Behind Bars - Part 8: The Night the Tribunal's Death Sentences Were Handed Down

9. The Night the Verdicts Were Handed Down

The trial of a number of the "Nasserist criminals" came to an end, and al-Dalati announced that the session would be adjourned to a date he set for handing down the verdicts.

The prominent defendants who had stood trial numbered nine: six tried in person, and three tried in absentia, since they were "fugitives from justice."

The principal defendant, Major General Rashed al-Qatini, read me the defense he would deliver the next morning before the martial-law council himself, since the tribunal refused to allow defense lawyers to represent the accused. One sentence in it caught my attention, reading roughly as follows:

"And we agreed with a number of civilians to seize the General Staff building and the radio station." This phrase left wide room for questions.

The civilian leaders in question were us, and we had no knowledge whatsoever of any agreement or execution in this entire operation.

I pointed out to him the trouble this word "civilians" might bring down on innocent people, and, taking my point, he added the word "Palestinians" alongside "civilians," since the agreement had in fact been made with them, and they had taken part in the actual armed assault on the "strategic" targets they had sought to seize.

I found myself admiring the steel nerves of Abu Maher, Rashed al-Qatini, who faced the specter of death with a rare boldness. We spent that evening trading jokes with our brothers who would receive their verdicts the next morning, and they were genuinely unconcerned by it.

All but one of the very senior officers among them.

He was in a troubling state of mind, repeating over and over, in obvious agitation: fine, execution, execution, so what? I'm ready, I'm ready!

I explained to them the position criminal law takes toward political offenses, assuring them that those who had already been executed now rested in God's own hands and in history's own keeping, while the rest of us, whose lives had been spared, would face nothing worse than a few years in prison, after which nerves would settle, grudges would fade, and harmony and affection might well take their place. I backed up what I was saying with the political and military upheavals our own country had already lived through.

Whoever fate's hand had struck down in the hour of the assault was now in God's own keeping, and that was simply his own destiny. As for those whose reckoning had merely been delayed, "no fear shall come upon them, nor shall they grieve."

I felt the room's own nerves settle, especially once I told our anxious friend: tomorrow you will be sentenced to death, and it will never be carried out. Before long you will be a spry young man again, strutting through the streets of your own country, enjoying the pleasure of swimming in its blue sea. We stood the next morning to see them off and lend them our own support.

They returned at noon, each one carrying "his own record in his right hand."

1. Colonel Jasim Alwan (held in detention elsewhere): death, "in application of paragraph (c) of Article 7 and paragraph (d) of Article 5 of Legislative Decree No. 21 of 24 April 1963."

2. Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Nabhan (our neighbor in the darkened room): death.

3. Raif al-Maari (held in detention elsewhere): death.

4. Major General Nourallah al-Hajj Ibrahim: hard labor for life.

5. Major General Rashed al-Qatini: hard labor for life.

6. Lieutenant General Muhammad al-Sufi: hard labor for life.

The council also sentenced Dr. Thouqan Qarqout and Colonel Mamdouh al-Habbal to death in absentia, since the two of them had managed to escape.

The death sentences were never carried out, just as I had expected, and none of them spent more than a year and a bit in prison. They were all eventually restored to freedom, some of them since passing away in the course of nature, others still living on.

Our own people simply hate bloodshed. Whatever blood is spilled in a moment of rage, they recoil from once tempers cool, and this is one of God's own blessings on us, even if it may also help explain the sheer number of coups and attempted coups, open or secret, that took place across the fourteen years beginning with Husni al-Za'im's coup of 1949 and ending with the events of 18 July 1963 I have been describing here. And yet the violence that erupted in this last uprising was of a kind our country had never known before.

22 November 1963

This is a date that can never be forgotten among the days of my detention.

We had finished our lunch in our own room and sat on our iron beds, which groaned every time we shifted our weight on them, worn down by age and rust, "gazing eastward," as was our habit, into the uncertain possibilities of the future. The small radio sat beside me on the bed, when suddenly the broadcast was interrupted and the announcer, I no longer recall from which station, delivered a stunning piece of news:

We have just received the following report: President John Kennedy has been assassinated only minutes ago, while riding in his motorcade to a public gathering in the city of Dallas.

It emerged that the man who killed him was named Lee Harvey Oswald.

But why?

As I write these lines, thirty-three years have now passed since this crime was committed, and yet, to this day, no one has uncovered the true secrets behind this assassination, despite the formation of several investigating committees.

As a matter of principle, President Kennedy was the first Catholic president of a republic whose overwhelming majority was Protestant.

He had also set out to renew America's own policy, one that had been exhausting both itself and everyone else in its effort to encircle the Soviet Union and its communist bloc with military alliances, wearing itself down in an arms race that could produce no true victor, since each of the two rival powers already held a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction sufficient to annihilate humanity many times over.

Kennedy had set out to ease international tensions, signing a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union, calling for peaceful coexistence, and declaring his own intention to abolish racial discrimination within his own country, raising the banner of respect for human rights.

His killer fired three bullets at him, one of which struck his back, and another his brain, though some witnesses said there were only two shots, while others told the Warren Commission of 1963 there had actually been six, even though only three spent shell casings were ever found.

Beside him sat his wife, who would later marry the aging Greek playboy billionaire Onassis.

Under interrogation, Oswald denied committing the crime, though he admitted he had spent time living in the hostile Soviet Union, and that he admired Cuba's communist leader, Dr. Fidel Castro.

His own spending far exceeded his income, confirming that he must have been receiving financial support from some unknown quarter.

When the American Central Intelligence Agency's own operation, sending Cuban refugees back into America, was defeated at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, the agency asked that the American army itself invade Cuba directly.

But President Kennedy refused this request, and dismissed one of the agency's own senior officials, Allen Dulles, brother of the secretary of state.

His refusal may well have enraged the Central Intelligence Agency, which sat licking the wounds of its own defeat. Kennedy then stood firm against Khrushchev, who had installed his own missiles in Cuba aimed at America, imposing a blockade on Cuba with a vast American fleet and warning his Soviet rival that he must choose between those Russian missiles, and their removal, or open confrontation. Khrushchev chose the path of peace, and withdrew the Russian missiles, a move that enraged the Cubans and the leftists alike, Oswald among them, since he had become secretary of the committee the leftists had formed "in support of Cuba."

What happened next was that a man named Jack Ruby lay in wait for Kennedy's killer as he was being transferred for questioning, and assassinated him, perhaps so that the living evidence itself would die, leaving no one behind to confess the true reasons for the killing.

Ruby's killer himself declared to a television station that "the secrets behind President Kennedy's murder will vanish forever, and no one will ever know why he was assassinated, or who plotted his killing."

In some views, the finger of accusation has continued to point toward American intelligence, exactly as it did in the attempted assassination of the Pope of Rome by the Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Ağca, in St. Peter's Square in Rome, on Wednesday the 13th of May, 1981.

No one has ever learned what passed between the Pope and the man who tried to kill him, in the secret meeting the two of them held behind the prison's own walls.

Criminologists say that only fifteen percent of crimes ever have their true details reach the judicial authorities. These were two enormous crimes, and their true details left the whole world deafened.

The secrets behind both of them remain locked away in files that only their own keepers can access, whether they have preserved those secrets "for history" or destroyed them entirely and "eliminated" the very people behind them, so that not a single trace remains.

25 December 1963: The Day of Relief and Release

We had our dinner in our own room, and decided to spend the evening with Nazim Bey in his own room, which he shared with General Zahreddine. While we were talking about everything and about nothing at all, we heard the creak of the wing's own door, and said to ourselves, silently, let it be good news.

The assistant, greeting us politely, said: Professor Homad, gather your things! And the phrase "gather your things" carried two possible meanings.

Release and a return to the embrace of freedom, the dearest of all wishes, or else a ride in the jeep up to Mezzeh prison, on account of some shift in the leadership's own thinking, impossible to predict.

I picked up my bag and bid farewell to the president and the general and our brothers whose room doors stood open, and bid farewell as well to the "soldiers" who had kept watch over our own comfort. The jeep carried us racing through the valleys and cutting across the hills, in the pitch darkness of night, and came to a stop before the prison gate. They led me into a side courtyard, where I found a number of detainees standing in front of one of the rooms.

We exchanged greetings and questions.

But none of them knew anything at all.

The door of the room opened, and a junior officer gestured for us to enter.

At the head of this room sat a senior officer I had seen before, and had once sat with in my own room, in a heated discussion that turned into an outright clash between him and Mr. Nihad al-Qasim: Colonel Ahmad Suwaydani, commander of the military police.

He opened by directing "advice" at us, we standing while he sat, though some of us were old enough to be his own father.

He made no attempt to dress up his threat in polite words.

The gist of his advice was that this experience had passed peacefully so far, and that whoever failed to learn its lesson would find himself back here with no hope of ever returning to his own family again.

He must have felt some shame at himself, for he then rose from his chair and came toward us to shake our hands in farewell, expressing his hope that our next meeting would take place on a footing of fruitful cooperation, under his own party's leadership, which intended to govern the country according to its own constitution.

He gave us the good news that our release had been decided.

A legislative decree had been issued granting general amnesty to those who had survived the July operation and had not been convicted by any judicial verdict, and I was one of them.

I found myself missing my friend Nihad al-Qasim, since I did not find him among those released. It seemed Colonel Suwaydani had not forgotten his own "boldness" toward him, and kept him as his own guest a while longer, not releasing him until a further month had passed.

When I picked up my bag, it was emptier than the heart of Umm Musa herself, if that heart could be said to have shown anything at all.

The "guards" had taken what books and clothes it held, seizing the opportunity of our own presence with the military police director Suwaydani, while we stood listening to his own precious advice.

I made my way out of the prison.

A military troop-carrier stood waiting for us. As I was about to climb its steps, two men approached me with the utmost courtesy and asked that I ride with them instead, in their own small car. I tried to excuse myself, but they told me they were investigators from the military judiciary, and that they "owed me a debt" for their own legal education, and pressed me, insisting I accompany them, since I was, after all, one of their own former professors.

In the car I asked them: and what did you find in the paperwork that could have incriminated me?

They confided in me that what had actually caused my own detention was not my participation, near or far, in the military operation itself, but rather my own resignation from the 9 March government, and its broadcast, word for word, over Egyptian radio on multiple occasions, which they counted as a contribution to inciting opposition against the party's own rule.

When I rang my own doorbell, and my daughter opened the door for me, I felt as though a gate of paradise itself had swung open. As I embraced this young woman, and her brother, now ten years old, and their mother, I felt myself restored to my own humanity and to life itself, and felt the chains of servitude falling away from me.

And falling away with them, all the resentment I had carried these past five months toward those who had betrayed and detained us.

I received my friends and relatives, "as though, my dear, we had never left and never returned."

When Mr. al-Qasim was released about a month later, "the Five" became four, since Mr. Ali Bouzo had already taken the road to Cairo, and had become a political refugee there.

Our own contacts with one another never stopped, though they grew quieter, for we felt the same fear our friends themselves felt for their own safety.

We realized just how heavy the hand of this regime truly was, and that it sought to discipline Abdel Nasser through us. So we decided to "cool" our own fervor, refraining from pressing anyone into anything unwelcome, and working only within whatever limits the circumstances allowed. This decision brought us no pride, but it was "the weakest form of faith."

We genuinely feared that if some of our own supporters let their enthusiasm rise too high, Amin al-Hafiz's own security apparatus would reach out for them, and their own children would come to us asking for "help," since "our breadwinner has been detained, and we have nothing to hold off our own need." None of us had the means, financially, for this kind of generosity. Nor were we among those who extended their hand to collect, as others did, seventy or eighty thousand pounds from Abdel Nasser, before turning around and declaring themselves his enemies.

For this reason, we resolved to walk "the path of the weaker man." We considered this a matter of holding to the principle of honor, and of refusing to be tainted by foreign money, including the money of "Egyptian intelligence."

And why should I not say it plainly?

The Baathist "regime" governs through the army. It has raised the banner of "the army of the doctrine" above its own flags, while its own newspapers attack us, its columns heaping upon us every label from agents to lackeys to appeasers. We do not wish, nor are we able, to resist the armed forces and their own sprawling security apparatus, nor was that ever our own goal to begin with, since our own principle rested on protecting the army by keeping it out of politics. We had learned from the lessons of the past that nothing corrupts a weapon like politics does, since it diverts it from the very purpose of its creation, the defense of the homeland, rather than waging partisan propaganda campaigns.

We were likewise certain that whoever holds the greater strength is the one who rules, and this is the very price paid by Akram al-Hourani and other politicians who so often militarized themselves. Once his own officers fell, or abandoned him, he took to his own heels and lived out his life as a refugee, first among the Iraqis, then among the Jordanians, where death finally overtook him on their own soil, after an exile that lasted more than a third of a century. King Hussein forgave him and granted him safety, forgetting all the insults he had once hurled at him and all the betrayals he had once accused him of, over so many long decades.

I read the news of his death on posters put up around Damascus on Sunday, 25 February 1996 (6 Shawwal 1416), and it was broadcast by the BBC's Arabic service, Radio London, and by Radio al-Sharq.

I grieved for him, given the old friendship that had once bound us, one his own hostility to unity had destroyed. Whatever may be said of him, he was a man of genuine socialist principle, who worked with real dedication to free the peasantry and championed the workers with all his strength. Had it not been for his entanglement with the army, he might have been counted among the finest leaders our country ever had.

I have often asked myself: where did Amin al-Hafiz truly stand among the bloc that held the real reins of power, Major General Salah Jadid, Major General Muhammad Umran, the officer Salim Hatoum, and Major General Fahd al-Shaer?

Because I knew him personally, and from what I heard from within their own circles, I felt real anxiety for the future. Syria had by then become almost entirely isolated from the Arab nation, and opportunism had spread among the ranks of the educated. A relative of ours, a holder of an East German doctorate and an economist well aware of the country's own deteriorating condition, found no better way to curry favor with the ruling clique than to title a major article in the party's own newspaper "Tightening the Belts Around the Bellies Still Further." When my brother Dr. As'ad asked him whether there was anything left in those bellies for a belt to tighten around, he answered, his own eyes downcast: "this is simply the way one gets ahead."