Behind Bars - Part 11: Secret Meetings with Salah al-Din al-Bitar and Akram al-Hourani on Syria's Sectarian Violence

c. Our Entry into Lebanon

I assured him that our own reputation, on account of our army's entry into Lebanon, had sunk to rock bottom across the Arab world. The people of Kuwait, for instance, believed we had become "allies of the Maronites," who had been defeated before the Palestinians, so that we might now strike this same armed Arab force ourselves, at Tel al-Zaatar. And could our own already exhausted budget even bear the burden of an army of occupation in a foreign country? I mentioned that we Syrians were suffering a great deal, at Kuwait University for instance, from the growing coldness of our fellow Arab professors of other nationalities, while the Arab press heaped insults on us without restraint or discretion.

I want to note here that General Khleifawi endorsed these observations without any reservation whatsoever, and said, at the close of the meeting, that he thanked me deeply for the observations I had offered, assured me he would remember them, and hoped we would meet again soon. He asked God to grant him success in his own task, so that the people might enjoy security and peace of mind.

He saw us out to the villa's own gate.

In the car, Dr. al-Imadi praised what I had said, endorsing it entirely, point by point, and calling it "among the finest and boldest things he had ever heard on these subjects."

I am not entirely certain the two of them accepted everything I said without reservation, but what I do remember of General Khleifawi, to his credit, is that he opened his own heart wide to me, and bore what I said with a graceful patience I thanked him for.

The man never offered me anything, despite what al-Imadi had told me before the meeting, that he intended to offer me the post of minister of finance. He may well have realized I would decline, or he may simply have shown me this patience out of courtesy, as his own guest in his home. But I believe I acted, in my own judgment, as a good citizen ought to. And your true friend is the one who is honest with you, not the one who merely tells you what you want to hear.

He formed his government two days later, and reappointed Dr. al-Imadi to the very same post he had held in the previous government.

I went back to finishing my book "International Criminality," which reached its readers on the very date I had set for it, by agreement with the University of Kuwait.

A Strange Meeting with Mr. Salah al-Din al-Bitar

The surprise was truly astonishing when the telephone rang at my own home, on the shore of the Arabian Gulf in Kuwait's own "aristocratic" district of Salmiya, on the morning of Saturday, 4 December 1979. I said, yes? And the voice said: this is Salah al-Din al-Bitar.

I had braced myself for every kind of surprise except this one.

Mr. Salah al-Din al-Bitar, the man we had once cooperated with, and who had then betrayed us.

He had been prime minister at the very moment we were seized, when men were executed, imprisoned, and tortured.

His own party had since cast him out, and he had gone off into "the diaspora," a word I use here in the sense of the Jewish exile.

He had been sentenced to death in absentia, along with his own colleague, the Baath Party's second founder, Michel Aflaq. So what had brought him to Kuwait, and what exactly did he want from me, of all people, when the image of him still lingered in my own mind from the front page of the newspaper Al-Baath, marching at the head of "the National Guard," a leather strap slung over his shoulder, a rapid-fire Kalashnikov hanging from it, this same man who had signed the secession document on 28 September 1961? I very nearly hung up the phone on him. But he told me he needed to speak to me about a serious matter, and that we absolutely had to meet as soon as possible. I said to myself: perhaps he has something worth knowing.

We agreed to meet the following afternoon aboard the "Marriott," a small vessel wealthy investors had converted into a floating hotel and restaurant complex, where he was staying as a "guest" of the Kuwaiti government, and specifically of Sheikh Jaber al-Ali, the information minister.

Mr. al-Bitar occupied two rooms, one for sleeping in with his wife, the other serving as a sitting room where he received his guests.

What struck me, as he rose from his chair to receive me, was the severe stoop now bent into his own back, the visible decline in his health, and the weight old age had placed on his own movements.

The conversation opened, as an initial prelude, on the state of the Arab region. I summarize below what I recorded of this conversation across four full pages at the time.

1. Saudi Arabia was living through extremely difficult days. The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which Prince Naif, the Saudi interior minister, had announced was the work of "a fanatic who claimed to be the awaited Mahdi," was in truth nothing less than an organized, wide-scale uprising, carried out by a rebel seeking to change the deteriorating conditions within this "theocratic kingdom," one that cloaked itself in the mantle of Islam (Juhayman, was it?).

Mr. Salah al-Din said he had met the previous day with the Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber, and learned from him that wide-scale revolutionary movements were underway in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, al-Ahsa, with its dense and deeply resentful Shia population.

These movements had in fact been echoed by demonstrations in Kuwait itself, organized by Iranian residents there, which marched toward the American embassy in protest, only to be forcibly broken up by Kuwaiti security forces, who prevented them from proceeding.

The whole Gulf region, in other words, stood at a boil, given the surging resentment welling up in its own peoples' hearts against the political and social conditions they lived under.

2. Mr. Salah al-Din then turned to speak of internal Syrian conditions, and said: there are two major warning signs.

The first: the massacre at the Aleppo Artillery School, in which some hundred Alawite cadets were killed, marking the start of the bloodshed to come.

The second: the Alawites' own attacks on Muslim neighborhoods in the city of Latakia, and the wave of assassinations in Aleppo and Hama.

He said these two incidents revealed just how deep the sectarian hatred ran, hatred "the Alawites themselves had done much to stir up," between them and the Sunnis, who made up the overwhelming majority of the country's citizens, and who held no real power of their own whatsoever.

3. He said he had met a few days earlier, in Paris, with Akram al-Hourani and Shibli al-Aysami, and learned from them that the Iraqis had organized a front made up of Syrians who had fled the country, "for the purpose of bringing down the Syrian regime," and that al-Aysami, who had met with Saddam Hussein himself (Iraq's executioner and ruler, cloaked in the mantle of Baathist party ideology), had been told that the Iraqis had decided to leave the Syrians entirely free to act as they wished in liberating their own country, without any Iraqi interference in their own plans.

For this reason, the opinion among the Syrian exiles had turned toward forming a front bringing together the various political currents, one that would meet somewhere and issue a statement demanding an end to military rule and the holding of free elections.

He assured me that "the people" would no longer accept the Baathists leading any front opposed to the Syrian regime, now that they had tried them and tried their own failed theories firsthand. (This was a truly astonishing thing to hear from the second of the two men who had founded this very party.)

He said he had met, two years earlier, for a full four hours with President Hafez al-Assad, and had come away from that meeting deeply uneasy: "this is a man either entirely without awareness, or possessed of an extraordinary degree of cunning. For this reason I saw no glimmer of hope of ever reforming him."

He also said he had met Rushdi al-Kikhya in Paris, and found in him no wish whatsoever to return to political life, though he remained bitter over the agrarian reform, a bitterness Mr. Salah al-Din found excusable, since Mustafa Hamdoun (minister of agrarian reform during the days of the union) "had treated Rushdi Bey with black-hearted malice, placing his name at the very top of the list of those subject to the reform law."

He added: "and this was not our own doing, since we ourselves were in Cairo at the time."

I answered him, at the close of our sitting, by saying: Mr. Salah al-Din, you say you want to return to unity. But wasn't unity already standing, and weren't you one of the very men who tore it down?

Please, I said, do not tell me that ordinary mistakes were made during the union. No one disputes that. But tell me: was the "cure" for those mistakes really secession, or was it treatment?

I told him: let me be frank with you. Mr. Aflaq has lost his own credit entirely, while you yourself signed your own death warrant the moment you signed the secession document. As for Mr. Akram al-Hourani, he raised the banner of secession loudly and openly, and no one will ever again trust his own claims of "unionism." Nor do I believe Rushdi al-Kikhya could ever be persuaded to return to politics, especially alongside the very politicians you have named.

He said: and your own opinion?

I said: we have had our fill of massacres. What I would suggest is that you try to make contact with President al-Assad and work to persuade him to restore democracy, and to form a government, one you yourself, or Sheikh Maarouf al-Dawalibi, might be tasked with forming, on the basis of national unionist reconciliation.

At that point, I said, I would be waiting for you. Until then, I have frozen all political activity of my own.

As I bid him farewell, he asked whether I would be willing to contribute to the newspaper he published in Paris, "Arab Revival," even under a pen name, though I made him no promise of any kind.

He gave me a copy of the statement he had broadcast declaring "his own independence from the Baath Party" twelve years earlier, dated 10 November 1967, the date it had been published in the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar, a statement I had never actually read.

The statement ran to six large legal-size pages, and included the following: "ever since the treacherous coup of 23 February 1966, I have been living in a kind of internal exile." He then went on to attack "the Baath Party," for "its ideological rigidity, its ossified mindset, its backward methods of work, and the intellectual adolescence, revolutionary chatter, and opportunistic careerism that had crept into it."

Having thus "vented his own frustration," and having laid at the feet of the very party he himself had helped found every fault and shortcoming imaginable, he called on "others," from the other parties, "to purify themselves of the residue of their own parties and the myths of their own organizations, and to accept, across these artificial partisan boundaries, a meeting on the threshold of a new stage." What was needed, in his own view of course, was a new transitional stage in which everyone might come together to practice free, open criticism and a shared, honest, constructive reckoning with the previous partisan experience. This new position, he wrote, no longer lay within the traditional parties, movements, and ideological organizations, since the people themselves now stood outside them, their own place above them, not beneath them. This new position had today moved beyond the traditional parties and organizations, and it fell to revolutionaries to grasp the horizons of this new Arab endeavor, and to put their own knowledge and experience toward the birth of a revolutionary Arab movement for the whole Arab homeland.

He then proposed a new formula, one that would "spring from the very heart of the revolutionary truth of Arabism and of the Arab people together, and extend, in breadth and in depth, to allow a democratic national unity of the people's own forces to flourish under its shade, alongside a national unity of the homeland and an Arab socialism for society."

In closing, he "declared his own independence from the Arab Socialist Baath Party, and took his stand in this new position."

I confess, having just finished rereading the statement again, that I was never able to fully grasp what this "new position" actually was, where it might be found, or precisely what Mr. al-Bitar truly wanted.

I said to myself: this is Mr. al-Bitar exactly, an idealistic dreamer once out of power, and a fanatical realist the moment power falls into his own hands.

Mr. al-Bitar remained alive for nearly fourteen years after this "declaration of independence," without our ever hearing anything more of the fate of this call, in its own "new position."

I never saw him again after that, for he was assassinated on 21 July 1980 in Paris, at the entrance of the very office from which he published his newspaper Arab Revival, located on one of Paris's own fashionable streets, Avenue Foch.

I have asked myself many times: Mr. al-Bitar had no easy way of securing his own livelihood financially, so where did he find the money to pay the rent on a residential apartment and on the office from which he ran his newspaper in Paris, especially once he was no longer a member of any party we might assume was funding him?

And in all honesty, I was deeply moved by the news of his assassination.

If one were to weigh his own good deeds on one scale and his own faults on the other, the good would surely tip the balance. His own nephew, Mr. Tayseer al-Bitar, told me, in an interview I had with him on 30 May 1990, that the late Salah al-Din had wept after signing the secession document, and had twice attempted to take his own life, and that the secessionists themselves, in an effort to pressure him, had once tried to kidnap his wife and daughter in Beirut, after he had sought refuge there.

A Meeting with Akram al-Hourani and Ahmad Mahfal

On the sixth of February 1980, Mr. Akram al-Hourani telephoned me at my own home in Kuwait to tell me he was staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Kuwait, and wished to see me.

I had braced myself for every kind of surprise except this strange one. He told me he had with him Mr. Ahmad Mahfal, a lawyer and head of the Communist Party in Aleppo, and I understood at once that this remarkable visit followed directly on the heels of Mr. al-Bitar's own visit two months earlier.

I told him I would come at once, since there was no point in delay, for he would simply have to wait however long was necessary until he could speak with me.

I got into my car, which could cover the distance between my own home and the Sheraton Hotel, driving along the Gulf's own quiet corniche, in under half an hour, spending the drive turning over in my own mind what my answer might be to whatever proposal I expected he was about to make. The two of them greeted me with kisses at the door of their own suite.

I noticed that Akram al-Hourani had become a broken old man, his body gaunt, his thin neck moving loosely inside the wide collar of his own shirt. And yet his mind remained as sharp as ever, his speech as clear, his energy as forceful, exactly as I had always known him.

We fell into conversation on all manner of subjects, from the firm hold Khomeini's revolution now had, having deposed the Shah and forced him to leave Iran on 16 January 1979, to the assassination of Sheikh Muhammad al-Shami in Aleppo just days earlier, said to have been carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood, since he had become one of the regime's own supporters and was working against them.

Mr. al-Hourani then turned to "the serious matter" itself, and said:

"I swear before God, I left politics long ago, and came to believe it was no longer right for us to drag people into danger on our own account. But these fine young men, whom the Syrian regime brands, unjustly and with real hostility, as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, are nothing but enthusiastic young men working to save the country from this terrible Alawite rule. What they need, though, is a political cover, and in order to provide this cover, I have decided to reach out to the old Brotherhood leadership, yourself among them, hoping we might form a united front seeking to bring down this regime.

Mr. Mahfal added that he and Mr. al-Hourani were organizing a resistance network inside Syria, and that they remained in constant contact with Mr. al-Bitar."

I asked him: are you still working as a communist? My own intention was to remind him that the communists had once fought unity ferociously. He said: yes, but not alongside Khaled Bakdash.

The two of them asked me how willing I would be to work with this front.

I decided to be frank with them both, so that each would know exactly where he stood, and I repeated to them what I had already told al-Bitar before: I do not extend my hand to the money of any foreign state.

I told them unity had already existed, and that they themselves were the ones who had played the decisive role in bringing it down, and that today they would have to bear the burden of that themselves.

I did not hesitate to tell them that I had no wish to go drifting from one country to another, with no clear goal we were actually working to achieve, and no company whose own loyalties I could trust.

They understood my own reluctance to cooperate with them, given our own past experiences together, and Mr. al-Hourani was careful to remind me that "unity had been an act of rescue for us, back when we pursued it. We were, at the time, in a state that could only lead us to one of two outcomes: union with Egypt, or a coup. We never imagined Abdel Nasser would actually accept union, but he did."

I asked him: and how, at the time, did federation turn into full union? He said: "it was the officers themselves who carried their own petition and took it to Abdel Nasser, leaving Mr. al-Bitar out of the meeting entirely. They never brought him in with them."

As I saw them off at the door of their suite, al-Hourani asked that our conversation, and this visit itself, remain entirely confidential. I gave them my word that it would.

I kept repeating to myself the old saying: whoever tests what has already been tested brings regret upon himself.

It is a matter of real regret that Mr. al-Hourani met an end he did not deserve, wandering homeless from Iraq to France, until he finally gave up his own soul in Amman just days ago, a guest of King Hussein of Jordan, the very man about whom Akram al-Hourani, and his own family, had once said things far harsher than any wine merchant ever said of his own trade.

Mr. Aflaq likewise died in Iraq, still enjoying the title of "Founding Leader," having by then announced his own conversion to Islam. When he gave up his own soul to his Maker, the Iraqi government declared official mourning for him, suspending its own broadcast programming and replacing it with recitations of the Noble Quran. Mr. al-Bitar had been assassinated before either of them.

And so men die, just as trees die, while the homeland itself lives on.

God, blessed and exalted, His alone is eternity and permanence.