Before These Memoirs - Part 7: Meeting Nahlawi's Officers and the Opium Accusation Against Field Marshal Amer

Thursday the 19th

Nur al-Din Kahhalah, Dr. Shawkat al-Qanawati (Minister of Health), Nihad al-Qasim, and I visited the Republican Palace, and signed our names in the protocol register, seeking leave to travel.

I believe that had we asked to meet the President, he would have received us.

But we agreed among ourselves to spare him, and to spare ourselves, a session of grief and sorrow. We went back to gather our families for the airport, on our way home to Damascus by way of Beirut, since flights between Syria and Egypt were now forbidden.

Our plane took off at two in the afternoon. As we left Egyptian airspace and cast a farewell glance at the Nile and its green ribbon, we remembered the joy that had swept over us the day we first came here as ministers, to carry out a national duty. Today, though, we return with our heads bowed, licking the wounds of our hopes for the nation's pride and dignity, asking ourselves: will there ever be an honorable return, some day soon? For us, or for our children, or our grandchildren?

We landed at Beirut airport, hired two taxis for ourselves and our families, and set off for Damascus by land.

At the Syrian border, an intelligence officer came to us asking that we meet with Colonel Abdel Karim al-Nahlawi in his office at the General Staff headquarters. We asked him to contact al-Nahlawi and ask whether we should come to him directly, or whether we might first take our families home and return afterward. The answer came back that we were free to do as we saw fit, but that he hoped we would not delay too long.

When we entered al-Nahlawi's office, a number of officers gathered around us, not one of whom I recognized. We sat talking with them, and they with us, for three uninterrupted hours. Their campaign centered on the Field Marshal, whom they accused of using narcotics. One of them stood up, opened a drawer in one of the tables, and brought out a filthy tin box the size of a palm, opening it in front of us and claiming that the black substance inside it was raw opium, which they had found in its place in the Field Marshal's own office, "a man well known," as they put it, "to be an inveterate hashish user."

This accusation was not new to our ears, for we had heard before that the Field Marshal was "a hashish user," but no one had ever been able to say he had actually seen him take this deadly poison. Whenever we sat with him, he was always in good spirits, always smiling, fond of a joke and delighted by one, and I found him pleasant in his dealings, easy to warm to, inclined toward simplicity in his gatherings, being a native of Minya province in Upper Egypt.

I recall that I once presented him with lists of essential goods and materials to be exempted from steep customs duties and their sharply rising prices, caused by the drought that had struck the region (he was then exercising the powers of the President of the Republic), and he asked me: Brother AbdulWahab, are you satisfied that this measure is necessary? I assured him it was a measure in the people's interest and for the sake of stability, and he reached out, took the foolscap pages, glanced over them briefly, took out his pen, and signed them, a smile on his lips.

After that, they went on complaining of the Egyptians' domination of power and their humiliation of the Syrians working alongside them, especially in the army, and expressed their regret that the Field Marshal had rejected the proposals they had submitted for his approval, which had forced them to issue Communiqué No. 10, announcing "that Field Marshal Amer had broken his promise, and that the Supreme Revolutionary Command of the Armed Forces had therefore decided to consider its Communiqué No. 9 null and void," thereby sealing the secession.

I took the floor and told the officers that I wished to speak for myself, since my fellow ministers were technocrats who had never worked in politics, and I did not wish to put them in an awkward position by what I might say. I, however, was a politician, and wished to speak in that capacity. Among what I told them was: if you are satisfied that the situation is now stable, I would like to remind you of the long series of coups we have lived through. Perhaps the worst year this country ever saw was 1949, which witnessed three coups. As for the coups that never surfaced, we do not know of them, but we used to hear that they occurred in various forms of mutiny, ending either in negotiation or in suppression. Al-Shishakli was toppled by a coup led by Mustafa Hamdoun of Aleppo, and it was the union, by coming into being, that spared us massacres whose scale only God could know. And now here you are, taking power through yet another military coup. Who knows what tomorrow holds in store?

They tried to "reassure" me that they held power with an iron grip, and that there was no fear whatsoever of any new military movements.

But the days that followed brought them evidence that refuted what had reassured them, evidence needing no riddle-solving computer to decode, for the truth of the matter was as plain as the midday sun. The new secessionists were "Damascenes," few in number within the army, whom Lieutenant General Abdel Karim Zahreddine himself estimated at only one percent of the total number of army officers. The overwhelming majority of officers came from the sons of the remote provinces and the countryside, men who had mostly been unable to pay the "cash exemption fee" because of their poverty, and so had turned instead to the military academy, resentful at being unable to enroll in the universities, a resentment they kept to themselves.

I can almost swear that the great majority of them, if not all of them, were Nasserists at heart, at ease with the socialist laws and the agrarian reform law, and with the benefits they themselves enjoyed under them.

Beyond that, and I say this plainly, coups and taking part in them had by now become for them a source of allure and amusement, with cause or without. Indeed, a temptation in their own right.

I confess I was struck with astonishment on reading the following passage in Lieutenant General Zahreddine's own memoirs:[1]

"...so much so that Major Fayez al-Rifai, who went after 28 September with a military delegation to negotiate with President Abdel Nasser over establishing a union on new foundations, told President Abdel Nasser that if we had not carried out the 28 September coup, some of your own ministers would have carried it out themselves. And I am able to tell you, Mr. President, that some of them negotiated with us to carry out a coup toppling the union era, and this before 28 September itself. When the President pressed to know the name of the person who had negotiated with Major al-Rifai, he answered him: Minister Ta'ma al-Awdallah. Al-Rifai says that President Abdel Nasser leaned on one hand and sank into deep thought for several minutes."

"Minister Ta'ma," as he used to style himself whenever he telephoned someone and wished to introduce himself, had been one of the ministers closest to President Abdel Nasser and Field Marshal Amer, and one of the most "devoted" to the union. He always carried a pistol, even to embassy receptions we attended in the government's name.

Once his pistol slipped and fell onto the sofa. I reproached him for this "armed display" in a house enjoying international immunity, the residence of the Indian embassy no less.

Our meeting with the coup's leadership ended after more than three hours. They saw us to the door of the Staff headquarters, showing us the utmost courtesy and civility, and a car they placed at our disposal that pitch-black night carried us home.

And so we began a new chapter in our lives, as ordinary citizens. But I made myself a solemn pledge to hold fast to the following principles:

1. To remain loyal to the first Arab republic of modern history. I thank God that I never strayed a hair's breadth from this principle for the whole of my life.

2. Not to cooperate with the secessionists.

Which meant:

a. Not returning to the university to reclaim my seat at the Faculty of Law as professor of criminal law and criminal procedure, since any return would come by a decree signed by the secessionists.

b. Not taking part in any political or municipal election, since that would mean recognizing the legitimacy of the new order.

c. Not accepting any political, administrative, or academic post.

These were moral commitments I upheld for as long as I lived, commitments that other, more prominent men cast aside without a second thought, if I am not to say trampled underfoot.

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Endnotes:

[1] P. 166.