace of "separatism."

But steadfastness in principle is a virtue not every person possesses, for it inevitably brings its holder troubles that many shoulders are not strong enough to bear.

The Messenger of God, peace be upon him, spoke the truth when he said: "Whoever holds fast to his religion in that time will be like one grasping a live coal." And just as in my two previous books I held myself to honesty and to resisting the pull of personal desire, so in this book too I shall remain, as I have held myself in the writing of political history, faithful to the truth, far from any wish to wound or injure, except where the truth itself demands it.

I write these lines more than a third of a century after this hideous historical crime took place, and most of its "heroes" have since died, while some of them wandered homeless under every sky, pursued by the specter of the tragedy into which they drove their country and its people, their good deeds not accepted from them nor any plea for forgiveness availing them.

I hope that the truth receives its due honor, and that the laurel wreaths flutter over the good.

As for those who are neither good nor righteous, I will not be harsh with them, for God will call them to account for the crimes they committed against their country and nation. But I will record the wrongdoer's wrong exactly as it was. This is history's right upon me.

The Author.

Thursday, 28 September 1961

I left my house in the morning, as I did every day, to go to my office. Our home was in a large building owned by a wealthy Kuwaiti, on Nile Street in Giza, Cairo, and my office was in the Heliopolis Hotel, which the government had converted into a palace for the new central government.

I had to cross the Gala'a Bridge, then the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, passing the Hilton Hotel, then Ramses Street with its imposing statue standing at its center, then Abbasiya, where President Gamal Abdel Nasser's house stood, then Heliopolis itself, to reach my office. I listened on the car radio to excerpts from the President's earlier political speeches, delivered on well-known occasions.

I entered the ministry building, and the guard officer saluted me as usual, as did the policemen and plainclothes agents scattered between the entrance and the elevator, with their customary courtesy. I felt nothing that hinted at any grave event underway.

A few minutes after I had sat down at my desk, my secretary Kamal al-Khouri came in. He was Syrian, and had moved with me from the Ministry of Finance in Damascus to the Ministry of Planning. He held my full trust, which he had earned through his integrity, his discipline in his work, and his keeping of the ministry's secrets even after the government's resignation. I had first come to know him when, in the first Finance Ministry I held in 1955, I removed the finance minister's office director, and a friend recommended Mr. al-Khouri to me, so I appointed him to the post. It was sound advice indeed.

Kamal surprised me by saying that President Abdel Nasser was giving a speech at that very moment, and that a small group of Syrian officers had seized the radio station following an organized uprising in Damascus, adding that the situation there was unclear and the position dangerous.

The surprise tied my tongue. I turned on the radio, and there was Abdel Nasser delivering a speech in which he explained what had happened that gloomy morning.

Dr. Muhammad Shalabi, the director of my office, an Egyptian, was not slow to come in after him, and he confirmed that an armed uprising had broken out in Damascus.

I began calling my fellow Syrian ministers by telephone, each of us asking the other what information he had and how he read the situation in the "Northern Region." The opinions did not go beyond speculation about the identities of those behind this hideous act, for the rebel gang had been too cowardly to identify itself, contenting itself with the name "the Supreme Arab Revolutionary Command of the Armed Forces."

At that moment, the private telephone rang, and on the line was Mr. Ali Sabri, the Minister of Presidential Affairs, who informed me of the President's wish that I come at once to the headquarters of the "Command," the very headquarters that the Free Officers Movement had occupied in 1952 and turned into their offices, after they had brought down King Farouk's regime.

We usually met either in the President's office at Qubba Palace, or at his home in Manshiyat al-Bakri.

It appeared he had chosen the Command headquarters for our meeting because the matter we were to discuss was military, and the Command headquarters was equipped with better communications facilities.

When I was shown into the President's office I found beside him his two Egyptian vice presidents, Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi and Kamal El-Din Hussein. Then the Syrian vice president Nur al-Din Kahhalah arrived. As for the other Syrian vice president, Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj, he had submitted his resignation four days earlier and left Cairo for Damascus on Monday, only three days before. The Syrian ministers began arriving one by one, greeting the President and his deputies, and taking seats arranged in an oval, without any ceremony or formality.

And how did I find Abdel Nasser in that grim hour?

He was firm of resolve, steady of nerve, and he was smiling, though bitterness churned in his throat. Yet he was confident that this uprising was no more than a passing storm that would soon disperse.

"As for the foam, it vanishes, cast off; but as for that which benefits the people, it remains on the earth."

At every moment he was answering telephone calls, issuing his instructions, though he was especially attentive to the calls reaching him from Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer in Damascus, and awaited them closely.

He would summarize for us all the information reaching him, domestic and international, and we would comment on what we heard and exchange views.

He would excuse himself and step into an adjoining room to reach Field Marshal Amer by wireless, since Amer's movements had been confined to the General Staff building in Umayyad Square in Damascus, then return to tell us whatever he could of what had been said and learned.

Still, the military uprising had become an undeniable fact. But who was behind it? Some of us thought Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj might be its instigator. It was said of al-Sarraj that when he had clashed with Field Marshal Amer, who had come to Damascus armed with the President's own powers, ordered the detention centers closed, transferred al-Sarraj's intelligence officers to Cairo, and decided that no one would be detained except by judicial order, al-Sarraj had summoned the National Union, of which he was Secretary-General, to a meeting held under his own chairmanship. Some who attended that meeting later relayed some of what al-Sarraj had said there. Among his words was that he was a vice president of the republic, yet his powers had been stripped from him, leaving him without function, and he attacked the Egyptians' domination of rule in Syria, saying he could not accept this state of affairs, nor could he allow himself to become a cheap victim like Akram al-Hourani.

But President Abdel Nasser, upon receiving this news, paid it no mind, for he was confident that stripping al-Sarraj of his powers to administratively detain people, spy on them, and pursue them on mere suspicion was simply a response to a general wish that citizens had been voicing, sometimes in secret and sometimes in the cafés.

I recall that I myself had disagreed with al-Sarraj when drawing up the last budget, over the number of police he had requested be added to the Interior Ministry's roster. He had asked for salaries for fifteen hundred policemen, and I approved only five hundred. He said that if this number were distributed among the provincial districts, it would amount to nothing in terms of the prestige of security, and that he would, as he put it, be powerless to suppress any demonstration mounted by enemies of the regime.

When I raised the matter with the President and told him of the justification al-Sarraj had given for increasing the police force by fifteen hundred, in anticipation of demonstrations that might occur, the President was struck by this reasoning and said: "Could demonstrations really break out? And why? Everything we do is done for the people's benefit and with their approval."

Dr. Shawkat al-Qanawati, the Minister of Health, who had just returned from Damascus, had told me that he "feared for the situation in Syria, and had preferred to hurry back to Cairo, worried something might happen there."

Mr. Thabet al-Arees, the Minister of Culture, had also hinted at some of these rumors, which he had witnessed in our own city of Aleppo, having returned from there two days earlier. The President instructed his aides, and they brought us a simple lunch, of which our weary spirits managed to eat what they could in such sorrowful hours, and we remained at his side through the rest of that day and into the evening.

Honestly, we were not convinced that a coup could so easily take place and succeed, for those capable of carrying out such a move would have to be politically motivated officers.

What we knew was that the army had been purged of its politically motivated officers. Some had been discharged, others transferred to civilian posts, and it had become a disciplined army, knowing nothing but the performance of its professional national duties, especially in facing Israel.

It finally emerged that the uprising was the work of officers from Damascus alone, amounting to no more than one percent of the total officer corps. The President named them in his speech, foremost among them Abdel Karim al-Nahlawi, the Field Marshal's own office director, who had persuaded the Field Marshal to carry out a series of officer transfers, through which he managed to concentrate Damascene officers in the strike forces stationed around Damascus and in the General Staff within the city, along with Haydar al-Kuzbari, commander of the Desert Guard (the camel corps), Muhaib al-Hindi, Muwaffaq Assasa, Abdel Ghani Dahman, and Hisham Abd Rabbo.

The Field Marshal had summoned the officer-ministers who happened to be in Damascus that day to his office at the General Staff. He had reached it barely half an hour after leaving his house, which Haydar al-Kuzbari's soldiers had surrounded and begun raking with heavy fire without warning, until the Field Marshal's guard surrendered. They then came down from Adnan al-Malki Street to the General Staff building in Umayyad Square and surrounded it. Before it was surrounded, the union-era ministers Akram al-Dairi, Ahmad al-Hunaidi, Jadou Ezz El-Din, and Ta'ma al-Awdallah, all former army officers, had already arrived there, and it was said that the Field Marshal had made a fatal error in summoning them to his office, when instead he should have dispersed them among the military units at once, to keep their commanders from siding with the mutineers. Because of this, they were taken "captive" along with him.

In his speech, the President announced their discharge from the army, and released the non-commissioned officers under their command from any duty to obey or carry out their orders, and ordered that they be arrested and resisted.

The rebels' statements began reaching us one after another, their texts picked up from the radio, and the President kept us informed of how their negotiations with the Field Marshal were developing. Communiqué No. 1 read as follows:

"Your army has risen to preserve the homeland's soil, its safety, freedom, and dignity. It has risen to remove corruption and tyranny and restore the people's lawful rights. We knocked on every door of reform before we finally erupted, and found no path but force by which the people's freedom and the army's dignity could be restored. We will no longer accept, from this day on, any resting place for the banner of Arabism except the peaks of victory. This is our blood, with which we write that we have kept faith with our covenant and refuse to live except with honor. God is greatest, and glory belongs to the Arabs."

In their second communiqué, the rebels explained the reasons they used to cover their sinful crime. Among what it said:

"The struggling Arab people in Syria and Egypt, backed by the Arab army in both, have risen, relying upon God, the Almighty, the Subduer, in an organized Arab revolutionary movement to erase deviation and the deviators, those who struck at the very heart of sacred Arab unity, that sacred unity for which fathers and grandfathers in every Arab land sacrificed their blood and their souls. But the ruling clique betrayed that trust and cast unity aside, and this corrupt clique went about searching for ways to guarantee the people's barefoot poverty, issuing from time to time decisions it called revolutionary, whose outward face was mercy but whose true nature was torment, all to deceive the toiling sons of this nation, especially the workers and peasants, the nation's very sinew. Not to mention the base scheme followed in liquidating the army, the nation's fence, and its sons and blessed heroes, in the very flower of their youth. This clique also went about squandering public funds in the name of salaries and bribes, to sow suspicion between brother and brother, father and son, so that terror and submission would prevail.

The proud Arab people extends its honorable hand to reclaim its sacred right, to work with full sincerity to support Arab unity from the Gulf to the Ocean, upon a firm foundation of equity, equality, freedom, and brotherhood."

Those who had followed the military communiqués broadcast on the morning of every coup that had humiliated and weakened Syria before the Arabs' enemy, Israel, and those colonial powers who backed it, would not find these repeated clichés surprising, clichés that ears had already grown weary of and come to reject.

Anyone who reads this second communiqué closely finds that its authors accuse the union government of three errors:

1. That it "struck" sacred Arab unity at its very heart. The injustice in this "error" is that those who staged their "revolution" against the union government were precisely the ones who slaughtered a union that already existed, and consecrated a secession with no moral justification, between two regions that had united and become the real nucleus of a greater Arab unity.

The moment the astonishing announcement of the establishment of the Syrian-Egyptian union in 1958 was made, Yemen hastened to join a federation with the two of them that became tripartite, and Iraq nearly became a fourth state, had the Communists not seized control of its fate under the leadership of Abdel Karim Qasim, who then set about opposing the Arab republic with hostility, owing to their deep-rooted regionalism and taking their cue from the Soviet Union's position at the time, which was not pleased by that union.

2. The second error is the issuance of the group of socialist laws in July 1961, under which three companies were fully nationalized and some companies partially nationalized, so that the state acquired real oversight over directing the national economy for the benefit of the people as a whole, especially the workers, who came to hold a share in the profit realized by the company they worked for, while labor legislation safeguarded their legitimate social and economic rights.

When the coup regime showed its true face, and began tampering with the rights of workers and peasants, it discovered that the popular bloc whose gains it had struck at was stronger in resolve than itself.

I recall that President Abdel Nasser once said to me: "What more could the greedy capitalists want, when the union spared their blood and preserved their wealth for them?"

In this he was pointing to the situation that had prevailed before the union, which had been sliding stubbornly toward an extreme socialist system. It would have taken no more than General Afif al-Bizri and his fellow leftist officers issuing a short communiqué declaring that Syria had become a "people's republic" for the affluent class to lose all its privileges and find its very existence threatened.

3. The third error is that the union era worked to liquidate the Syrian army, "the nation's fence, and its sons and blessed heroes."

Every citizen, whatever his leanings, values and honors the army's role in protecting the homeland and defending its sanctities.

But what is regrettable is that politics had seeped into the minds of a faction, the smallest in number, but the most determined, of its officers, who formed warring blocs within the army that for many years threatened both their own lives and the life of the country. Every coup discharged the greatest possible number of officers whose movement against it was feared, until the army's blood had been so drained that its own Chief of Staff admitted, in the summer of 1956, in a session attended by Egypt's President Abdel Nasser and Syria's President Shukri al-Quwatli, that this army could not hold out for more than four hours, the occasion being an assessment of the Syrian army's ability to withstand an Israeli attack on Egypt.

And when the Qatana incidents took place, shortly before the union, and the artillery surrounded the barracks, the tanks moved swiftly to surround the artillery in turn, and units moved up from the front to encircle the warring formations, with the help of the air force. It was then that the politically motivated officers sensed the grim fate closing in on them and on the country, and they went rushing to Abdel Nasser, ready to accept an immediate union. He set two conditions for them: