Behind Bars - Part 2: Nasser's Radio Announcement of His Execution and a Last-Minute Reprieve

3. The Interrogation Papers

The guard handed out papers for us to fill in. They carried a plain threat: "We already know everything about you, so there is no use denying the truth."

The paper contained a great many questions, running to four full pages, and my own answers to most of them were simply no.

Had I traveled to Cairo recently? Why? Whom did I meet there? What was discussed between us? Describe it in full detail.

I answered that, since returning from Cairo on 19 October 1961, in the wake of the secession, I had never gone back to Cairo, and had therefore met no one there.

Had I traveled to Lebanon? When, where, how, and by what means?

I wrote that I had not traveled to Lebanon since the days of the union.

I answered a question about "which Syrian officers I knew," and the nature of my own acquaintance with them. I answered: I have a nephew in the army holding the rank of captain, and I gave them his own name and post, and I have a cousin who is a pilot, naming him too.

I later learned that this cousin was being held in "another wing," accused of being a unionist, and that he was later discharged from the army, after having become a brilliant pilot, trained in the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Poland, only to be recalled to duty some days later.

He was killed in a battle with Israel, when the Israelis shot down his own plane over the no-man's-land separating the Israeli and Syrian forces. His own body, burned inside his plane, remained there for forty days, reduced to a charred, disfigured heap, until a commando unit risked bringing it back.

The state honored him by naming a preparatory school in his own city of Aleppo after him. I also told them of my own acquaintance with "Lieutenant General Amin al-Hafiz, Deputy Martial Law Administrator," the very man who had issued Martial Law Order No. 19, ordering our own arrest.

Some of my own brothers advised me not to mention his name, so as not to embarrass him, but I mentioned it anyway, in keeping with the interrogation's own instructions, "to tell the truth, since they already know everything about us."

My own sense is that Amin al-Hafiz helped entrench the shaky regime, through the very methods of violence and cruelty he used against the Nasserists, even though he had not originally belonged to the Baathists at all. It was said he joined the party only later, while serving as "head of the National Council," after Lieutenant General Louai al-Atassi resigned from that post.

We often asked ourselves why General al-Atassi had resigned at all.

Some said he had refused to sign the execution orders, preferring instead to resign rather than become the regime's own "doormat," especially given that he was considered a "Nasserist," one of the revolutionaries of the nationalist movement.

But what was confirmed to us was that signing the execution orders fell, by law, to Amin al-Hafiz himself, as Deputy Martial Law Administrator. Which is why General al-Atassi submitted his own resignation, so as not to remain swept along a tunnel with no end in sight, especially after having signed the legislative decree establishing the martial-law tribunal, once the radio began broadcasting one execution sentence after another, and their own carrying out.

He preferred, then, to leap from a boat already headed toward the abyss, saved only by a rock he clung to, drifting instead toward dry land, from where he went on to broadcast to people the news of his own unionist heroism, heroic deeds that had once, in truth, marked a bright chapter in his own life, though he abandoned them afterward.

4. The Hashish-Smoking Freedom Fighter

Among the detainees, we found two men no one could quite understand the reason for their being held with us.

The first had once been a deputy, and stood very close to the new men in power. His name had first become known in the early days of the union between Egypt and Syria, as a bribery middleman for the Saudi king, who had wanted to bring down Abdel Nasser's own plane, to rid himself of the danger he posed to his own family's throne. He came away from this "conspiracy" with a tidy sum, exactly one hundred thousand pounds sterling, enough, at the time, to buy twenty-five apartments the size of the one I had bought myself, on al-Shahbandar Street.

Those who knew his own story kept their distance from him.

But he did not keep his distance from me. Nor did I hold his own closeness to me against him, since he had once been my own student at the Faculty of Law, and treated me warmly as a result, showing me every courtesy and telling me whatever he heard from his own Saudi relatives about our own conditions, and whatever he knew of them from the inside.

I will not deny that I remained wary of him, and so I would listen to what he had to say, without ever telling him anything that might benefit him, or harm me.

He left us after four days, once "a high order" was issued for his own release. He left the dormitory trailed by looks of real disapproval.

As for the second man, he remained a real mystery, until he finally unlocked his own secret himself.

He said: I'm a man who loves his own water pipe. I was thoroughly "stoned" under a shady tree, tending my own pipe, a piece of solid wood, carved out to hold a bit of ash and some burning charcoal, then placing a piece of hashish on the fire, and smoking it until I lost all feeling of everything around me.

While I was in this state of blissful "intoxication," I heard gunfire and artillery fire, but paid it no mind at all, lost as I was in my own overwhelming pleasure, until some soldiers attacked me, and beat me until I lost consciousness. I woke up here, among you.

He kept asking what had happened, and why he was here, and whether this was a hospital, or a prison.

When he was told, no, this is a prison, he took to cursing hashish, and cursing whoever had first taught him to use it, giving himself over to a state of deep bewilderment.

He became a source of amusement for us, and one of the men nicknamed him after the Carthaginian commander Hannibal (or Hani Ba'al), who had once threatened the Roman Empire in the very heart of its own capital, given that he too now stood accused of "threatening the safety of the state." He did, though, make the most of his own imprisonment, swearing a whole series of solemn oaths that he had repented before God of his own addiction. One evening, his own name was called, and he left, never to return.

Most likely, "the justice of al-Dalati's court" caught up with him, and he was returned instead to his own water pipe, since we never heard his own name among those whose execution was carried out.

For it is exceedingly difficult for a drug addict to abandon so vile a habit through solemn oaths and vows alone.

As I write this very chapter, I read in the magazine Al-Arabi (February 1996) a summary of a UNDP report, stating "that the size of the world's own drug trade had reached 500 billion dollars a year (note the figure carefully, it is 500 billion, not 500 million)."

The Human Development Report states that what consumers spend on drugs exceeds the total gross domestic product of more than eighty developing countries.

It is worth noting that the United Nations devoted an entire decade to fighting drugs, the decade of the 1990s, naming it "the United Nations Decade Against Drug Abuse," and that the most important drug-producing regions in the world are Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Bolivia, Peru, Thailand, and Colombia.

The most important drug-consuming countries are the United States and Canada.

These astronomical figures mean that "the drug trade" exceeds the size of the world's own oil trade, coming immediately after the arms trade, itself controlled by the advanced industrial states, the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union, which, since its own dissolution, has become a group of states, the Russian Federation foremost among them.

5. Abdel Nasser's Speech of 22 July

This day is a dear one to Abdel Nasser, and to his own comrades in that sacred march, and to the Arab nation as a whole. On this day, in 1952, the columns of the Free Officers moved to uproot the corrupt monarchy's own foundations, restoring sovereignty to the people of Egypt for the first time since the end of Pharaonic rule, an age of the most ancient antiquity.

It had become the Egyptian President's own custom to mark this anniversary with a speech delivered before a great gathering of citizens, and he did not depart from this custom on this particular day.

We listened to his speech on a small radio set I had managed to keep with me.

He launched an exceptionally forceful attack on the Baath Party, accusing it of being a fascist party, and said, in this very speech, "that we have decided to consider the charter of 17 April null and void."[1]

And so the efforts of the Syrian delegation that traveled to Cairo, headed by Lieutenant General Louai al-Atassi, with Colonel Muhammad Umran and Lieutenant Colonel Fahd al-Shaer as members, on 18 July, the very day the Nasserist assault on the General Staff and the radio station took place, to persuade Abdel Nasser not to abolish the tripartite agreement signed on 17 April, ended in resounding failure. The President had come to realize that the Baathists had merely been maneuvering, to buy time in hopes of securing their own footing on solid ground, once they had decided to purge their own former partners.

A deep unease took hold of us, for we feared these campaigns of physical liquidation might spread further still, striking indiscriminately, sparing neither the guilty nor the innocent, among the dormitories' own occupants, ourselves among them.

President Abdel Nasser likewise launched a fierce attack, on this same day, against al-Dalati's own court, since it had "decided to execute AbdulWahab Homad," a sentence, he said in his speech, that had already been carried out. I felt real dread at this news. But finding myself in a detention I held no power or say over whatsoever, all I could do was submit to God's own decree.

The following morning, a non-commissioned officer came to the dormitory's own door and called out my name, saying I was wanted "for a meeting."

I placed my own fate in God's hands, and put on my own suit, since, like everyone else, we normally lived in our own "pajamas," being easier to sit on the floor in. I judged this to be a summons to appear before the court. I bid my brothers farewell with kisses, and left with the soldier, amid the detainees' own hushed silence and their own grim expectations.

They brought me into a room whose own furnishings suggested an office, given the table and telephone inside it. I sat waiting. The door opened, and in walked someone I recognized, the journalist Mr. Mutei al-Nunu, along with a photographer carrying a camera.

We exchanged "warm" greetings, and asked after each other's health and "spirits."

I noticed the photographer taking a great many pictures of me. What's the story here, Mr. Mutei?

He said: I missed you, so I asked to see you, and they allowed it. This was the flimsiest answer I had ever heard, for there was no relationship between us that could possibly justify granting him permission for such a visit, especially since his own safety depended on denying any acquaintance with me at all, so as not to expose himself to any suspicion of "conspiracy" or Nasserism. And even granting, for argument's sake, that my own "chaste love" had suddenly seized his heart, he still held no real power of his own capable of securing him special permission for so strange a visit. I remained puzzled over how to explain it, and my own suspicions wandered in every direction as I spoke with him. He then spoke, with the supervising officer, our own third party in the room, listening to our conversation, and said: the Egyptians broadcast that you had been executed, and your family and friends grew alarmed, so the officials thought it best to deny the news, to put their own minds at ease.

I gave him a smile whose own meaning was not lost on him, and he asked me if I wanted anything. I told him: if it were possible for me to speak with my wife by telephone. He granted my own wish, and I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear, at which point the camera's own flash began going off, capturing me in the very pose of a man speaking on the telephone.

I never actually got to make the call, since "the line was down," as the officer put it, "another time, God willing." Mr. Mutei bid me farewell, and I returned to my own brothers, who took real heart at my return, as proof that I remained alive, and was being treated decently, the very telephone against my own ear serving as their own proof.

God's Messenger spoke the truth when he said: "The guilty man is nearly moved to say, arrest me."

6. An Execution Without Equal

An astonishing piece of news spread through the dormitory, one no one could quite "swallow."

One of the detainees told us he had seen a junior officer, one of the "trusted men," help a lieutenant colonel step down from a jeep, at the very moment "the meat truck," the closed vehicle used to transport bodies, was making its way toward the nearest cemetery, to dump the bodies of those already executed. This "trusted" officer signaled to the meat truck's own driver to stop and wait, so that "this one could be taken along with the rest." The truck stopped.

Its own driver waited as the trusted man and his own charge walked into the prison's own courtyard, and from there into the dreadful room where al-Dalati and his fellow "judges" practiced their own bloody trade.

The bound man stood before them, and "the court" hurled a few "polite" curses at him, its own members "deliberating" over the punishment he deserved, a deliberation that ended in a decision to execute him. He was led away to meet his own fate, and his own body was carried to the meat truck, his own soul departing to its Creator, to complain to Him of the injustice of this ungrateful, tyrannical gang.

Mothers wept over the fruit of their own wombs, martyrs of the beloved union. And the mothers of these "judges" swayed with pride over their own sons, whose eyes power's own glittering lure and the illusions of class struggle had blinded.

But other mothers would one day weep over their own sons, these very "judges," for the rest of time, pursued by God's own wrath and curse.

Some of them would be killed themselves, by weapons even more bloodthirsty than their own, wielded by their own "brothers." Some would be reduced, in their own final, most wretched years, to wandering exiles, cast out from one country only to find every other country's own door shut in their face.

7. And the Crow Cawed

We had scarcely begun to enjoy a measure of real peace of mind, after several days of deadly anxiety, when we saw, through the bars of the dormitory's own door, Sergeant Suleiman, a paper in hand, preparing to read out the names written upon it.

A deathly silence fell over the dormitory. The blood froze in every face. We judged that the machine of death had resumed its own work, under al-Dalati's own leadership. Suleiman read out eight names:

AbdulWahab Homad

Nihad al-Qasim

Thabet al-Mahayni

Munir al-Rayyes

Adnan al-Majarkash

Zairi Tayyara...

I no longer recall the other two names, nor can I be entirely certain the name Zairi Tayyara is correct. I did discuss this very matter with Mr. Adnan al-Majarkash, on the evening of 9 December 1993, about that particular day, and he remembered these same names as I did, though he too could not recall who the other two men had been.

They stood us in a row before the tribunal's own door, guards surrounding us, and we waited beneath a scorching sun. Our own wait dragged on, perhaps close to an hour.

Some of those "invited" grew genuinely weary of standing, and asked themselves: why summon us at all, and why this endless waiting?

Mr. al-Majarkash tells me:

You spoke, meaning myself, among us, offering encouragement and calling on us to hold fast to patience and endurance, for God alone does with us as He wills.

The court summoned Suleiman, who stood bowed beside us, and he went in for two minutes, then came back out and told us: "Return to your own dormitory." We walked back, behind the two guards, like eight sheep the butcher had already chosen from the pen, only for something to give him pause before the slaughter. What, then, had changed the court's own mind, this same court so eager to spill blood, after several days of rest?

What I was told, years later, was that Lieutenant General Amin al-Hafiz, and I record this here for history's sake, had personally pressured the court to postpone our own trial, one certain to end in disaster, since he "had learned from the papers" that we bore no connection whatsoever to this armed assault, the one Jasim Alwan and some of his supporters had carried out against the General Staff and the radio station's own headquarters, especially since not one of us had any past record suggesting any real fondness for bloody coups.

I met with Lieutenant General Amin al-Hafiz twice after this very incident, though we spoke of other, more pressing matters each time. I avoided asking him about a matter he himself might not even have known about. But if this last-minute intervention by the Deputy Martial Law Administrator is indeed true, it means that even the blackest of souls may still hold within it some small point of light, shining through the darkest of gloom, capable of lifting an injustice that need never have happened at all.

The dormitory's own occupants rejoiced at our own return, for they had grown accustomed to the rule that whoever left never came back. Their own ears would strain toward the far side of the northern wall, where the execution post stood, listening for the sound of gunfire through the high window's own opening.

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Endnotes:

[1] See also p. 184, Palazzoli, La Syrie, le rêve et la rupture, Paris, 1977.