Before These Memoirs - Part 19: The Secret Arrest Memorandum Targeting the Nasserist Five and a Night in Hiding

Thursday the 14th

After considering Dr. al-Azma's request that we send a telegram of support to the President of the Republic and to the Prime Minister, and given the tongues of flame now raging in our own press, we decided to throw our support behind the unionist direction, and telegraphed the following to Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi and to the head of the Council of Ministers:

To the President of the Republic

To the Head of the Council of Ministers

Cairo's answer to Damascus's own call has opened the door for the Arab nation to reclaim its dignity and erase the shame of the secession. We demand that positive steps be taken toward the union of Egypt and Syria, and that this nucleus of union become the starting point for a broader Arab union, in answer to the Arab people's own will, and in condemnation of a secession that serves none but colonialism and Zionism. Signed, we the leaders of the United Arab Front: Ratib al-Husami, Abdel Samad al-Fatih, Ali Bouzo, Nihad al-Qasim, and myself.

The radio stations carried the text of this telegram, and both Cairo radio and Egypt's Voice of the Arabs broadcast it several times.

Our own move here was supported, from the unionist side, by Salah al-Bitar, who offered to cooperate with us, as well as by the Arab Nationalists and by our own supporters among the Front's members in the provinces.

We held a meeting with our Front's representatives in the provinces and with the Arab Nationalists, at which we agreed on the following:

1. No contact whatsoever with the military, and no meetings with any officer to discuss political matters, since we could not allow ourselves to fall into the same errors for which certain other parties, riding the coattails of the military current, are rightly criticized.

2. No incitement of students to strike or demonstrate, out of concern for their studies and for the country's own future.

3. No funding of our movement from any outside source whatsoever, only from our own pockets, since all we would ever need was to write and print the occasional memorandum, or send the occasional telegram, none of which required more than a modest sum of money.

Each of us contributed a hundred pounds, handed to one of our own number to spend on our printed materials whenever we decided to publish a leaflet or statement.

The "sober" newspaper Al-Ayyam opened its own pages to a stream of improvised, obscure writers, all of them calling for union, nationalism, and socialism, while rejecting any "dictatorial" union. I will not name most of them here, for they are truly beneath mention.

I would like to note one of these socialists, though, one of those whose own throats grew hoarse calling for union, freedom, and socialism, his own party's slogans, who ended up an arms dealer living in Paris, moving from one luxury hotel to an even more luxurious one, until his own inevitable hour came, a stranger cast out from his own homeland.

Saturday the 16th

Mr. Barmada told us, over lunch in the village of Mnin, that "the army fears being held to account," and that some way had to be found to reassure it.

He said: Abdel Hamid Ghaleb (Egypt's ambassador in Lebanon) and Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj were weaving conspiracies together, organizing the working class to carry out acts of violence inside Syria, from outside its own borders.

We assured him that our own front would never take part in any act of violence, this being a principle we had bound ourselves to, and that we could reassure them that we would do everything in our power to keep the country from being plunged into chaos. We asked him whether the government wanted one of us to travel to Cairo, on condition that the request come from them, to sound out its views on the general situation and return with a clear, decisive answer. He asked us for time to see "the group" and take their own pulse before giving us a response.

Sunday the 17th

The five of us met with Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi in his office, and the meeting lasted an hour and a half.

We were seated in a circle around him, Nihad al-Qasim to his right, myself to his left, and the other three across from him. He looked tired, pale, and troubled.

He turned to me as though reproaching me and said: "It's been a while," since we had not met in a long time. I told him, apologizing, that I had not wished to waste his time.

The first thing he took issue with in our telegram was its phrase about "washing away the shame of the secession." The man clearly felt this phrase was aimed at him, and in this he was not mistaken, for he had made himself into a cloak worn by the secessionists, becoming their own president and the very face of their regime.

As we listened to him speak, we sensed that he held no real power at all over the course of events, and that he feared committing himself to anything, lest he prove unable to carry it out, a fear that was, in fact, entirely justified.

So we asked him: do you think I should resign? He added: and what good would resignation do, amid a chaos only growing and spreading, with no one able to bring the situation under control?

We noted that he was resigned to the gravity of the general situation, and that no one took his own position with any real seriousness.

We remarked to him on the state the press had fallen into, attacking us and attacking the very idea of union with an unfamiliar hysteria, one at odds with proper journalistic conduct and public decency. He said: what am I to do, I myself oppose this reckless press freedom, but the Prime Minister clings to it firmly. He added: I am as resigned as you are to the fact that foreign money is flowing into this country like rivers, with neither oversight nor accountability. We told him, laughing: we hope you're equally resigned to the fact that we are not among those pocketing it, and God willing, we never will be.

We again offered him our own mediation with Cairo, should he wish to entrust us with it. He said he would "consult them" and let us know.

We were genuinely startled by his remark that shots had been fired at Akram al-Hourani, though he was unwilling to give us any further details.

He closed our conversation by saying that al-Husami and I had squandered our own opportunity to work within the Arab Affairs Committee, especially since its majority, as he claimed, were unionists, a claim with not a shadow of truth to it, for the great majority of its members were secessionists who did not wish to hear so much as the word union.

Monday the 18th

A pleasant occasion came my way today, when I met Mr. Raif al-Mulqi, deputy for Hama and our own colleague in the chamber of deputies. He showed me a leaflet signed by "the United Arab Front, Hama Branch," containing a vicious attack on Akram al-Hourani, Khalil al-Kallas, and Abdel Fattah al-Zalat (representative of Akram al-Hourani's movement in Aleppo). He also showed me a poem heaping foul curses and coarse language on al-Hourani.

I denounced the leaflet, of which we had no knowledge whatsoever, and told him we would look into the matter, just as I denounced the language of the poem, whose author had not signed his own name to it, and so it remained anonymous, its writer unknown. He gave me a copy of it, which remains among my own papers to this day, a third of a century later.

I will pick out a few of its "cleaner" lines here, to give some sense of the atmosphere then prevailing on the political scene:

The secessionists, you are their own imam

and their leader, O Akram al-Hourani.

You are none of ours, and we are none of yours,

so be gone, for you are the Devil's own handiwork.

We shall yet turn your own scheming back upon your own throat,

and restore the unity of the nation of "the Arabs."

Our own Gamal must one day return,

and you, O accursed one, will meet with nothing but disgrace.

It is clear this was meant for vengeance and abuse, not to satisfy any refined creative impulse.

Today as well, Dr. Maarouf al-Dawalibi visited me at my home, quite unexpectedly. He repeated to me his own "declaration" of 1950, in which he had attacked Zionism, considering it more dangerous than Communism. At the time, this declaration had genuinely caused a great stir, coming as it did from a turbaned sheikh.

He added, however, information I had not known before, that Abdel Nasser had exploited this very declaration in launching his own revolution against the monarchy in 1952, and later in breaking the arms monopoly in 1955.

Yet he held it against Abdel Nasser that he had colluded with Israel and colonialism to orchestrate the 28 March 1962 coup against him and against his own President, Nazim al-Qudsi. His evidence for this was that the Security Council had dragged its feet in considering the Syrian complaint, not deciding to take it up until this very day, several months later. I was astonished that a measured university professor and seasoned politician should say such a thing, and I tried to show him the error of his own view, but who was I to sing my own psalms to David?

I later learned that he had gone down to Aleppo, where his own supporters tried to arrange a reception showing the world the fame and influence he enjoyed, seating him in an open-top Cadillac and driving him about the city, trailed by a short column of cars.

I heard of his reception in the Qallasa quarter things I would rather not have heard about him.

I confess I hold real affection for him, one that will not let me forget fifty-five years of companionship, seven of them at the Sorbonne, and many long years at the university, as fellow professors at the Faculty of Law, and through political work and detention alike. Yet I take issue with certain of his actions, dictated as they are by illusions with no basis in reality.

Tuesday the 19th

It seems that harassment has begun catching up with us.

At one o'clock in the morning, our doorbell rang in an unbroken peal, waking us with a start, since we had grown accustomed to this being the very hour coup tanks preferred to strike, pouncing on vital centers and occupying them, while at the same time the arrests of political "enemies" would begin.

When I opened the door, I found a figure wrapped in a scarf concealing most of his face. I asked him what he wanted, and he said: isn't this the house of so-and-so, naming someone I did not know. He then said he had the wrong address, and left, without bothering to apologize.

One of our own neighbors, an intelligence officer, informed me that some of those eager to preserve the current order were planning actions against "the unionists," possibly violent ones, possibly even involving explosives, and advised me to be cautious and careful.

Among the signs of this "new policy" was the resignation of Abdullah Abdel Da'im, Minister of Information, and his departure from Damascus for Beirut. The Prime Minister described this resignation as a personal matter. Abdel Da'im, for his part, declared that he had accepted his place in the ministry on a unionist basis, in order to help restore union with Egypt, but that the government had strayed from the sound, agreed-upon course, leaving him no reasonable grounds to remain in it.

The "yellow-paper rags" then pounced on him, gnawing at his own dignity, branding him with a greed that had led him to prefer Beirut's dollars (since he now works as an expert for the United Nations) over fulfilling his own national duty at home.

The Minister of Interior, his own party colleague Mr. Abdel Halim Qaddour, resigned alongside him. At the same time, Mr. Adnan al-Azhari, Minister of Foreign Affairs, resigned as well, having himself been a minister in the tripartite Egyptian-Syrian-Yemeni union. A staunch unionist, he "escaped the swamp with his own skin," as he put it to one of his own friends.

Their own time in the ministry had lasted only five months.

Bashir al-Azma reshuffled the ministry, which he had grown quite fond of, bringing in a number of ministers who had never before engaged in any political work at all.

Wednesday the 20th

Umm Fayez, wife of Mr. Ratib al-Husami, came to see me in the evening, while I had some friends over for dinner, fellow union deputies who had been elected as deputies for their own districts to the secessionist chamber of deputies: Messrs. Shukri al-Rahmo al-Shihabi and Jamil Khallo, the two deputies for al-Bab, and Sheikh Hasan Abdel Karim, deputy for Jabal Sim'an. She whispered in the ear of Umm Ghassan, my own wife, that we needed to go into hiding, since a memorandum prepared by intelligence called for the arrest of the five of us, along with Dr. Osama al-Naqib (born in Palestine), whom I did not know personally.

When I contacted our brother Nihad al-Qasim, I understood from him that he already knew of the memorandum, and was on his way to the al-Qadam district, to sleep at a relative's house.

We arranged with Umm Fayez to spend the night at the home of a relative of theirs nearby, a bachelor living with his own sister, who received us most graciously.

We learned the next day that the army commander had never signed the arrest memorandum, since the final word rested with him, as martial law administrator, a power al-Kuzbari had granted him, and which he had kept ever since.

The newspaper Al-Akhbar of Damascus came out, its own illiterate owner unable to read or write, dictating his articles to others instead, carrying on its front page an article dripping with malice and insolence against us. Among what it said: "The Nasserist Five continue receiving constant threats, and they will meet their own inevitable fate, sooner or later."

From Cairo came a statement from Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj, saying he stood ready to return to Syria to appear before a military court, at which point he would release the documents in his own possession incriminating certain prominent figures, and he named Shukri al-Quwatli by name.