A Special Chapter - Part 3: Minister Ahmad Abdel Karim's Assault on a Visitor and the Officers Turned Ministers

The Story of Ahmad Abdel Karim

Ahmad Abdel Karim was an army officer, part of a well-known bloc led by himself, along with Brigadier Amin al-Nafouri, Jaddou Ezz al-Din, Taama al-Awdallah, and Ahmad al-Hunaidi. It would be fair to say these were officers of leftist leanings, coming from the countryside, some from Hauran (Ahmad Abdel Karim and Ta'ma), some from the Druze Mountain (Jaddou Ezz al-Din), some from the Qalamoun (al-Nafuri), and some from Deir ez-Zor (Ahmad al-Hunaidi). They had banded together to stand against Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj (a bloc unto himself, though sympathetic to the left) and against the Hama-based Baathist bloc that gave its loyalty to Akram al-Hourani (Mustafa Hamdoun and Abd al-Ghani Qannout) and Jamal al-Soufi (of Latakia). These blocs differed among themselves, but sometimes agreed in order to pressure the politicians, or, more precisely, to use them as a public facade behind which they stood, pulling the strings of their pawns in ways not lost on any discerning eye behind the curtain. They had learned to defy civilian authority through their own participation in the successive coups.

Alongside these blocs were officers who sympathized with them, such as General Afif al-Bizri, whom they installed as Chief of the General Staff in 1957, and who then became commander of the First Army at the start of the Union.

We politicians suffered a great deal from the interference of these officers in the country's politics, even though they were a minority compared to the number of silent officers who knew nothing but soldiering as a profession and a duty, receiving orders and carrying them out. They too suffered, for some of them paid with their lives for championing their own ideas, and many, very many, were driven out of the army, or left to wander, after the nation had spent enormous sums preparing them for the day they would repay their debt to it, in the confrontation with Israel. The taxes citizens had paid for their training in foreign academies were thus squandered, and they themselves lost either their lives or their positions.

We lived for long years caught up in the whirlpool of their troubles, with no one able to find a way out of the dark tunnel.

When their troubles among themselves grew acute, they boarded a plane to Abdel Nasser in the Cairo of al-Mu'izz, and asked him to accept a full merger union, rather than the federal union the Syrian Chamber of Deputies had approved and all the parties had agreed to, or else, as I learned one of them had put it, they would "slaughter one another." Amin al-Hafiz had once said that if Abdel Nasser ordered him to bomb Aleppo, his own city and birthplace,[1] he would do it, singling it out for this "honor" in his own zeal to prove his loyalty to the Union.

Abdel Nasser accepted the principle of union, but set two conditions for the officers:

First: that the army not interfere in politics.

Second: that the political parties be dissolved.

The officers accepted these two conditions, and the Chamber of Deputies accepted them along with them, and the Union came about.

Abdel Nasser then set about untangling the army's own knot, taking these very officers on as ministers in the first and second cabinets.

In the cabinet of 6 March 1958, he took, from among the (feuding) officers, Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj (for Interior), Mustafa Hamdoun (for Social Affairs), Ahmad Abdel Karim (for Municipal and Rural Affairs), and Amin al-Nafouri (for Communications).

This choice was an unusual event, since the country was not accustomed to seeing military officers occupying seats of civilian government in the cabinet.

When the cabinet of 7 October 1958 was formed, it brought in, from among the officers, Ahmad al-Hunaidi (Agrarian Reform), Akram Dairi (for Social Affairs), Jaddou Ezz al-Din (Minister of State for Presidential Affairs), Jamal al-Soufi (a well-known Baathist, Minister of Supply), Taama al-Awdallah (Minister of Municipal Affairs), and Ahmad Abdel Karim, the leader of one of the blocs (for Public Works).

Much was said about bringing officers into the cabinet. Some said Abdel Nasser wished to reward their personal loyalty to him, and so honored them with ministries. Others said he wished to remove their danger from the army and put an end to the scourge of coups, and so brought them into posts they were unaccustomed to dealing with people in, given how different the nature of soldiering is from civilian political life, thereby weakening the army by stripping it of capable commanders, without improving government performance, since they lacked the necessary experience.

I lived through both cabinets, and worked alongside these officer-ministers, and I found nothing to hold against their conduct or their integrity. What could be held against them was simply their lack of experience in the ways of civilian life.

And so Colonel Ahmad Abdel Karim became Minister of Municipal and Rural Affairs, a ministry we had not known before, taking as his headquarters the building of the "Capital Secretariat," from where he set about running the affairs of the municipalities, Damascus's municipality among them.

One day, a story spread through Damascus like fire through dry brush, that he had struck a visitor in his own office. The man "struck" was a retired Damascene officer who had asked to see him. The Minister's office manager asked him to wait, since the Minister was in a meeting with the senior staff of his ministry. When the visitor grew impatient with the wait, he stood up, kicked open the door, and entered the Minister's presence without permission.

The Minister's own account is that this visitor forced the office door open and entered hurling obscenities at him, brandishing his fist, and advancing toward him as though intending to strike him. He tried to calm him, especially since the man outranked him in the army, and told him his case would be looked into, a case involving a violation, the setting up of a coffeehouse at one of the entrances to Damascus, which the Minister had ordered closed for violating municipal regulations.

The Minister adds that the visitor kept up his stream of insults, so that he moved to ring the bell to have the ushers remove him from the room, but the man lunged at him meaning to strike him, and His Excellency found, before he knew it, his own hand rising and striking the visitor, being, of course, physically stronger and more solidly built than him, and then pushed him until he forced him out of the room.

Ahmad Abdel Karim himself referred to this story in his own book,[2] noting that Abdel Nasser never once raised it when they met. Ahmad Abdel Karim commented on their meeting as follows: "I saw in Abdel Nasser a real generosity in not bringing it up, but I told him myself that I could never allow anyone to diminish my own dignity, for it is my only real capital, and that I had no choice but to act as I did."

Those bearing him a grudge seized upon the story and set about spreading it among the people, magnified, "perfumed and spiced," and directed it against the Union itself.

I heard, years later, the injured man's own version of the incident, and it did not, in fact, differ much from the Minister's account, except in toning down the "language" of the insults, though he did not deny forcing the door open, shouting in the room, and lunging at the Minister, until the powerful blow silenced him. He spoke of it as though he himself were "the hero" of the story.

The injured man's wife, a lawyer and a former student of mine, came to see me at my office in the Ministry of Justice, bringing X-ray images showing fractures at the base of the skull, and submitted them to me along with a complaint describing the assault, asking me to "punish" the minister who had attacked "a citizen who had come to him seeking redress for a wrong done to him" by an unlawful decision.

There was, in fact, nothing I could do, given the existence of a law setting out the specific procedures for bringing charges against ministers and the manner of trying them.

This law had been issued at the very outset of the Union.

It was poorly drafted, unclear in its wording, and I never learned who had actually written it. What stood out in it was that it granted the minister immunity against being "dragged" before the courts by those with vested interests, whenever he acted against their interests, an immunity that was indeed necessary for the proper functioning of government and the handling of the affairs of the people who came before this ministry's own departments.

I explained to her what the law provided, and promised to bring the matter, along with a detailed report of the incident, to the President of the Republic, since he alone held the legal authority to refer the Minister to trial or not, and, should a decision to refer him be made, there were complex procedures that were simply not available at the time.

Article 1 of this law, for instance, states that a minister is to be tried before a supreme court composed of twelve members, six of them members of the National Assembly, chosen by lot, three of them justices of the (Syrian) Court of Cassation, chosen by lot, and three of them justices of the (Egyptian) Court of Cassation, likewise chosen by lot.

Article 3 provides that the function of public prosecutor is to be carried out by three members of the National Assembly, elected by the members of this assembly by secret ballot and by majority vote.

This article also provides that the decision to refer the case is to be issued by the President of the Republic.

It can also be inferred, from Article 8, that the National Assembly has the right to decide on this referral.

But the National Assembly did not yet exist, since it had not yet been formed, even though the President had issued a decision treating its future members as already placed at his disposal, to carry out whatever tasks he might assign them, so that they could draw their salaries, pending the formation of the new National Assembly.

It was therefore not even within the President's own power to refer him to trial.

In any case, I sent the file to the President in Cairo, fully convinced that there was nothing judicial he could do about it, though he could, of course, dismiss the minister if he wished. But the union's cabinet was newly formed, and, besides, the "crime" was a minor one, a mere slap, even if such a thing had never before occurred in our country, which is precisely what gave it the wide circulation it enjoyed, fed by its own strangeness and its jarring novelty.

Anyone who has practiced law knows the relative value of many of the reports litigants submit. The injured man himself, God rest his soul, made light, in front of me, of this business of a "fracture at the base of the skull."

Even so, the incident contributed to the vilification of the Union, and was exploited in the ugliest way, unusual as its own ugliness already was.

Rumors said that I had failed in my duty by not referring the striking minister to the judiciary, and that I had taken his side.

But the legal situation simply did not grant me that right.

The law is the law.

There is no doubt that this wretched conduct, on the Minister's part, in his own office, did real damage to the Union's own standing.

Whatever has been said, whether true or false,

what excuse have you for repeating a thing once said?

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Endnotes:

[1] From Ahmad Hamrouch, "Abdel Nasser and the Arabs," p. 472.

[2] Lights on the Union, Damascus, 1962. The author himself held ministerial posts during the secession era.