Days of the Union - The First Year - Part 4: The General Amnesty Law and the Dissolution of Syria's Political Parties

Wednesday, 12 March

Today the President signed the general amnesty law I had drafted, in celebration of the establishment of the new Republic and at the wish expressed by a number of ministers. I excluded from it those who had committed serious or base crimes.

As a matter of principle, I am opposed to general amnesty laws, since they are broad and are often exploited by criminals capable of threatening social safety. I recall a vicious murderer who benefited from one of the earlier general amnesty laws before the soil on his victim's grave had even dried, an event that left wounds in the victim's family that never healed, and weakened the standing of law and justice in the eyes of the citizens.

If recourse to such measures is sometimes unavoidable, it is essential that they be adopted only in rare circumstances and at widely spaced intervals.

It seemed to me, and to my colleagues in the government, that the establishment of the United Arab Republic was a splendid national event, accomplished through mutual consent and unparalleled enthusiasm, a circumstance that does not repeat itself every day and that had to be honored.

General amnesty had in the past been granted, as it has been since, on occasions that amounted to nothing more than political demagoguery.

Even so, I excluded from it dangerous criminals, who did not deserve so generous a grant from the nation. This law became Law No. 3 of the new Republic's laws.

Among the things it covered were the following penalties and offenses:

1. The full remaining term of the sentence, for those suffering from incurable, chronic diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer, and leprosy.

2. The full remaining term of the sentence, for those who had reached the age of seventy.

3. Half the remaining term, for other criminal sentences, for convicts whose good conduct was certified by the prison administration.

4. Half the remaining term, for the offense of causing bodily harm under Article 542 of the Penal Code, that is, the offense in which the resulting incapacity to work exceeds twenty days, whose statutory penalty is imprisonment from three months to three years and a fine.

5. The commutation of a sentence of hard labor for life to a sentence of hard labor for a fixed term of twenty years.

After this law was issued, I noticed an error in the drafting of this fifth clause: linguistically, the preposition "to" ought to attach to the penalty being replaced, not to its replacement, so that the text should properly have read as follows:

"A sentence of hard labor for a fixed term of twenty years shall be substituted for a sentence of hard labor for life." This is a common error, one the courts do not dwell on when interpreting the text, since the legislator's evident intent was leniency, not severity.

It once happened that a flawed provision was brought before the French judiciary, reading as follows:

"Whoever boards a train after it has come to a complete stop shall be punished by imprisonment."

The legislator's intent had been to protect people's lives, by forbidding them from boarding train carriages before the train had come to a complete stop, not after it had already stopped. The French judiciary nonetheless applied it as written, until the text was amended twenty years later.

6. All misdemeanors and minor offenses, whether already adjudicated or still pending before the courts, or for which criminal proceedings had not yet been brought.

This amnesty helped to "empty out" the prisons of the majority of their inmates.

Regrettably, however, it was not long before they found their way back into its "embrace."

Our professor at the University of Paris, Donnedieu de Vabres, used to say:

"Prisons are like jackals: they empty their bellies of food, only to come back and devour it again."

I excluded from the amnesty's provisions the base crimes, though in truth every crime is at its root a base one, and so I excluded offenses against public morals, drug offenses, theft, fraud, deception, and breach of trust, along with crimes touching the security of the state, whether external or internal.

This amnesty law was certainly met with a great deal of joy and delight across most sectors of society.

Thursday, 13 March: The Law Dissolving Political Parties

Yesterday and today, President Abdel Nasser issued three laws to organize the exercise of government in the Republic.

Law No. 1 of 1958, dated 12 March 1958, provides as follows:

1. The President of the Republic shall assume all the powers that the legislation in force in the regions of Egypt and Syria entrusted to the President of the Syrian Republic, or the President of the Egyptian Republic, or the Syrian Council of Ministers or its chairman.

It is clear that the President thereby came to enjoy all the executive powers that had previously belonged to the President of the Syrian Republic, the Prime Minister, and the Council of Ministers, in addition to the powers he already held, previously, in the Egyptian state.

2. The President of the Republic shall issue decisions on matters that the legislation provides for, or that had customarily been issued in Syria by way of regulatory decrees.

3. The President of the Republic may delegate to his vice presidents or ministers the exercise of the powers set out in the legislation.

4. The provisions contained in the laws in force in the Syrian region concerning the organization of public interests and institutions shall have the force of decisions issued by the President of the Republic, and may be repealed or amended by decisions of his.

By this law, the hand of executive authority, represented by its head, the President of the Republic, was set free, and decisions on matters such as amending staffing tables, personnel affairs, and transfers between budget items, among other things, became the exclusive competence of this authority, meaning it no longer needed separate laws to be issued for such matters.

Law No. 2 of 1958, dated 12 March, provides for the dissolution of the political parties and organizations existing in the Syrian region, and prohibits the formation of any new parties or organizations. It likewise prohibits any organization, political party, or any of their former members from engaging in any political activity "in any form whatsoever."

The assets of these parties and political organizations shall revert to the National Union (which had not yet been formed, but whose creation had been decided upon, to serve as the vessel into which all political tendencies were expected to merge and cooperate).

The Minister of the Treasury in the Syrian region shall appoint a special delegate whose task shall be to take receipt of these assets. This law required anyone holding any of the parties' funds to hand them over, within a single week, to this appointed official.

The Minister of the Treasury at this time was Mr. Fakhir al-Kayali. I never learned what this financial official actually received from these dissolved parties. I do know, however, that all the parties had operated out of rented premises, furnished only with simple furniture.

I later learned, however, from Dikran Jrajian, the Aleppo deputy for the People's Party and its financial agent in Aleppo, that the People's Party had, under his custody, forty thousand Syrian lira, and that he had handed it over to the party deputy Adel Kikhya, who used it to buy himself a house, pledging to hand it over to the state at a later time. Both men have since passed away, and no one any longer knows the fate of this large sum.

The law in question provided for the punishment of anyone violating its provisions with imprisonment from ten days to three years and a fine not exceeding fifteen thousand lira.

The third law, No. 6 of 1958, provided that the members of the National Assembly in Egypt and the Chamber of Deputies in Syria would retain a financial allowance equal to what had previously been set as their salaries, until the next National Assembly was formed.

The reason for this law was that the National Assembly in Egypt and the Chamber of Deputies in Syria had been dissolved upon the issuance of the new constitution, making it necessary to issue a legislative text authorizing the financial administration to pay their salaries under a new designation. They continued to receive this "allowance" until their fate was settled with the establishment of the new National Assembly.

The President also issued, on this day, an important decision unifying the gendarmerie, the police, the general security forces, and the desert patrol forces in our Syrian region, under the new name "Police and Security Forces." A similar decision had been among the causes of al-Shishakli's first coup, and, at least on the surface, of his second coup as well.

Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad al-Jarrah was appointed Director General of Police and General Security.

Lieutenant Colonel al-Jarrah was known for his violence and severity when he served as public prosecutor in the military court headed by General Afif al-Bizri in 1957, which tried those accused of conspiring against state security.

Naturally, I do not condone his conduct, and I told him that justice requires no violent behavior, but rather fairness, a sense of justice, moral courage, and mastery of the law, nothing more and nothing less.

This is what I told President Nasser himself, one day, when we spoke on the subject of this court.

Sunday, 16 March

Egyptian newspapers and magazines began visiting the ministers' offices to write about them, so that the people of the Egyptian region might become acquainted with them, especially those serving in the central government.

Here, for example, is what the widely circulated al-Musawwar magazine, famous for the elegance of its layout and the beauty of its photographs, wrote about me:

"He is one of the shining national and scholarly faces in the Syrian parliament.

"He was born in Aleppo in 1915, and earned his doctorate in law from Paris, along with a licentiate in letters and a diploma from the Institute of Criminal Sciences.

"He practiced law and taught at the Syrian University.

"He was elected deputy for the city of Aleppo three times.

"Mr. Homad's interests vary according to the circumstances and the ministries entrusted to him. If he holds the Ministry of Education, for instance (as we used to call the Ministry of Education and Instruction), he devotes himself to the study of educational research, and if he holds the Ministry of Economy, he devotes himself to economic research.

"He is married, and has two children, a daughter named Maysa and a son named Ghassan."

(Al-Musawwar, issue of 14 March 1958.)

I recall that the ignorance of some Egyptian journalists about Syria led them into laughable errors. One of them, for instance, wrote about Syria's most famous summer resorts, stating that the city of Deir ez-Zor was considered one of Syria's most famous resorts, distinguished by its beautiful location on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

I would also note that I never once held the Ministry of Economy, as the al-Musawwar correspondent claims, though I did hold the Ministry of Finance on several occasions, which was renamed the Ministry of the Treasury under the Union.

Monday, 17 March

President Gamal visited the city of Aleppo, which gave him an unparalleled reception, going to great lengths in honoring and welcoming him.

Aleppo is a city of Arab nationalism, the frontier post of Arabism and Islam, ever since the armies of Abu Ubaydah entered it, led by its valiant commander Iyad ibn Ghanm.

The President delivered a speech to its assembled crowds, in which he said:

"I had been waiting for this day, to meet you in your valiant city of Aleppo, which has always been the impregnable fortress protecting the Arab lands from treachery and tyranny."[1]

Wednesday, 19 March

The secretary of the Council of Ministers' presidency contacted me and informed me that President Gamal would deliver an important speech tomorrow in Cairo, and that the ministers were invited to travel to attend it.

I felt no wish to leave Damascus, and so I excused myself from being able to accept the invitation.

That day I met with Mr. Sabri al-Asali, Vice President of the Republic, in his office at the Presidential Palace in al-Muhajireen, and proposed that we discuss the affairs of the Ministry of Justice together, but he refused to enter into any discussion, since the President of the Republic had issued no decision defining his own powers. My own sense was that the man dominating the affairs of government was Akram al-Hourani, who usually presided at the head of the Council of Ministers, with al-Asali seated beside him. It was al-Hourani who debated with the ministers and ran the sessions, and al-Asali spoke only when al-Hourani allowed him to, which came to be seldom indeed.

How true is the old proverb: Buraqish brought this upon herself (a classical Arabic saying about a dog whose own barking led enemies straight to her masters' camp, meaning one who brings ruin on one's own people through one's own actions).

For ever since al-Asali mortgaged himself to the politicized officers and fell into step behind al-Hourani, himself and al-Azm, and even al-Kuzbari before the Union, merely to obtain a position, he lost the ability to say "no" to any wish of those working behind the curtain.

Thursday, 20 March

President Abdel Nasser delivered his long-awaited speech, and I listened to it at six o'clock in the evening. In it, he launched a harsh attack on the colonial powers and on Nuri al-Said (Prime Minister of Iraq), and laid bare the reasons behind the Arab states' defeat in their military and national struggles. I could hear over the radio the cheers of the hundreds of thousands who had come to the rally,[2] shouting themselves hoarse whenever the President paused to speak of Arab nationalism and the Arab nations.

My memory carried me back to 1943, when we, the Syrian and Lebanese students, wanted to hold a celebration of the Prophet's birthday at the Café Dupont in the Latin Quarter, and invited to it some sympathetic Frenchmen, choosing speakers from among the students of the Maghreb countries, Syria, and Lebanon. We needed to find an Egyptian student to speak, as an Egyptian, but every one of them we approached refused to take part with a speech. I knew a student studying history named Muhammad Afifi, and I put the idea to him, and after some hesitation he agreed.

When he stood to deliver his speech, he began by saying: "I want to be clear in what I say, that I am attending this celebration to take part in commemorating the noble birth of the Prophet, and not to contribute to any political act," and he added, opening his mouth wide for emphasis, "We Egyptians are bound to the Arabs by only two things: Islam and the Arabic language."

His speech left a painful echo in all our souls, for he had taken care in it to insist that Egypt was Egypt, and not part of the Arab nation.

Today the Egyptians cheer for their own son, Gamal, as "the hero of Arab nationalism." Afifi was not a rare example of the Pharaonic idea.

I recall attending, in Aleppo, in the early 1950s, a dinner reception held by the municipality in honor of the great Egyptian writer Muhammad Hassanein Haykal Pasha (author of the book Muhammad, and not to be confused with the great journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal), in my capacity as deputy for the city. A discussion arose between us that amounted to little more than a conversation between the deaf, for he held firmly to his view that Egypt was fundamentally Pharaonic, that it could not deny its own roots, and that Pharaonism was not at odds with Arabism and Islam.

My own view was the opposite: our own ancestors had been Phoenicians or Hittites, yet we now study them merely as a stage of civilization that survives in our lives only as historical memories. Our present reality, however, is that we have been Arabs for two thousand years, and that God favored us with Islam fourteen centuries ago, so that we became Arab Muslims, and that we look forward to the rise of a single nation, one that loses nothing by including Arab Christians within it, our brothers and partners in the homeland, sharing with them both its fortune and its hardship.

We ended our discussion having accomplished about as much as someone blowing air into a punctured waterskin.

I was delighted to hear the Egyptians cheering for the Arab nation, stretching "from the raging Gulf to the roaring Ocean, at your service, Abdel Nasser." The President also took a pointed jab at his "brother Saud," for his involvement in the vile plot to assassinate him.

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Endnotes:

[1] From Mr. Amin Said, The United Arab Republic, p. 114.

[2] Abdel Nasser's prestige had risen greatly after the Suez war of 1956. "Instead of London and Paris recovering their former influence in the region, they were humiliated militarily and diminished politically, and the Arab states allied with the West (Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon) lost their importance." "And in those years, the idea of Arab nationalism succeeded only with the emergence of Abdel Nasser..." From the book by Alberto Maria Nannini (Italian) and Fritz Oberson (Austrian), entitled Le non-dit du conflit israelo-arabe, published by Pygmalion, Chiré, France, 1992, p. 83.