The Unity Project Unanimously Approved - Part 1: The Tripartite Unity Charter Is Signed After Failed Mediation by Boumediene and al-Sallal
Homad Says: No Disagreement Among the Parties in Government, We Are All Agreed on Union
Al-Anwar asked Dr. AbdulWahab Homad, by telephone, for his own view on the question of union, and he answered:
We took part in the six-member ministerial committee that drafted the federal union proposal, and we approve of everything achieved within this committee. We are the ones who drew up the Syrian proposal for tripartite union, in cooperation with the committee's other members, bringing our own proposal before the Council of Ministers, which approved it unanimously. We agree, in this proposal, on tripartite union between the United Arab Republic, Iraq, and Syria, and there is no disagreement whatsoever on this question among the parties in government. We therefore consider tripartite union a matter already agreed upon unanimously. We entered the ministry precisely to fulfill the Arab people's own demand in Syria, and to realize its own hope for union, and this lofty goal has been achieved in a manner that satisfies our own conscience and conviction. Anything else said on this subject, then, is false and fabricated.
Tuesday, 26 March
The Revolutionary Command Council announced, on 25 March 1963, a decree barring 27 secessionists from public life for either ten or five years, according to the term set beside each name.
At the top of the list stood Dr. Bashir al-Azma and Ahmad Qanbar (ten years each), along with Riyad al-Maidani, As'ad al-Kourani, Ahmad Abdel Karim, Hani al-Sabai, Mustafa Hamdoun, Nawfal Elias, Abdel Fattah al-Zalat, Muhammad Abidin, Faidi al-Atassi, Hussein Awad, and Abdel Ghani Qanout.
A further decree, issued on 27 March, barred sixty-three more people, at their head Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi, Khaled al-Azm, Maarouf al-Dawalibi, Ma'mun al-Kuzbari, Sabri al-Asali, Akram al-Hourani, Rashad Jabri, Suhail al-Khouri, Ahmad Sulayman al-Ahmad, Mustafa al-Barudi, Leon Zamaria, Izzat Trabulsi, Awad Barakat, the senior journalists Nassouh Babil and Muhammad Talas, army commander Abdel Karim Zahreddine, commander of the internal security forces Mati' al-Samman, Khaled Bakdash, Ahmad Mahfal, and the officers who had carried out the secession, at their head Abdel Karim al-Nahlawi, Muwaffaq Assasa, Abdel Ghani Dahman, Fakhri Omar, Haydar al-Kuzbari, and Mustafa al-Dawalibi.
Monday, 1 April: President Boumediene Visits Damascus
Algeria's President Houari Boumediene came to Damascus, and invited us to a meeting with him.
We made our way to this meeting, at the time he had set, myself along with Ratib al-Husami, Ali Bouzo, and Nihad al-Qasim, and he received us in the salon of the Guest Palace, on the officially named Abu Rumaneh, "al-Jalaa," Street. He told us he had met with Mr. al-Bitar and his own Baathist brothers, discussing with them a mediation he intended to carry out between us and them, and had found them, in his own words, receptive. He wanted us to be receptive as well.
We nearly gathered, from his own conversation with us, that President Abdel Nasser himself approved of this mediation too.
President Boumediene told us that, should his own mediation succeed, and a "dignified peace" be reached between us and the Baathists, he would advise his own government to join this union.
Boumediene was tall in stature, eloquent of tongue, and fully fluent in Arabic, unlike some of his own colleagues, such as Bachir Boumaza. I learned he had studied at al-Azhar, before joining the forces fighting the French army, where he became a prominent commander.
He later overthrew President Ahmed Ben Bella, on charges of Communist sympathies, and took over leadership of the state, proving himself one of its most capable leaders.
His mediation, however, ended in failure.
The Baathists told him they still held firmly to the tripartite direction, but remained just as firm in their own determination to keep the reins of power in their own hands. They welcomed sharing the ministerial posts with us, on condition they retained the majority.
The man then traveled back to his own country, by way of Cairo.
Nor did the mediation of Yemen's President Abdullah al-Sallal, who likewise came to Damascus, and met with us at length, prove any more successful.
The failure of both presidents' own mediation was to be expected, since the hardline wing of the Baath Party had by then managed to seize control of the party, a wing that despises Abdel Nasser and wants to govern Syria alone, for its own narrow, regional ends.
During our own meeting with President al-Sallal, a man walked into the hall and sat down near our own circle. We asked al-Sallal whether this man was one of his own Yemeni aides, and he said he did not know him at all. We asked the man: and who might you be, sir? He said: I'm here on a mission! We were struck by this impudence, and told our own distinguished guest: either this man leaves the hall, or we ourselves withdraw, to preserve both your own dignity and ours.
The President contacted whoever had sent this intruder, ordering him to withdraw, and he did so, without the slightest sign of embarrassment at being thrown out.
We had never heard of any "respectable" state agreeing to treat its own "revolutionary" guest with such base conduct.
But "our own people" had by then made peace with absolutely anything.
Saturday, 6 April: The Third Stage of Talks
The Syrian delegation traveled to Cairo, to continue the tripartite union talks.
It was made up of seventeen members, representing the four unionist forces.
Unlike the Syrian delegation's own composition during the first stage of talks, in which the Baathists had been represented only by Mr. Abdel Karim Zohour, this delegation included four of their own senior figures: Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Abdel Karim Zohour, Shibli al-Aysami, and Colonel Muhammad Umran (member of the Revolutionary Council).
The Iraqi delegation was made up of Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, head of the Council of Ministers, Ali Salih al-Sa'di, Lieutenant General Salih Mahdi Ammash (Minister of Defense), Talib Shabib (Minister of Foreign Affairs), Mahmoud Khattab (Minister of Municipalities), and Abdel Sattar Abdel Latif (Minister of Transport).
It is worth noting, in this delegation's own composition, the exclusion of Dr. Abdel Rahman al-Bazzaz, Iraq's ambassador in Cairo, a man well known for his own genuine national unionism, and no party man himself. It is a real misfortune that he later met a tragic end, at the hands of his own partners in government.
The United Arab Republic's delegation was made up of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi, Kamal El-Din Hussein, Ali Sabri, Kamal Rifaat, Amin Howeidi (Egypt's ambassador in Baghdad), and Abdel Majid Farid, the very same men who had attended the first stage of talks in full, and the second stage as well (except for Kamal Rifaat and Amin Howeidi, who had not attended the second stage).
The talks were held under President Abdel Nasser's own chairmanship, and continued from 6 to 14 April 1963.
Anyone wishing to "amuse himself" need only read the minutes. He will find the sheer shallowness of some of the speakers, even certain "eminent" members among them, genuinely astonishing, to the point of wondering how they ever came to occupy such exalted ranks among their own brothers. Stranger still, some of them would offer an opinion they clearly believed a stroke of pure genius, only to abandon their own "theory" the moment President Abdel Nasser answered them, folding in on themselves with the utmost humility. Even the phrase "meaning... meaning..." itself became something of a running joke among rumor-mongers and ordinary people alike.[1]
I have no intention here of hunting down every flaw and shortcoming, since these are already there in the minutes and in the actions themselves, for anyone who cares to look. I will confine myself, then, to recording only what "history" itself needs, and what helps in the writing of it. At the very start of the talks, the Syrian delegation presented the proposal we had agreed upon in Damascus, and it was agreed that a committee, made up of members from all three delegations, chosen by acclamation, would study it. These were: Mr. Kamal El-Din Hussein, Vice President of the United Arab Republic, who chaired the sessions, Kamal El-Din Rifaat (member of the Presidency Council), and Muhammad Fahmy al-Sayed (legal advisor to the President of the Republic), for Egypt; Nihad al-Qasim, Abdel Karim Zohour, Hani al-Hindi, and Sami Sawfan, for Syria; and Ali Salih al-Sa'di, Salih Mahdi Ammash, Talib Shabib, and Abdel Rahman al-Bazzaz (proposed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser himself), for Iraq.
Even though the newspaper Al-Baath kept up its own attacks on the unionists, even as the Syrian authorities, through the Minister of Interior's own zeal and his own apparatus, persecuted anyone who raised his own voice demanding no further delay in ratifying union, and despite the Baathist delegation members' own attempts to delay concluding the union, the delegations finally reached agreement on the charter's own draft, signing it on 17 April 1963.[2]
We said: praise be to God, who has honored this nation, with agreement reached on establishing a federal union, one possessing Iraq's oil, the Suez Canal, and the very jewel of Damascus itself, a union creating a great state, capable of encircling Israel and resisting it, when the moment of real reckoning comes, issuing to its own unified army the orders of a single command, one that knows itself solely responsible for these very orders, a union that would also become a single economic market, its own economic elements integrated on the basis of proper scientific study.
I have no intention of reproducing here the charter's own preamble or its provisions, since these can easily be found in the references that contain them,[3] but I will give a brief sketch of the proposed state's own structure, one that now belongs to history.
The preamble reads:
"In the name of God, the Most High, the Most Powerful
And in the name of the Arab people
The delegations representing the United Arab Republic, Syria, and Iraq met in Cairo, in obedience to the will of the Arab people in the three countries and in the wider Arab homeland. The fraternal talks between the three delegations began on Saturday, 6 April, and concluded on Wednesday, 17 April, 1963.
Throughout their own talks, the Arab delegations drew their own inspiration from the belief that Arab unity is an inevitable goal, one drawing its own substance from a unity of language, carrying culture and thought; a unity of history, forging conscience and consciousness; a unity of popular struggle, determining and shaping destiny; a unity of spiritual and human values, springing from the messages of heaven; and a unity of social and economic concepts, resting on freedom and socialism. They were guided, too, by the will of the Arab popular masses, who demand union, struggle to achieve it, and sacrifice to protect and preserve it, knowing that the firm nucleus of union is formed by uniting those parts of the homeland that have already won their own freedom and independence, where progressive national governments have arisen, resolved to put an end to the alliance of feudalism, capital, reaction, and colonialism, and to liberate the working masses of the people's own sons, so that they may forge their own alliance and give voice to their own true will. Union is, above all, a revolutionary matter, bound up deeply with the cause of Palestine and the national duty to liberate it, for the Palestinian catastrophe itself was what first exposed the conspiracy of the reactionary classes, and laid bare the betrayals of the collaborationist, ethnic-chauvinist parties.
And though union is a sacred goal, it is likewise a weapon and an instrument of popular struggle, toward realizing its own greatest goals, freedom, security, the liberation of every part of the Arab homeland, and the establishment of a society of sufficiency and justice, a society of socialism."
On the structure of the federal state and its own powers, the charter reads:
"A federal state shall be established, under the name of the United Arab Republic, resting on a free union among Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, the federal state's own member entities to be named the Egyptian Region, the Syrian Region, and the Iraqi Region."
Any independent Arab republic believing in the principles of freedom, socialism, and union shall have the right to join this state, through the free will of its own people.
The federal state shall hold full international sovereignty. The citizens of the federal state shall hold a single nationality, the Arab nationality, and its own capital shall be Cairo. It shall have a single flag, the flag of the United Arab Republic (as it then was), with a third star added to its own two. Islam shall be the state's religion, and Arabic its own official language.
The following matters, in particular, shall fall under the federal authority's own jurisdiction:
1. Foreign policy, in every one of its aspects, including foreign representation and international treaties.
2. Defense and national security, the unification of the armies, and the determination of war and peace.
3. Federal taxes and the federal budget, foreign and domestic loans, and customs laws and policy.
4. Economic planning and currency affairs, and the regulation of natural resource exploitation.
5. Establishing unified foundations for justice, the judiciary, joint transport, and the declaration of states of emergency. Anything not falling under federal jurisdiction shall remain the responsibility of the regional authorities.
The federal state shall have:
1. A National Assembly, made up of two councils:
a. The Chamber of Deputies, whose members shall be elected freely and directly, in proportion to each region's own population.
b. The Federal Council, elected freely and directly, made up of an equal number of members from each region.
The President of the Republic shall issue laws once both councils have approved them.
The federal state shall be headed by a President of the Republic, assisted by a vice president from each region, serving a term of four years. It shall have a Council of Ministers, its own members appointed by the President of the Republic, who shall likewise accept their resignations, and who shall be answerable to the National Assembly. The state shall have a supreme federal court.
Each region shall have:
1. A regional president, elected by the region's own legislative council for a term of four years, subject to the President of the Republic's own approval.
2. A legislative council, elected freely and directly, with jurisdiction over drafting the region's own legislation.
3. A regional ministry, made up of a Prime Minister and a number of ministers.
The federal state shall have a Presidency Council, made up of an equal number of members from each region, and a National Defense Council, appointed by the Presidency Council.
The federal ministry shall be made up of the following seven ministries:
Foreign Affairs; Defense; Information (and National Guidance); Education (and Higher Education and Scientific Research); Justice; and Finance and Economy (and Economic Planning).
Transitional provisions were established, to give the three countries time to complete the establishment of their own constitutional institutions, within a period not exceeding twenty months.
Once the union document had been signed, the parties exchanged congratulations, with embraces and "the kissing of beards." But the days that followed revealed that the Syrian side had all along been hiding a ticking bomb, and that what appeared on the surface bore little resemblance to what was actually being whispered in secret, and schemed in the shadows.
The Baath began treating both its own allies in Syria and Abdel Nasser himself in a manner that can only be described as thoroughly dishonorable.
The National Council discharged, and transferred into the diplomatic corps, a hundred and two officers known for their own Nasserist unionist leanings, so that the Baath Party could tighten its own grip on the army and the armed forces. In response, Lieutenant General Muhammad al-Sufi (Minister of Defense) and General Rashed Qatini (Deputy Army Commander) both submitted their own resignations. We learned that three Baathist ministers, Abdel Karim Zohour, Dr. Jamal al-Atassi, and Dr. Sami al-Droubi, submitted their own resignations as well, in protest against the Baathist regime's own conduct toward their fellow unionist colleagues, and against the tripartite charter itself, which the Baathists had turned into nothing more than a means of buying time while they seized the army and the state for themselves. Zohour kept to his own home, and later resigned from the Baath Party altogether.
Dr. al-Atassi threw himself into political work, alongside a group of his own brothers, apart from the Baathist structure entirely, and I kept up certain political ties with him myself. The regime showed him no mercy, waging a campaign of harmful rumors against him.
Dr. Sami al-Droubi was appointed the Baathist state's own ambassador to Abdel Nasser.
He ran into me once, in the street, embraced me, and wept, lamenting his own fate, that God had not "written martyrdom for him alongside us."
By one of fate's own strange coincidences, the secondary school on the very street I live on (Urwa ibn al-Ward Street), and the park whose own greenery and history we breathe in and admire, morning and evening alike, both now bear his own name.
Not one of these three "Baathists" was included in al-Bitar's new ministry.
I sent the following telegram to "our own teacher":
To President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cairo
Praise be to God for His own blessings, for our own eyes have finally been gladdened by the return of our eternal republic, stronger and more secure than ever, and God has crowned your own struggle, and our great nation's own struggle, with a resounding victory, rewarding your own sincerity by placing Arab history itself in your own hands, to shape with your own deep faith and firm resolve. The nation has pledged you its own banner, and given its own sincere love to your own wise leadership. In these eternal days, please accept the warmest of congratulations and the sincerest of affection, and may God protect and watch over you.
Damascus, 17 April 1963
Dr. AbdulWahab Homad
The following reply came back:
Dr. AbdulWahab Homad, Minister of Finance, Damascus
I thank you most sincerely for the fine sentiments and heartfelt congratulations your own telegram carried, on the occasion of the announcement of union between the three Arab countries. We give thanks to God for the great favor He has bestowed upon Arabism, in realizing this very union, the object of every sincere son of the Arab nation's own hopes, and I extend to you my own warmest wishes for health and happiness.
Cairo, 22 April 1963
Gamal Abdel Nasser
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Endnotes:
[1] Whenever President Abdel Nasser asked Mr. Aflaq to clarify some doctrinal concept, Mr. Aflaq would answer: "meaning... meaning..." according to the minutes and Egyptian radio broadcasts. Patrick Seale writes, in his own book Asad, p. 136: "In an attempt to force the Syrians into submission, (Abdel Nasser) threatened to publish the minutes of the talks. He carried out this threat, causing real embarrassment to Aflaq and al-Bitar, since it exposed them as poor negotiators, stammering through their own words."
[2] Nor did I find it useful to reproduce our own proposal here, since important amendments were introduced to it, already noted above, and its own principles were embodied in the charter's own articles. Besides, the charter itself has now passed into history, remaining nothing more than a subject for anyone wishing to study the development of Arab political thought.
[3] Among these references: Dr. Adel Zaaboub's study, The Arab Charter, Beirut, 1979, and Al-Ahram's own printed minutes of the union talks.