Behind Bars - Part 9: Secret Post-Release Talks with Amin al-Hafiz, Salah Jadid, and Muhammad Umran on Restoring Union

A Meeting with Amin al-Hafiz

The Arab heads of state were invited to a conference in Casablanca, and General Amin al-Hafiz took part in it. When he returned, I said to myself: why not meet with him myself, and try to steer his own general thinking in a better direction? I secured an appointment with him at his own home one evening, and he suggested I come in through a small back door. He was living in the "villa" that had served, during the days of the union, as the residence for the Egyptian vice presidents whenever they came to Damascus. He received me warmly. I said to him: "Abu Abdo, I am a civilian man and you are a military one, and I will never become a military man, nor will you ever fully take on a civilian's own mindset. We now belong to two complementary but different worlds, and I hope you and I can complete one another, on the path of truth and of the homeland."

We fell into conversation on all sorts of subjects, though I noticed he seemed reluctant to say much of anything, extremely guarded, unlike what I had heard about him.

I asked him: we heard you had a private meeting with Abdel Nasser at his own residence in Casablanca. How did you find him?

At this his tongue loosened, and he spoke of the Egyptian president in only the best terms, describing him: "he is a giant, and we are mere dwarves in his presence."

I said to him: "Abu Abdo, you know that however high I rise, I will never become more than a minister, a post I have already held six times now, and I have no ambitions left in it. I am a professor of law, that is my own true profession, and I promise you I will never practice any other. But why not seek out a place in history that would bring honor to both you and us?" He gave me a questioning look, as though asking: and how? I said to him: "You are now the 'president' of a small country, surrounded by enemies on every side. Why not work with your own colleagues to restore the union with Egypt, freeing Syria from this state of siege, and helping to establish a great Arab state, one with real weight in the world, with you yourself becoming vice president of a federated state stretching from the upper Nile to the Turkish border?" And the man answered, with genuine humility: "if such a state were ever established, I would be content to serve coffee at Abdel Nasser's own door."

His answer startled me. I offered him my own view on how such a union might be achieved, and bid him farewell, a warm smile still spreading across his face.

Who knows? Perhaps national pride would one day stir him to move from words to action. I left through the small back door, walking the side streets in the pitch darkness of the night.

Nihad al-Qasim's Trip to Lebanon

Mr. al-Qasim told us his wife's brother had died in Tripoli, Lebanon, and that he would be traveling to take part in the funeral and attend the mourning ceremonies.

We told him quite frankly: if you intend to join the opposition there, we ask that you be honest with us about your own intentions, so that we can take our own precautions and not be caught off guard by your defection. He assured us that if he had any intention of seeking political asylum at the Egyptian embassy in Lebanon, he would tell us so himself, and said he would not be gone more than fifteen days, five in Tripoli and ten in Beirut, to visit the rest of his own family.

On this understanding we bid him farewell, expecting him to return to us once he had shared in his family's own grief.

My Nephew's and Niece's Wedding

My sister in Aleppo invited us to attend the wedding of her eldest son, held on the same night as the wedding of one of her own daughters.

I traveled with my wife and our younger daughter to share in my sister's own joy, and we spent a warm, family-filled few days, forgetting politics and all its own troubles.

We moved from one lunch celebration to another dinner celebration, in the fashion of Aleppo's own people, and on the third day we were having lunch by invitation of a cousin of ours, in his own beautiful orchard, beside a pool of water into which the waterwheel poured a silvery stream, cooling the hot air and reviving our own spirits.

While we sat in this pleasant state, watching our children swim in the pool and sharing in their own delight, we heard a car horn at the orchard gate, coming to a stop near where we sat. One of our relatives hurried to find out what was happening, then came back to whisper in my ear that the governor of Aleppo was asking to meet me at once, on an urgent matter. I felt a surge of anger and irritation, and sent back word: there is nothing between me and the governor that would justify so urgent a meeting. If an order has been issued for my arrest, I will comply with it, but if the meeting concerns some other matter, I would prefer to postpone it until tomorrow, since we are celebrating a family occasion today.

The officer left, leaving some of his own men waiting, and was gone half an hour before returning to say that the governor had an order from Damascus he needed to relay to me personally, and asked that I not put him in an awkward position, and that I telephone the governor myself.

There was no telephone in the orchard, so I bid the family farewell and made my way with my own small family to my sister's house, and telephoned the governor from there to find out what this was really about. He told me the interior minister had instructed him to inform me that "the leadership" wished to meet with me, and that I needed to reach the entrance to Damascus by nine that night, where an officer would be waiting for me, and that the officer who had come to the orchard would "remain at my service" until I left Aleppo, at five in the evening at the very latest.

I was driving my small Simca. I put my daughter in the back seat, my wife sat beside me, and I filled the fuel tank at a station outside the city, where the officer bid me farewell, his own hand raised in a courteous salute until he was satisfied I had passed out of his sight on the road to Damascus.

I admit I was never a skilled driver, and yet I had to press on quickly to reach Damascus within four hours. In those days the road was still long, before it was later shortened.

As I listened to the Voice of the Arabs radio station, with night having drawn its own curtain over the winding plain leading toward the town of Qara, I heard the news that alarmed me, and that explained to me the real reason I had been forced away from my family's own celebration: our colleague Mr. al-Qasim had broadcast a fierce statement against the Baathist regime in Syria, declaring he had joined the resistance and would never tire or relent, God preserve him, until he brought down this "bloody fascist regime."

I said to myself: it's back to the detention center. Why had Abu Omar Nihad done this, and why had he hidden it from us, after assuring us he would never entangle us with the authorities, and that he would return?

By the time I reached the Qaboun district of Damascus, I found no one waiting for me, and so I made my way home instead, to call a doctor for my young daughter's rising fever, and to inform the military police the next morning of my own arrival, since I had no idea who among "the leadership" had asked for me, or how to reach them.

The "Negotiations" Begin

The invitation to a "meeting" did not take long to arrive.

Two days later, someone from the authorities telephoned me and said I was expected at ten o'clock the next morning at the People's Assembly building, for a meeting with certain officials.

I arrived at the Assembly through its small side door, the one leading to the Speaker's own office. The Assembly had no sitting speaker at the time, since it had been suspended, and iron chains locked all its doors, all but this one, which was left open.

But what surprises could the Assembly possibly hold?

And who could have asked for me, when there seemed to be no one there at all?

My confusion ended when a policeman led me from one room to another, facing what would have been the Speaker's own office, had there been a speaker. I felt a measure of relief on seeing Mr. Mansour al-Atrash seated behind the desk, with another man in civilian clothes beside him.

I greeted them both, and they returned my greeting with even greater warmth. The door opened, and Mr. Abdel Samad al-Fatih, "my own colleague in the Nasserist leadership," came in.

Mr. Mansour told me that the man seated beside him was Major General Muhammad Umran, now in civilian dress. I had seen this general before, in his military uniform, "inspecting" us in the ward of the military-hospital wing they had turned into a detention center, though I did not recognize him at the time. What I do remember is that he walked with the very steps of Field Marshal Keitel, moving through the wide ward as though reviewing New Zealander prisoners of war.

Mr. Mansour is the son of the hero and commander of the Great Syrian Revolt, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, and is himself an old Baathist, from the wing of Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar.

For this reason I was surprised he had accepted a ministerial post during the secession, under Khaled al-Azm's own government, formed on 17 September 1962 and toppled by the coup of 8 March 1963, after which the members of that government were hunted down, some of them stripped of their political rights, and its own prime minister took refuge in the Turkish embassy, which secured the authorities' consent for his safe passage to Beirut. Mr. Mansour's own colleagues forgave him this lapse, and brought him back as minister of labor and social affairs when Salah al-Din al-Bitar formed the first post-coup government, on the morning of 9 March, a government we ourselves took part in and then resigned from.

He did not waste many words, going straight to the heart of the matter. He said that he valued our own pure unionist principles, and assured us that he and his own party colleagues were no less committed to unity than we were, and that the days ahead would prove the truth of what he was saying.

He said he deeply regretted the rift that had opened between us, one he could find no reasonable cause for, a rift that had only grown wider with the recent events of 18 July.

The time had now come, he said, now that tempers had cooled and minds had regained their own clarity, to set aside the painful past and look toward the future with hope and optimism.

He assured us that he and his colleague were negotiating on behalf of their own party to reopen contact with Abdel Nasser, in order to close the page of the past and open a new page of unity, one that would restore what had been torn apart and erase the disgrace of the secession, since the Arabs, he said, had no true life for themselves except through their own unity. For this reason, he said, we have decided to invite you here to discuss this with you.

I asked him: you two are negotiating in the name of the ruling Baath Party, which wants to restore the union. But who exactly are we, myself and Abdel Samad? He said: the two of you will be the door through which we will pass into fruitful negotiations with Abdel Nasser.

I told him: I want to be honest with you both. We do not represent Abdel Nasser. We are simply unionists, exactly "like the two of you." As a matter of fact, we are Syrians, not Egyptians. If you truly wish to negotiate with Abdel Nasser, you can contact his own ambassador, Abdel Hamid Ghaleb, in Beirut, or send a delegation to meet him in Cairo. And if it should ever occur to you that we ourselves attend such negotiations, then rest assured we would be sitting among the Syrian negotiators, facing Abdel Nasser across the table alongside the two of you, not beside you.

And yet the two of them insisted on continuing the conversation, which stretched across three lengthy sessions, the second of which was attended by General Amin al-Hafiz and Major General Salah Jadid.

I had heard a great deal about Salah Jadid, though I had never actually seen him before.

He had a pleasant appearance, fair-skinned, shy, and sat through the entire session in silence, not uttering a single word. What I did notice, though, was that Amin al-Hafiz clearly understood his own true weight, since whenever he spoke to us about the question of unity, a subject he seemed genuinely "enthusiastic" about, he would look toward Jadid and ask him: "isn't that so, Abu Samer?" And "Abu Samer's" only answer was a polite little smile at the corners of his own lips, his eyes fixed on the ground.

I said to myself: a lieutenant general who talks, and a major general who acts.

It seemed one of the reasons these two senior officers attended our own discussions was Abu Abdo's own desire to answer me directly, since in our first session I had told Mr. al-Atrash and General Umran that our own trust in their group was limited, since they had already proven themselves men who shake hands with the right while stabbing the back with a dagger in the left. I reminded them of the night of 9 March at the General Staff headquarters, and of how they had gone on to treat the Nasserists afterward, discharging their own officers from the army, beating their own civilians in the street, humiliating those they threw into detention, and cutting off the livelihoods of vast numbers of people under the banner of purging Abdel Nasser's own agents.

Amin al-Hafiz spoke up and said: we have never been known to shake hands with the right and stab with the left. I am not sure whether he was speaking on behalf of the government, or on behalf of the party.

I had always assumed he belonged to no party at all, but I learned that he had "formally joined" the party only a few months before assuming the presidency of the state.

I recall once asking General Umran, who was a remarkably skilled and eloquent conversationalist, what his own view was on relations with Abdel Nasser. He answered me: from simple rapprochement, all the way to complete organic union.

I am not sure why I found myself so at ease with Muhammad Umran, who later wrote a book titled "My Experience in the Revolution," before being assassinated while living as a refugee in Tripoli, Lebanon.

Our own "negotiations" came to nothing in the end, since all we ever actually agreed on was that if they wished us to travel as their own emissaries to meet Abdel Nasser and urge him to consider the possibility of establishing union on new foundations, we would agree to carry out this task on their own behalf.

We bid our interlocutors farewell, and this marked the last political-level meeting between us and their own group, since the Baathists soon fell into a bitter internal struggle among themselves that made them forget unity and the unionists alike.[1]

These conversations spurred me on to seek a further meeting with General Amin al-Hafiz, this time at his own home. A relative of his, secessionist in his own leanings, had told me that al-Hafiz would launch into fierce attacks on Abdel Nasser in his own private gatherings with his close circle. But I took what I heard with real caution, since he had spoken so highly of President Gamal to me himself in our first meeting, telling me with genuine humility that he sought no high office for himself, and wished that the union might be restored, even if it meant he himself ended up serving coffee at Abdel Nasser's own door. General al-Hafiz, unlike other politicized officers, was, at heart, not a political man to begin with, and I believe he was sincere in what he told me, quite unlike those officers who swear their oaths on the sword and the Quran only to forget them the moment they are called to some coup that would place them in a position of high office.

He received me one night, and I told him what I had come to say, for his own good and the good of the country. But I came away sensing that he felt he was fighting an enemy made of a hundred horns.

What he sensed proved true soon enough, for he was brought down not long after in a bloody coup, cast out into the unknown.

I later heard that he had settled in Baghdad, living under Saddam Hussein's own protection, "Baraqish undone by her own doing."

During this same tense period, Dr. Jamal al-Atassi, one of the well-known unionist figures, came to my house and told me he was carrying a message from Mr. Nihad al-Qasim, who had settled as a political refugee in Cairo. I read the message, and found that Mr. al-Qasim had appointed himself "secretary-general of the Arab Society for the Liberation of Syria," and in this capacity, was asking us "not to make any contact whatsoever with the pillars of the Baathist regime, and that its leaders were to contact him personally if they wished to negotiate with the unionists."

I returned the letter to whoever had sent it, through the same man who had carried it to me, since I have no wish to maintain ties with a man who says one thing, conceals another, and does a third thing entirely.

I never once regretted the position I took toward this old colleague, since he had already set a precedent of similar conduct in our own shared "struggle," namely his own decision to accept the post of deputy prime minister and minister of justice in the 9 March government. When I later reproached him for it, he told me: "there is nothing left to unite us now. We had agreed to bring down the secession, and it has fallen, so each of us is now free to act as he sees fit. And in my own conviction, had I not accepted al-Bitar's own offer and let you down, al-Bitar could never have formed a government that very night without us."

He returned some years later from his own voluntary exile and announced he had withdrawn from politics altogether. We would meet on occasion, but only on specific occasions.

I too had frozen my own political activity by then, though I never made any public announcement of it.

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Endnotes:

[1] It falls outside the scope of these memoirs to write about the split that occurred within the Baath Party after 1963. Dr. Munif al-Razzaz has already written of how these splits unfolded in "The Bitter Experience."