Before These Memoirs - Part 9: Nazim al-Qudsi Accepts the Presidency After al-Kikhya's Refusal, and Kuzbari's Forced Resignation

Monday the 20th

It became known that the secessionists had offered the presidency of the republic to Rushdi al-Kikhya, and that he had refused it.

They then offered it to Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi, who accepted it.

I later learned that Rushdi al-Kikhya had not himself nominated Dr. al-Qudsi for this presidency.

He preferred to have no role at all in this secessionist era, beyond what old ties of friendship and colleagueship required.

This morning the telephone rang at my house, and Nazim al-Qudsi was on the line. He reproached me for the fact that no one from their circle ever saw me.

And so, as he put it, he had come "to draw me out of my isolation."

The truth is that my ties with them had been severed entirely, for I felt that some of them had openly and explicitly supported the secession (Ahmad Qanbar and As'ad al-Kourani), while others supported it without declaring so, seeking their own nomination in the general elections or angling for a ministerial post (Nazim al-Qudsi, Maarouf al-Dawalibi, Rashad Barmada, Rashad Jabri). He asked to meet me at his residence at the Orient Palace Hotel. It happened that my son Ghassan was suffering that very day from appendicitis, and Dr. Jalal al-Dahhan had decided to perform an urgent operation to remove it.

I tried to make him understand that my circumstances with my son did not allow me to leave him while he writhed in pain, but he kept insisting on the meeting with a strange persistence.

I said to him: Nazim Bey, may I know the reason for such urgency?

The man realized I would not answer his hasty summons, given that I had to accompany my son to the hospital, and so he decided to disclose his purpose to me over the telephone instead, which amounted to the necessity of my running as a candidate for our home city of Aleppo, and that my place on the party's list was reserved.

I was genuinely astonished at this "honor" coming from former brothers with whom every political tie had been cut. Why, then, did he come to offer me something so entirely out of keeping with our severed relations?

I believe he was not unaware that I could never accept entering elections that would lend the secession a false air of legitimacy, just as he was not unaware that they could easily do without me, since I was in a position of weakness, while they held "the throat" of the general political situation in their grip, backed by the army, that is, by the officers who had seized control of it, and by every hidden center of power.

And yet I do not deny Nazim al-Qudsi his modesty and his gentleness, two qualities that never once left him throughout his life. Likewise, the cleanliness of his hands and the soundness of his political direction remained beyond suspicion. I had shown him courtesy, as I had shown courtesy to our fellow former members of the People's Party, during the union, and it is likely that he had sensed and remembered my courtesies, and remembered too what al-Sarraj had written of me in his own reports to Abdel Nasser, on account of my continued attachment to their friendship, and so he wished to repay me in kind for what I had once shown him. Beyond that, he wanted to secure me politically at his side for the coming vote on the presidency of the republic, for it was no longer a secret to anyone that he had become the army's sole candidate, after Rushdi al-Kikhya's refusal to accept any post at all. In fairness, I must say that I once heard Rushdi al-Kikhya himself remark, as we spoke of Nazim al-Qudsi, that his eye was fixed on the presidency of the republic, and that he could not turn it away, and in this gentle remark he meant to level a soft-worded criticism at him.

Rushdi's own conviction was that the army's interference in the country's politics had corrupted both the army and politics alike, and that his own political experience had convinced him that whoever accepted the post the coup-makers raised him to would inevitably become a prisoner of their whims and desires. And so Rushdi always kept himself at a distance, while Nazim fell straight into the trap.

I told Nazim al-Qudsi over the telephone that I had no intention of putting myself forward as a candidate, and no intention now of engaging in any political activity whatsoever.

The man sensed that my position was a final refusal, and so he bid me farewell, visibly irritated by this "stubbornness." I bear witness that I felt an immeasurable sorrow at his acceptance of this adventure, and I remembered what he himself used to say about the army's domination of civilian rule. And now, human weakness had taken hold of him, before the lure of the "lofty" office.

Tuesday, 21 November

It was announced today that Prime Minister Ma'mun al-Kuzbari had submitted his resignation from the ministry, in order to enter the electoral battle as an ordinary citizen.

But what the "inside" reports say is that he was forced out, dismissed against his will. His own cousin, Colonel Haydar, who had taken an active part in the secessionist coup, had been arrested, and Haydar's brother, Khulusi, was arrested as well. Alongside them, another Damascene officer, Colonel Faisal Sirri al-Husseini, was arrested, along with two of his own brothers.

And so "the accursed cat" began devouring her own kittens.

The late Dr. Abidin Hammadeh told me of the late Dr. Izzat al-Nuss, Minister of Education in al-Kuzbari's government, that the officers had summoned him to the General Staff headquarters. He arrived escorted by a military police officer, and walked between two rows of armed soldiers bearing their submachine guns. He felt a wave of unease when he heard voices threatening al-Kuzbari coming from the Chief of Staff's own hall, and heard curses being hurled as well, to force him to resign. When the door was opened for him, al-Kuzbari was already signing a paper handed to him, containing his own resignation, a resignation submitted with neither thanks nor blessing.

A decision was then issued, one part accepting the resignation of al-Kuzbari and his government, the other appointing Dr. Izzat al-Nuss in his place at the head of the transitional ministry. And so the officers had not tolerated al-Kuzbari for more than fifty-five days.

Dr. al-Nuss, a well-known sociologist, enjoyed the respect of his academic colleagues and his friends in university circles. Events pushed him into the furnace of "politics" under the worst circumstances the country was passing through, by sheer chance alone. I learned through one of his friends that he had never been at ease with being entrusted with this task.

On al-Kuzbari's forced removal, Lieutenant General Abdel Karim Zahreddine, the army commander at that time, wrote the following:[1]

"Before the deadline set for submitting nomination requests to the parliamentary council, information had reached us indicating that Dr. Ma'mun al-Kuzbari was not innocent of taking money from Jordan, though the investigation was unable to obtain conclusive evidence against him.

We had come to view him with suspicion and doubt, and we decided to remove him from the presidency of the Council of Ministers.

In the meeting held by the Command Council, I informed him that the Command was displeased with him, and demanded his resignation that very night, before leaving the meeting hall. I then told him plainly that as commander, I would not take responsibility for preserving his life, since the intelligence division had informed me that a number of factions might assassinate him. At that, he yielded and submitted his resignation."

The truth is that the "joker" he had been playing, his own cousin Haydar, had ended up behind bars and discharged from the army, so that Dr. Ma'mun had no remaining support left to draw on for resistance.

I do not know the reason for such a desperate clinging to power, unless there were benefits to be hoped for behind it, and class interests he sought to safeguard, foremost among them the interests of the Five-Man Company, one-fifth of which was owned by his own father-in-law.

The Five-Man Company had a less than honorable record in the country's economy, which is why it was nationalized in the union era, and remains, at least in theory, the property of the people to this day.

Friday, 1 December

Parliamentary elections were held today in every province of the state. At the same time, a vote was held to approve the provisional constitution.

As for the constitution, the referendum's result was 92 percent in favor, more merciful in any case than the 99.99 percent margins we had grown used to in referendums held for the benefit of the armed forces or under their supervision.

I went around some of the polling stations in Damascus, without of course taking part in the voting myself, and found them nearly empty of people.

Lieutenant General Zahreddine wrote of these elections (p. 149):

"I had believed that those elections were a model of integrity and orderliness. Yet after a long time had passed, I learned that covert interference, from within the army and from outside it, had played a significant role in the matter."

Out of your own mouth I condemn you, Israel.

Sunday, 3 December

The results of the parliamentary elections became known.

In Damascus, seventeen deputies won seats, fourteen Muslims and three Christians. The deputy with the highest number of votes was Khaled al-Azm, followed by Ma'mun al-Kuzbari, then Issam al-Attar (the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood and the rising star of the new politics). What draws attention in Damascus's election results is the success of three members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the success of Sabri al-Asali, and of Hanin Sahnawi and Bashir Ramadan, both major wealthy merchants.

Salah al-Bitar lost his seat, as did our own colleague from the People's Party, Ali Bouzo.

Mr. al-Bitar immediately issued a statement, in keeping with his party's usual habit, impugning the integrity of the elections and claiming they had been rigged.

Exactly as had happened to them when Mr. Michel Aflaq lost his seat in the 1949 elections. The rightward drift, then, was plain and unmistakable.

Aleppo's elections confirmed this very same trend.

Eleven Muslim deputies and five non-Muslim deputies won seats there. Rushdi al-Kikhya did not put himself forward as a candidate, having decided, as was confirmed to me, to withdraw from politics altogether. Nor did Nazim al-Qudsi put himself forward, since he had already been earmarked by the coup-makers for the presidency itself, an "honor" he accepted at their hands.

Among the most prominent winners were Dr. Maarouf al-Dawalibi, Rashad Barmada, and Ahmad Qanbar, members of the dissolved People's Party, along with Alaeddine al-Jabiri, As'ad al-Kourani, and Nihad Ibrahim Pasha (an economist working abroad and a nephew of Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi).

The most prominent Christian deputy was Leon Zamaria, a legal figure well known for his professional competence, though he could not bear to hear so much as a mention of social justice or socialism.

Mr. Abdul Fattah Abu Ghudda, who led the Muslim Brotherhood in the north, was also elected. I came to know him once, in the city of Rabat in 1967, when I was a professor at its university and he had come to attend one of the conferences there. I bear witness that he was a distinguished jurist, fully attuned to the developments of the age, and possessed besides of a warm nature and an easygoing temperament.

He had surely taken as his own guide the noble verse: "Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good instruction, and argue with them in a way that is best."

How badly this faith needs more men of his virtue and openness to progress.

In Hama, the entire list of Mr. Akram al-Hourani's candidates won.

In Homs, its traditional figures won: Faidi al-Atassi, Ratib al-Husami, Farhan al-Jundali, Hani al-Sabai, and Muslim al-Haddad, all of them members of the former People's Party.

Al-Husami and al-Sabai, however, had resigned their party membership before the union came about.

It is fair to say that the other electoral districts sent to the council's hall the same faces they had always sent, by inheritance or by established leadership.

These were, then, as a general rule, traditional faces, drawn from tribal chieftains and the wealthy of the districts, along with a handful of socialists (Wahib al-Ghanem for Latakia, al-Walid Abdul Rahman for Harim, Abdullah Jasouma for al-Bab, and Dr. Muhammad al-Ashouri for Idlib).

A perennial deputy for Manbij, Sheikh Diab al-Mashi, also won a seat.

I had known him ever since I first entered the chamber of deputies myself, as a member, in 1947, and he remained a deputy long after we ourselves had left it.

He still sits as a deputy in the "People's Assembly" as I write these very lines, in September 1996. I laugh every time I see his "handsome" face on television, now and again. I once ran into him in one of the markets of Damascus, and asked him how he had managed to keep his parliamentary seat all these years, being a man who could neither read nor write. He answered me: by wiping the cloth clean.

The new council, then, gathered together every old face, along with new faces resembling them in their reactionary, capitalist leanings.

Most of them despised the union with Abdel Nasser's system, because they could not coexist with a socialist system that left them no room to dominate. As for the remaining "leftists," the strongest among them were al-Hourani's own supporters, and he, as his positions made clear, was among the fiercest enemies of the union, indeed fighting it with tooth and claw, he and his followers alike. The unionist majority, meanwhile, kept its silence, taking refuge in cautious watchfulness.

Monday, 11 December

One of the "Nasserist" deputies told me that the army command had invited them to a dinner held in honor of the new deputies and the members of the provisional government, "to get acquainted." Lieutenant General Zahreddine delivered a "nationalist" speech to them, in which he said:

"On that first day, the revolutionaries gave everything they could of sacrifice and effort, to turn back the tyrants' scheming from the path leading down into the abyss, and to preserve for the union its majesty and its sanctity.

But the tyrants" (meaning President Abdel Nasser and his men) "refused to do anything but ride roughshod in stubbornness and arrogance, and destroyed the union experiment with their own hands, in a manner that lays bare the rancor of their souls and the narrowness of their horizons."

Why this vilification, O "one of the officers of the union"?

Was it because the President refused to negotiate with mutinous officers who demanded they not be brought to trial, and refused any compromise that would undermine the discipline of the armed forces?

It had become known that the army command was working to secure the presidency for Nazim al-Qudsi, and the presidency of the parliamentary council for Said al-Ghazzi, and had obtained a written pledge from Dr. al-Qudsi to work toward this end. It placed a "veto" on Sabri al-Asali, Maarouf al-Dawalibi, Ma'mun al-Kuzbari, and Khaled al-Azm for the post of Prime Minister, leaving the President free to choose a Prime Minister from outside this circle, based on the results of his own consultations.

Nazim al-Qudsi accepted this "veto."

And the "people's deputies" were made to understand what was expected of them, and they proved themselves worthy of that confidence.

Tuesday the 12th

A number of deputies came to me, we unionists, telling me "that they would remain in touch with me as a unionist parliamentary bloc," to coordinate their work within the council. All of them had been deputies in the National Assembly in Cairo during the union days. I learned from them that the majority of deputies were leaning toward Ma'mun for the presidency of the council, but that they themselves would vote for neither him nor for al-Ghazzi.

The chamber of deputies held a session this morning, and al-Kuzbari won with 114 votes, against 47 for Jalal al-Sayyid, the candidate of the socialists and Khaled al-Azm's own bloc.

Zahreddine writes (p. 160) that "Dr. al-Qudsi dealt us our first blow (with al-Kuzbari's victory). I discussed this matter with Dr. al-Qudsi, and he answered that he had done everything humanly possible, but had been unable to persuade the deputies to elect Mr. al-Ghazzi." As soon as the election results were announced, the army's representatives withdrew from the gallery, and refused to congratulate al-Kuzbari, though they kept their private feelings to themselves, reserved for the President-in-waiting and his own regime.

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Endnotes:

[1] In his memoirs, on the secession period, p. 147.