The Second Year of the Union - Part 9: The Journey to Washington for the World Bank and IMF Conference

Thursday, 3 September

My students at the Faculty of Law know me well enough to know that I do not reject the principle that the law's own severity must, in certain circumstances, be tempered with a measure of humanity. The Director General of Customs brought before me a decision taken by the Supreme Customs Council providing for the dismissal of two customs guards from the province of Latakia.

I looked into their two files, and found that one of them, Mustafa, actively sought out bribes and took them, and that a number of base and shameful offenses had been established against him. I signed the decision to dismiss him.

The file then had to be sent on to the President of the Republic, as the final recourse for anyone who felt he had suffered an injustice, and the President too signed the decision to dismiss him (Republican Decision No. 1546).

In the second file, I found that its subject suffered from a sexual deviancy, and that he would bring a certain man of that kind to his office to commit this indecency with him. But he had never once taken a bribe, and this was the first difference between him and his colleague.

The second difference was that this wretched man was the father of eight children, the eldest a girl of sixteen, with her sisters and brothers following behind her in age.

I said to myself: is what this guard does not one of those organic and psychological afflictions that the professor of forensic medicine at the University of Paris, Dr. Piedelièvre, used to lecture us about, one that is, in the great majority of cases, a psychological illness, and a curable one at that?

I did not sign the decision, out of pity for this group of minor children, fearing that destitution would visit them with the ugliest of consequences.

I summoned the man, made clear to him what was in his file, and he promised to reform himself. I never heard anything more of him. This was, without doubt, a solution that would satisfy no zealot, but in choosing it I proceeded from a wish to temper the law's own hardness with an injection of mercy.

Saturday, 5 September

Dr. El-Kaissouni telephoned me, and asked whether I wished to travel to Washington to attend the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to represent the Republic as its governor there (in my capacity as Minister of the Treasury), and as deputy head of the delegation, whose head was El-Kaissouni himself.

I told him I welcomed this, but that I wished to extend the trip a few days beyond its set program, for pressing health reasons, and I asked him to put this wish of mine to the President for his approval.

I was, in truth, exhausted, and had expressed my own wish to resign, for these very health reasons.

But I held back from submitting it, because of the "electric" political atmosphere following the Baathists' collapse in the National Union elections, and the emerging signs of a coming crisis on the horizon.

This trip to America was, for me, an opportunity not to be missed, and I felt a strong desire to learn how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually worked, at the very height of their own activity.

I had, in years past, excused myself from a series of invitations extended to me: one to visit Delhi for an international conference, another to visit the People's Republic of China, whose invitation was brought to me by the Chinese Muslim orientalist Shahidi, so that I sent my own professor, Nader al-Nabulsi, in my place to head the delegation, and another still, an invitation from Pakistan, on the occasion of my own decision to have Syrian banknotes printed at its presses in 1955.

The President's decision forming the delegation was issued. It included, from the Northern Region, Dr. Ibrahim al-Adli, who had completed his studies at an American university, along with some fifteen officials from the Southern Region.

I contacted El-Kaissouni to have him reserve two tourist-class seats on the plane for me and my wife, on the understanding that I would settle their price out of the price of the first-class ticket the World Bank would pay for me, paying the difference myself.

The Bank in question paid me a check covering the price of the travel ticket and the daily allowance for the days of the conference in Washington, and I endorsed the check over to Dr. Abdel Moneim El-Kaissouni, in settlement of what the Egyptian Treasury had paid on my behalf, a sum greater, in fact, than what I actually owed.

During this same period, two important decisions were issued:

The first, political, providing for the dissolution of all political, cultural, and social organizations, including the Partisans of Peace and the Syrian-Soviet and Syrian-Chinese Friendship Societies.

This decision was interpreted as a further effort to root out the communists and communism from the country, and as an affirmation that the Republic's policy was an independent one on the international stage, aligned with neither the Western nor the Eastern bloc.

The second, economic, providing for the exemption of new industrial enterprises established in the Northern Region from registration fees and property taxes for six years, and from income tax for three years.

The aim of this decision was clear, being a further step in the effort to industrialize the Syrian region, and to encourage investors to establish industrial enterprises that would bring them good profit and bring the country renewal and development.

The trouble, however, lay in the industrialists' own weak confidence in the existing political order, and their growing fear of its leftward drift.

Even so, the Damascus Molasses Company was established, and we visited it, along with President Abdel Nasser, after it was set up, the President giving it his own pledge that it would remain in its owners' hands. I was myself a witness to this pledge.

It is regrettable that this pledge was not honored, for the company was nationalized, along with the other industrial enterprises, less than a year later.

It is not the President's habit to break a pledge he has given. But what happened was that the Molasses Company was one of the larger industrial establishments, and it could hardly be exempted at a time when nationalization was striking enterprises of far lesser standing than it.

And who, in any case, could say for certain that the President had not simply forgotten this pledge, amid the crush of his own tangled political affairs at home and abroad, with some two years having passed since he had given it?

Friday, 11 September: The Journey to the World Bank Conference

At a quarter past eleven in the morning we set off for Cairo. The plane's takeoff was delayed by about half an hour, which stirred our own anxiety. Was it some malfunction, or fear of an Israeli attack?

After a long wait, two languid figures appeared and climbed its steps. It was the daughter of the "former" President Shukri Bey, and her distinguished husband.

We reached Cairo after two hours of comfortable flying, apart from the turbulence caused by clouds over the mountains surrounding Damascus.

At Cairo's vast airport, by comparison with Damascus's own modest airport in western al-Mazzeh, we were received by officials on behalf of Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, the central Minister of the Treasury, standing in for El-Kaissouni, the head of our delegation to America.

We stayed at the Shepheard Hotel, facing the Semiramis Hotel on the Nile, and had lunch there. We went out to tour Cairo's own quarters, one of them the Muqattam hills, and in the evening we dined at the Abdeen Casino, where we watched the dancer "al-Nimr" until a late hour of the night, flocks of "civilized" European girls displaying their fair bodies, swaying like willow branches, before the eyes of drunkards and men of inherited wealth.

Saturday the 12th

I went to Qubba Palace, where President Abdel Nasser's office was, and signed my name in the protocol register, to bid him farewell and pay my respects, and to remind him that I was in Cairo, should he wish to receive me, and speak to me of my own mission to the "land of the foreigners."

We went out to the Khanka barrages, and visited the towering pyramids and the Sphinx, ancient monuments the mind can scarcely comprehend being raised, thousands of years ago, in those bygone days, when there were no cranes to lift these enormous stones and set them in place with this astonishing precision, which has withstood the ages, and we were told the Pharaonic engineers used no mortar or binding material at all between the stones.

Beside the pyramids sat the Sphinx, mocking time itself, having likewise borne, for thousands of years, Egypt's blazing heat and choking sandstorms.

That evening we were graciously invited to dinner by our friend Riyad al-Maidani, one of the ministers of the union with Yemen, aboard a houseboat moored on the Nile named "Omar Khayyam."

Those were the nights of the Nile flood, which came close to threatening the streets, so that one newspaper spoke of "great panic." But the houseboat, which very nearly stood level with the street itself, paid no mind to what was happening beneath it, so confident was it in its own wonderfully cheerful mood, rising with the surging waves beneath and around it, like one of those splendid white birds that thrive upon the water, swaying in whatever direction the tide danced.

Sunday the 13th

Some people lie awake the night before an early morning flight.

I am one of them, for fear that sleep will take me and I will miss my appointed time, while others throw themselves into the arms of Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep, whether on the ground or soaring through the skies.

As for me, I share no friendship at all with this god in his lofty heaven.

I asked the hotel management to wake me at four in the morning, so that we could be at the airport by five, ready for the Swiss plane's takeoff at six for Athens.

We landed in the Greek capital at ten minutes to nine, having flown over the Mediterranean from its southern shore to its northern one, the very opposite of what the ships of the Greeks and Romans used to do when they moved from north to south and southeast to invade our own lands, those same thousands of years ago.

Three hours is, without doubt, a great deal in the eyes of people today. The reason was that flying, in that period, was still done by propeller aircraft, for jet travel had only just appeared, and it stirred a certain dread in the soul, since these jet planes had no four propellers to ease one's staying aloft, riding the carpet of air, and to set one's mind at ease should a propeller landing become necessary.

We drank warm coffee in the airport cafeteria, then returned to the plane, which carried us on to Zurich, by way of southern Greece, then southern Italy, before turning north over the Adriatic Sea, Yugoslavia and Albania on our right, and the "Italian boot" on our left. We passed over the Alps, and were struck with wonder at the mountains' sharp peaks, like white spears planted in fields of dazzling white snow. The plane then began to lose altitude so that it could descend into Switzerland, passing between these peaks, left and right, so as not to strike them, allowing us to enjoy the sight of rivers in their deep valleys, and forests blanketed in snow, yet still within our sight. After a flight of five hours, above the clouds or among them, we landed at Zurich airport.

The gifted poet "Badawi al-Jabal" (Muhammad Sulayman al-Ahmad), our colleague in government and in parliament before the Union, was afraid of flying, and whenever he was forced to board a plane, upon stepping off it he would address it with a line from a beautiful poem by an ancient poet, spoken as he fought a fierce lion:

"Grant my two feet the back of the earth, for I have found the earth a steadier back than yours."

The poet was Bishr ibn Awana al-Abdi, who addressed his own betrothed, saying:

"O Fatima, had you witnessed, in the belly of the valley of Khabt, the fierce lion meet your brother Bishr,

You would have seen a lion, the very embodiment of a lion, a fearsome, mighty lion, meet another fearsome lion."

At the airport, we were met by a representative of the Swiss airline, who helped us reserve two rooms at the Hotel Baur au Lac, for us and for our companion al-Adli and his American wife.

The hotel charged 55 Swiss francs a night, the equivalent of 50 Syrian lira, for the Syrian lira was then worth slightly more than the Swiss franc, whereas today (1995) the Swiss franc is equivalent to 35 Syrian lira. I do not imagine hotel prices today are less than ten times what they were in those days, keeping pace with this luxurious country's own cost of living.

What caught our attention, however, was the "cheapness" of Switzerland's famous chocolate, a kilogram of bars costing eleven Swiss francs, or 9.50 Syrian lira.

No one is unaware that Switzerland is the homeland of banks with their secret accounts, of precise watches, and of delicious chocolate.

I hope the reader will not grow impatient with my dwelling on these details, which I have set down deliberately, so that his own mind may wander, comparing those broadly easy days before this rampant inflation with the days in which we now suffer under prices so exorbitant we can scarcely believe them.

I once had occasion, some years ago, to enjoy reading the "Memoirs of a Damascene Barber," written in a language closer to colloquial than classical Arabic, a century ago now, in which he recounted how people used to live, and did not fail to tell us the prices of Damascus's famous vegetables, nuts, and sweets. This book met with a very warm reception.

Someone might well say: but salaries too have risen greatly in our own day. This is true, but the gulf still runs deep between earning and spending for a great many people, though not for those whose hands reach into the state's own coffers among men of influence, who beam with delight at gifts and smile warmly on those who bring them. My own retirement pension today, to give one example, once more than sufficient for my needs back in the sixties, now scarcely covers a tenth of my basic necessities.