Year 1960 - Part 1: The Resigned Baathist Ministers and Syria's First Corruption Trial

Friday, 1 January

We had New Year's Eve dinner at the airport restaurant (in al-Mazzeh), with some friends among our guests, and the evening ran on to a late hour of the night.

What caught our attention was how few non-Muslim patrons there were, and how packed, to the point of overflowing, the hall was with people like ourselves, Muslims.

The tables were laden with every kind of food, and drink as well, and some of the women did not deny themselves that magical substance that loosens the tongue and weakens one's own power of self-control.

Bodies swayed to the beat of the blaring music.

This well-known "poet" was in a state of half-consciousness, dancing with his friends' wives, a glass of liquor in his hand.

I teased him about his state, and he said: "today wine, tomorrow trouble."

Whoever frequents these "settings" ought to be used to them, and so long as we ourselves were there, it was hardly our own place to criticize anyone.

Lest God's own words prove true of us: "Do you enjoin righteousness upon the people and forget yourselves?" [Quran 2:44]

But what truly distressed me was this baring of women's chests, arms, and legs. Why all of this?

Could we not be "civilized" without these "indecencies"?

As for me, I like to think of myself as "progressive," so as to stay faithful to my own "Western" education, and religious, as I have always been, "keeping with tradition." That is, I like to be in the fire without being burned by it.

Saturday the 2nd

After the President formally accepted the resignations of Akram al-Hourani, Vice President of the Republic, and the Baathist ministers Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Mustafa Hamdoun, and Abdul Ghani Qannout, leaving only Dr. Amjad al-Tarabulsi still in government from among them, I thought it right to visit Mr. al-Hourani at his home, and went to see him accompanied by Nour al-Din Kahhaleh, Chairman of the Executive Council and Minister of Public Works, and we expressed our own regret at their collective resignation. Al-Hourani spoke of the reasons for the resignations, saying there was no real Syrian participation in government at all, but rather the domination of one region over the other. He concluded that the whole question of the relationship between the two regions needed to be reconsidered, on the basis of a single president, a single army, and a single foreign representation, and that these three pillars ought to be settled matters, beyond any possibility of debate.

I remarked to him: is this not exactly what we ourselves had decided in the Chamber of Deputies, only for you to reject it on your own side, rushing instead toward full merger-style union?

Regrettably, this is exactly what happened in practice, and now they had come to lament it.

I also visited Mustafa Hamdoun at his home. In fairness, this minister had become the most hated man in the country, and this, in truth, counts among his own better qualities, for he had seized surplus land under the Agrarian Reform Law from the holdings of four thousand landowners, especially in the Hama region.

He was right when he said: we have never known a single good day, even to this day, and he expressed his own sorrow for his father, who had begun facing hostile harassment by telephone back in Hama, his own hometown.

I recall that Mustafa Hamdoun received Rushdi al-Kikhya, at my own request, with proper courtesy, looked into his complaint, and he left him satisfied.

I also visited Khalil al-Kallas, the resigned Minister of Economy, and asked him: is Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj with you, or against you? He said: he is with us in word, and against us in deed. He is a man who wants power, and wants it for himself alone. He is deeply troubled by the Field Marshal's own presence in Damascus, just as he was troubled before by the presence there of the former ambassador Mahmoud Riad, before he was transferred to Cairo under al-Sarraj's own pressure.

Al-Kallas accused al-Sarraj of having led their own party astray in Iraq, pushing al-Shawwaf into rebellion against Abdul Karim Qasim, so that the Iraqi regime made an example of him, killing a number of his men and imprisoning others, thereby stripping their party of any further capacity to act against the Iraqi regime at all.

Al-Kallas admitted to me that there existed a secret political committee within the Council of Ministers, made up of al-Sarraj, Hamdoun, Qannout, and Taama al-Awdallah, whose task was to review political proposals they wished to put before the President, and that they had sworn oaths among themselves to keep this committee's existence secret.

Thursday the 7th

I received an invitation from Moussa Arafa, Minister for the High Dam, to attend the ceremony detonating ten tons of dynamite to begin work on the High Dam project in southern Egypt. The historic ceremony was to be presided over by President Abdel Nasser and King Mohammed V of Morocco, who had returned to his own ancestral throne after French authorities released him, having previously confined his own residence to the island of Madagascar.

I was not in a state of health that allowed me to accept this invitation, and so excused myself to my fellow minister, thanking him warmly for the gracious invitation, and kept to my bed for three days under the strain of overwork.

Tuesday the 12th

A complaint arrived from a man from Homs named "al-Habayan," signed in his own name, alleging that "Baath leaders" had taken 18,000 Syrian lira from him in exchange for securing him the fishing concession at al-Madiq.

It was forwarded to Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, and a similar complaint reached me as well.

It named al-Hourani and some of "his own ministers." But I clear all of these men of these fabricated charges, though I do not clear some of their own circles in that region.

Among the charges leveled against them was that they had leased large tracts of Agrarian Reform land in the Ghab, then sublet them to peasants actually working the land, while they themselves sat in the cafes of Hama, spending freely from the "rents" of their own land. The days ahead will reveal what truly lies behind all this.[1]

All I hope for is that the Baathists do not let their own hostility toward the Union carry them into working to unravel its very bonds. If they do, we will return to the old whirlwind, the ceaseless conflict, the strife between civilian and military, reactionary and progressive, the very condition people fled into the Union to escape.

I do not know what exactly they hold against Abdel Nasser.

Dictatorship? They knew this full well, when they themselves insisted that governance be presidential, and without parties.

Failing to strike at the feudal landlords? And why should they strike at them themselves? He imposed agrarian reform upon them, and took the surplus from their lands to give to the peasants working it. This alone should suffice, so long as it leads toward building a nation on the basis of citizens bound together, rather than class strife.

And this was exactly what Abdel Nasser was convinced the National Union would achieve.

Thursday the 14th

Today I referred the head of the Ministry of the Treasury's own inspection body, having first secured the approval of the head of the State Inspection Authority (as that body's own law requires, since it concerns a case involving parliamentary immunity), by lifting his immunity, to the Illicit Gains Court.

This "big shot" thereby becomes the first person accused of embezzlement to be brought before the judiciary.

I believe he will serve as a lesson to others. As the ancients used to say:

"The most resolute of men is he who is warned off by another's thirst, and will not approach the watering hole until he has learned the truth of it,

and the wisest of men is he whose own two eyes, upon seeing a thing happen to another, take it as a lesson for himself."

I would like, in all sincerity, to speak well of the great majority of the Treasury's own men. But I know that within this ministry's own ranks there are two or three men whose day of reckoning will come, a reckoning I hope will be just and severe. Otherwise, what does it mean for a finance director to sit at the head of a table with some of the country's great merchants, at the finest restaurants in the capital, his own greedy wife seated to his right, at the very same time he is reviewing their own objections to the preliminary committees' rulings imposing income tax on their enormous profits?

Sunday the 17th

The government received the King of Morocco, arriving from the Southern Region. The Vice President of the Republic and the members of the government went out to the airport to receive him.

For the sake of these "protocols," people's own affairs must grind to a halt, some of them having traveled from remote provinces, others forced to remain in the capital, staying at a hotel and eating at a restaurant, though they may not be in any financial position to do so.

The Field Marshal held a dinner reception for him at the Sharq Club, its guests led by President Shukri al-Quwatli.

President al-Quwatli hosted him at a luncheon at his own home the following afternoon, and in the evening an evening of music and entertainment was held for him at the Zahra cinema.

Among the ministers accompanying the King was Mr. Ahmad al-Alaoui, of the royal family, and a fellow student of mine at the Sorbonne, this "Moulay Si Ahmad" having lived his own life in Paris to the fullest.

I was delighted at this tribute being paid to President al-Quwatli, "the foremost Arab citizen," whose home has become one of the landmarks great visitors to the country make a point of visiting.

Al-Alaoui introduced me to King Mohammed V as though presenting a brother from whom he had once parted, half-convinced they would never meet again, for the colonial power (France) had thrown an iron ring around the lands of the Arab Maghreb, such that none of us ever dreamed of crossing its borders.

Monday the 18th

We used to read of a certain minister of old described as "the man of two ministries."

In these very days, a new ministry has been added to Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj's own portfolio, so that he has become Minister of Interior, Minister of Religious Endowments, and Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, as well as Secretary-General of the National Union.

The press might now rightly call him "the man of the ministries."

What strikes me about al-Sarraj is that he is, in truth, a courteous man, of few words, effective behind the scenes.

An entire cabinet session, running for several hours, might pass without his uttering a single word, and if the matter under discussion fell within his own remit and required him to speak, he would say only a few words, in a low, soft voice, and whenever he speaks, he speaks with his eyes fixed on the ground.

His own star rose when he took charge of the "Deuxième Bureau" (intelligence) before the Union, becoming a power unto himself that had to be reckoned with among the warring blocs of officers. He is one of the men on whose shoulders the very structure of the Union was built, and he heads a secret apparatus that people genuinely fear.

He won President Gamal's own trust when he exposed King Saud's conspiracy, and supplied the state treasury with one million nine hundred thousand pounds sterling, arriving at our own moment of greatest need for funds.

He used to treat me with courtesy, perhaps because I was older than him.

The family of the well-known Aleppo lawyers Wajih al-Hallaj and Zakariya Qatirji came to me one day, in a state of great fear, to tell me that al-Sarraj's own intelligence service had arrested them. I felt a deep sense of discomfort, for the two men were members of the dissolved People's Party, and their arrest implied that some elements within the party were "stirring" against the Union, a charge I genuinely found hard to credit.

I contacted al-Sarraj to ask him about the matter, and he confirmed the arrest had indeed taken place, adding that the two men met daily with the Communist Party's own leader in Aleppo, Ahmad Mahfal, at al-Hallaj's own office.

I sent someone to the detention center to question the two men, on my own behalf, about what they had to say against this charge, and the answer that came back was astonishing, if not outright comical. The two lawyers had two offices in the very same building, and one of its apartments was occupied by a licensed Jewish woman, at whose home the prominent, unmarried communist would sleep. So intelligence had fabricated a charge, one dictated to its own informant by nothing more than his own imagination.

I brought my own findings to my colleague "Fouché,"[2] who was overcome with embarrassment, and ordered their immediate release.

He punished his own "misguided operatives."

Anyone has the right to say: here are two men, wrongly detained, who found someone to speak on their behalf. But not every innocent detainee has someone able to carry his own complaint to so high an authority.

This is a plain and decisive truth, one no one can dispute the soundness of.

As something of a joke, I recall that the "secessionists" once assigned an agent to watch my own movements. He would stand at the entrance of the building to shelter from the cold and rain, and I once asked him: what do you gain from watching whether I am inside or out, and what will you report back to your own superiors? He found no answer, so I gave him the key to my car, so he could sit in it to keep warm while waiting for me to come down, and I began taking him along with me wherever I went. He was delighted that his own reports now contained "valuable" information for state security, for the security officials came to know that I had visited so-and-so, and that so-and-so had come to visit afterward, since I was the one supplying him with the names myself, for these were visits paid between friends, in the full light of day, our own political activity requiring no cover of darkness at all.

For this reason, I never placed a shred of trust in the intelligence reports that used to be distributed to us in our own offices, back when we held government posts.

Unless, that is, we trusted the source ourselves.

A cousin of mine, who commanded the police force of one of our cities, once told me that a certain progressive party had begun plotting against the Union, and that its own leadership once held a secret session running late into the night, taking a number of decisions harmful to security. When the meeting broke up at dawn, the report on it was already on his own desk within a single hour, written by one of the "conspirators" themselves, who had handed it to the officer in charge personally, and it reached the Minister of Interior within minutes, over a dedicated telephone line. Naturally, His Excellency the Minister stamped out the fuse with his own foot before the fire could reach the gunpowder and set off any explosion at all.

Wednesday the 20th: The Leningrad Ballet

We spent our evening at the invitation of the Soviet consul, watching a performance given by the Leningrad Ballet on a Damascus stage.

One can scarcely contain one's own admiration, expressing it instead through unbroken applause, for these young bodies bending and swaying as though they were graceful, supple rods of beautiful, well-matched rubber.

I had already seen this same performance in 1955, at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, at the invitation of the Soviet leadership.

Small wonder, for this troupe enjoys a worldwide fame it has fully earned through its own merit and the astonishing refinement of its art, an art that, despite the bareness of the bodies, remains entirely above vulgarity or the stirring of base appetites.

During the intermission, my two friends Rafiq Bishour and Rateb al-Hasami, deputies in the (suspended) Chamber of Deputies, told me they had visited Akram al-Hourani at his home, and that he had declared to them, with the utmost conviction, that he and the Baath Party disowned any role at all in bringing about the Union, and that it was certain officers who had carried it out and imposed it upon him.

I heard the same claim from other Baathist sources, that the Baath Party bears no responsibility at all for the Union.

If so, why did they march at the very head of its own procession, and threaten anyone standing in its way with charges of treason and resistance to the nation's own goals?[3] And what, then, does the word "Union" itself mean, occupying, as it does, first place among the party's own three slogans: Unity, Freedom, Socialism?

Once again, ruin take the hands of opportunistic politics. How well Khair al-Din al-Zirikli put it, when he said:

"Alas for politics and its own turning, even the wise man, in patient endurance of it, finds his only solace."

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Endnotes:

[1] Mr. Khalid al-Azm, ally of Mr. al-Hourani and Mr. al-Asali within the National Front, wrote of al-Hourani's own circle in his memoirs: "They enabled their own clients and relatives to enrich themselves and profit, granting them tens of thousands of dunams of land in the Ghab." Vol. 3, p. 168.

[2] Fouché, a French Minister of Interior, notorious before the French Revolution for his own brutal treatment of the monarchy's opponents.

[3] This is what Khalid al-Azm himself said in his memoirs, vol. 3, p. 166.