Year 1963 - Part 7: The Suppressed Amnesty Decree, and Zahreddine's and al-Azm's Verdicts on the Secession's Fall

Sunday the 3rd: The Story of the General Amnesty Decree

Among the signs of the secessionists' own sense of how precarious their position had become was their effort to issue a legislative decree granting a general amnesty for the crimes they had committed, fearing they might be pursued for them, should their own era collapse in the early hours of some night. It was as though they sensed the hour of reckoning drawing near. And indeed, the President of the Republic issued Legislative Decree No. 79, dated 4 March 1963, and rushed it to the official gazette for swift publication.

An employee of this institution brought me a copy of this general amnesty that very same evening. This institution is one of the departments attached to the Ministry of Finance, and its own staff numbered close to three hundred employees, more than half of them with no real work to do, appointed by former ministers as a form of "patronage" or "combating unemployment." Its own director often complained to me of the chaos this institution floundered in, given the sheer number of these idle employees, and their own constant scheming to be handed any task at all, for fear that someone might suddenly decide to let them go.

I had no wish, at the time, to cut off their own livelihoods, and so issued a decision barring the appointment of any new employee, waiting instead for their own numbers and the financial burden they represented to ease through resignation, or through death by God's own decree. This goal was achieved, with patience, within two years.

Regrettably, the minister the secession brought in as Minister of Finance appointed, in a single decision, as many of his own political followers as there were vacant posts.

This legislative decree granted a general amnesty for two groups of crimes: the first, the secession itself, the very crime that took place on 28 September 1961, covering, naturally, Abdel Karim al-Nahlawi, Haydar al-Kuzbari, Muwaffaq Assasa, Fayez al-Rifai, and every other officer who took part in this criminal act.

The second, the events of the coup carried out against Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi and his own government on 28 March 1962, whose own events included the arrest of Dr. al-Qudsi and a number of his own ministers.

So that the unionist officers tried before the State Security Court, presided over by Judge Ahmad al-Rashed, would not benefit from this same amnesty, Article 2 was drafted specifically to exclude them. But for technical reasons, publication of this legislative decree was delayed, and the secessionist era itself fell on the very morning of 8 March, only four days later. I took up the Ministry of Finance myself, and Major Munib al-Rifai came to me, sent by the Revolutionary Council, asking that it not be published, and I instructed accordingly.

These same officers were later pursued, just as the civilian politicians who had cooperated with them were hunted down in turn, to receive the just punishment they deserved for their own sorry opportunism.

By one of fate's own ironies, detention brought me together with Lieutenant General Zahreddine himself, some months after the unionist coup took place, and we discussed this very general amnesty together, a matter he later wrote about in his own memoirs (p. 41 and following).

We remained fellow detainees in this same place, until we were both released under a fresh general amnesty of our own. I retain, of this senior officer, real memories of the warmth and easy atmosphere he brought to our own gatherings there. Years later, he graciously sent me a copy of his own memoirs, which I sometimes cite here. How strange are the workings of fate.

Monday, 4 March

Iraqi radio began attacking the situation in Syria, cursing "the murdered" Qasim, as it called him, for having recognized the Syrian regime. It never speaks of Syria at all except as "the Northern Region of the United Arab Republic." One political commentator on Baghdad radio demanded the Iraqi government withdraw Qasim's own recognition of Syria, considering it null and void.

Mr. Ali Salih al-Sa'di, Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, declared that Abdel Nasser had told him: the estrangement colonialism dug between the Arab countries, generations ago, has produced regional attachments of its own. Overcoming them requires a long, gradual rapprochement between the present-day regions, to bring minds closer together and plant real trust in people's hearts. It is therefore necessary to set aside the idea of immediate, full merger union, and work instead toward building bridges of shared interest and experience between the Arab peoples, devoting real effort to deep, wide-ranging studies, adopting or amending them as needed, before finally moving toward union itself.

Al-Sa'di added that he had supported the President in this very direction.

This is a new statement, one that amounts to Egypt itself abandoning the idea of immediate full merger union, a tactical shift that, had it been followed before the Syrian-Egyptian union was established in 1958, at the Syrian officers' own urgent request, might well have spared the Arabs a far better set of circumstances, and spared us the secession entirely, along with the ever-growing open and secret scheming aimed at bringing it down.

Wednesday, 6 March

Our friend, the journalist and veteran freedom fighter Mr. Munir al-Rayyes, showed us a list of "payments" the Iraqi embassy in Damascus had made to certain Syrian politicians, part of which had already been broadcast on Baghdad radio during al-Mahdawi's own trials, from 1958 onward. He told us the Iraqi chargé d'affaires had handed it to him personally, hand to hand.

We studied it closely, and it left our own tongues tied with astonishment.

Among the "recipients" were politicians who neither forbid nor permit anything on principle, forever one hand with God, the other with the Devil, and among them a name we lingered over for a long while.

According to the said chargé d'affaires, and Mr. al-Rayyes's own good faith, Sabri al-Asali received 80,000 pounds, Maarouf al-Dawalibi received 250,000, Ma'mun al-Kuzbari received 280,000, Mustafa al-Barudi received 100,000, and Adnan al-Quwatli received 50,000.

The list is a long one, containing many names, politicians and journalists alike. Some were seasoned veterans of "receiving," while others left us genuinely astonished that they would sully their own conscience for sums they had no real need of at all.

Thursday the 7th

The daily news that drew our own real interest and unease was the effort Prime Minister Khaled al-Azm was making to unite the country's own economic and reactionary forces, backed by concentrated press campaigns targeting "the Nasserists, Abdel Nasser's own lackeys," and Abdel Nasser personally. The purpose of this alliance was to pressure President Nazim al-Qudsi against reaching any agreement with army commander Zahreddine, and against dismissing Khaled al-Azm from the premiership in favor of a figure known for unionist leanings, a move the neutral officers themselves would support.

Standing alongside Khaled al-Azm was a bloc made up of the remaining members of "the Damascene officers' bloc," the rightists, and the defectors from the union era, led by Akram al-Hourani and his own men, Amin al-Nafouri and Ahmad Abdel Karim.

This bloc's own goal was to force al-Qudsi to hold firm to his own direction, then carry out a move to overturn the whole situation, handing command of the army to General Aziz Abdel Karim, Minister of Interior, with Brigadier General Muwaffaq Assasa and Jawdat al-Atassi serving as his own deputies.

From there, they would move to the use of violence, turning, if necessary, to outright terror against the unionists, so that not a single root of theirs would be left to sprout again in this country.

We slept that night in the midst of this storm of terrifying news, the whole country living under its own nightmares.

News of Nasserist plots, news of reactionary plots, an alliance on the right, matched by an alliance on the left, and within these clashing currents, every possible outcome had become conceivable.

Friday, 8 March

"And the intoxication of death has brought the truth; that is what you were trying to escape." (Surat Qaf, verse 19)

At six o'clock in the morning, the doorbell rang. I woke, since the hour was still early for this time of winter, and sought refuge in God from Satan the accursed. I hurried to open the door, and found two residents of my own building standing there, stunned, telling me a coup had taken place in Syria, though they did not yet know who was behind it.

It remained crucially important to learn the true nature of these coup-makers and their own goals. The telephone in my own house began ringing without pause. Word reached me that the secessionist era had breathed its own last, that a new chapter in Syria's own life had opened, and that a dark chapter of weakness, narrow vision, and crime had finally been closed. "Is not their appointed time the morning? Is the morning not near?" God Almighty spoke the truth.

A thought crossed my own mind, of the advice I had once sent to Dr. al-Qudsi, through Rushdi al-Kikhya, urging him to protect both himself and the country, advice he refused, in his own arrogance. I recalled Durayd ibn al-Simma's own verse:

I gave them my own counsel at the bend of the valley,

but they saw the wisdom in it only on the morning after.

And by the time they finally saw this wisdom, they found themselves already behind bars.

Brigadier General Mati' al-Samman wrote, in his own memoirs, of President al-Qudsi: "This time, execution (with this second coup against him) stood closer to him than his own jugular vein, and he sensed this himself."[1]

A number of secessionists have since written of this coup and its own causes.

Lieutenant General Zahreddine believes the secessionist era fell for several reasons, among them the unionist tide itself (p. 419), and he admits "that the following truth must be acknowledged, that the Syrian people, in its entirety, is passionately devoted to union," a statement carrying real weight on the scale of judgment. Among the reasons too, he says, was the secessionists' own attempt "to destroy the socialist course," a second statement of its own weight, along with "personal gain," which drove the capitalists and feudal landowners to seek "to shatter the army," the weakness of the government, which he considers the principal cause behind this era's own fall, and, finally, "those infatuated with power itself."

Nor did he neglect to sharply criticize certain pillars of the secession, whom he names outright. I have no wish to discuss them further here, though reading what he wrote of them (pp. 428-432) is not without its own real pleasure, for anyone who enjoys drawing lessons from the passage of time.

Yet, strangely enough, this same man, who wrote so extensively of the collapsed state of both the army and the civilian government, says: "he never imagined the coup would succeed," even though his own era stood on foundations of pure clay, needing nothing more than a small stream of water passing beneath it to bring the whole structure crashing down on everyone inside it.

The late Khaled al-Azm laid a share of the blame for his own downfall on "Nasserism," and attacked the cooperation between "the duo" of Nazim al-Qudsi (President of the Republic) and Zahreddine (the army commander), of whom he wrote: "I have no doubt whatsoever that this was part of a United States scheme to establish a regime in Syria favorable to American policy" (p. 408). He affirmed that the receptions organized for the President of the Republic in the provinces had in fact been arranged by the Communists, who "instructed all their own supporters to chant long live al-Qudsi," and accused him of suspending the constitution and issuing a legislative decree after his release from detention (on 14 April 1962), one al-Azm branded unconstitutional, granting himself the right to legislate (in the chamber of deputies' own absence). Al-Azm likewise spoke of "the buffoonery of Bashir al-Azma and Nazim al-Qudsi, and their own wordplay with epithets like beloved Egypt and sister Egypt," and praised, God rest his soul, "the Chtaura conference in the most fragrant terms, a conference that was in fact nothing but an arena of obscenities and curses any decent soul would recoil from."

Nor did he spare "poor" Salah al-Bitar, "the sallow-faced man, driven by the black malice within his own heart, for referring him and his fellow secessionists to an exceptional court, to hold them accountable for the felony of seizing power" (p. 443).

But what angers him most, and what he considers the direct cause of the era's fall, is "Nasserist propaganda," and the dispute between the Muslim Brotherhood and the socialists (p. 441), as well as the dispute between "al-Bitar's own group, on one side, and Akram al-Hourani's own group, on the other." This, he says, was a "dispute that bore the greatest share of responsibility for how events unfolded, leading both factions to withdraw from the ministry, destabilizing the government and clearing the way for the coup" (p. 443).

I would note, though, that Khaled al-Azm had himself been one of the active figures behind establishing the 1958 union, and the very document announcing the union bears the "honor" of his own noble signature.

Yet Abdel Nasser excluded him from the first ministry, as he excluded others, and he grew resentful of the whole era ever since, for he had grown accustomed to sitting on the seat of power, no matter who happened to hand it to him.

His own friend, Brigadier General Mati' al-Samman, quotes him as once telling him: "Yesterday I considered taking my own life, to be rid of it all, then thought better of it, so as not to add further to the gossip." (p. 363).

Naturally, he wished to take his own life not because he had become a pillar of the secession, but for another reason I would rather my own pen not touch here. What matters is that he did think of suicide, to overcome his own frayed nerves. But what I myself consider the real cause of the secessionist era's fall is that it arrived an illegitimate child, with many different fathers, colonialism, reaction, petty sectarian kings, and opportunists all among them. A child such as this, misguided and misleading in equal measure, could never have been allowed to remain within the sphere of legitimacy and nationhood our own people has always been known for, throughout every turn of its own history, which is why a handful of tanks brought it down, without firing a single shot, since it had already begun dying from the very first hour of its own birth, born amid circumstances in which many well-known parties conspired together to resist any form of Arab unification whatsoever.

It is certain that this century has witnessed the broadest regional blocs, military and economic alike, and Europe is one such example. It has set aside its own sectarian and doctrinal disputes, turned the page on its own clashes and bloody massacres, in wars that once had its own peoples at each other's throats, and united its fifteen states into a single economic bloc, so that it might stand firmly on its own feet within the international arena, a giant among giants, alongside the bloc of the United States, Canada, and Mexico at its own forefront, the bloc of Japan, China's own vast market, and India's own enormous market.

The Paris newspaper Le Monde recently wrote[2] the following about this enormous bloc:

"The European Common Market now numbers 15 states (with other European states set to join), with a combined population of 370 million people, and total reserves of 6,000 billion ecu (each ecu being equal to one French franc). By January 1999 it will have a unified currency, called the Euro."

I read, in this same issue, that the annual turnover of the French tie- and clothing-maker Christian Dior reaches a billion dollars a year, and that Yves Saint Laurent, plying the very same trade as his own former countryman, reaches 850 million dollars. These are but two names among a great many, and their combined turnover very nearly rivals the entire Syrian state budget (123 billion Syrian pounds, with the dollar worth 50 pounds).

This single trade pales beside the multinational corporations, whose own roots spread across the world like an octopus, dealing in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Against these staggering figures stand other, equally staggering figures concerning us, the Arabs of the Middle East. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released its own report for 1995, which read:

That the number of people assassinated in this region of the world, for religious and ethnic reasons, between 1975 and 1995, exceeded 65,000 people, 50,000 of them in Algeria alone.

This figure exceeds the total number of martyrs who fell in every single war against Israel combined.[3]

And so, without an Arab bloc bringing together its own two hundred million Arabs, even in the form of smaller blocs, whatever name such a bloc might bear, we will remain economically weak, intellectually backward, and militarily fragmented, and will therefore remain nothing but an open consumer market for the products of foreign industries and factories, advanced in both industry and technology. This means the foreign worker will go on enjoying a high standard of living, while our own workers remain victims of unemployment and want. This is exactly why the secessionists' own crime was so immensely grave, on the national, economic, and international level alike, and on the level of national security itself.

Its own fatal consequences would reveal themselves fully in the years that followed.

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Endnotes:

[1] P. 263.

[2] Issue of 17 December 1995.

[3] The Egyptian magazine Rose al-Youssef, issue of 4 December 1995.