Year 1960 - Part 3: The Nationalization of the Bank of Syria

Saturday the 20th

The plane took off with us for Hama, and we landed at its airport after a flight of less than thirty minutes.

This is Akram al-Hourani's own city, the man who resigned from the Union and set about attacking it and working to tear it apart. How, one wondered, would it receive Abdel Nasser?

The answer was not long in coming.

The reception was astonishing, enthusiastic, and dense with people. Horsemen on their own lean mounts surrounded the President's car and his own escort, cheering from the very depths of their hearts.

One of two things had to be true:

Either the city was being genuinely sincere in its own feelings and affection toward the Union and its symbol, Abdel Nasser, which would mean that all the rivals of al-Hourani's own Socialists had gathered their own ranks and come to prove to the regime that the "Hourani faction" was only one faction among Hama's many, not the whole of it, and that those welcoming his arrival were the true majority, theirs the deciding voice.

Or else this roaring crowd of people had come out of mere "hypocrisy" or "coercion."

This is an observation that applies to every popular reception of this kind.

In that case, I would have no cause to congratulate myself or my own countrymen on such wretched conduct. But what truly convinced me, in all honesty, of the crowd's own sincerity and spontaneity was what I felt myself in the warmth of their cheers, the press of shoulder against shoulder, and the sheer human joy pouring from every face.

"Do my own eyes lie to me, with the banners fluttering before them,

or do my own ears lie to me, with the whole world itself singing?"[1]

The President's own address, delivered from the balcony of the government building, overflowed with national sentiment, and with an acknowledgment of gratitude to the people of the Republic, whether in Aleppo, Hama, or Latakia, every town Abdel Nasser's own procession passed through in the Northern Region.

The governor held a large dinner reception, bringing together the city's most prominent men, and we had lunch at the invitation of Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj, at the water project on the outskirts of the city.

At both receptions, the only Baathist present was Dr. Faisal al-Rakabi.

What I know of this Baathist leader is that he is moderate and sincere in his own convictions.

He had been my companion on an official parliamentary trip to the communist countries in 1955, during which we witnessed, firsthand, his own firm commitment to principle and his own far-sightedness.

Sunday the 21st

From Hama we made our way to Homs.

The moment the official motorcade entered the gates of Homs, its own progress was slowed by the sheer number of people gathered to receive it, and the crush of the crowd.

Our own arrival in the city of Ibn al-Walid was greatly delayed, owing to the villagers who came out along both sides of the more than forty kilometers of road between the two cities, blocking the road itself to force the President to step out of his own car, shake their hands, and hear a word from him.

Was he not a peasant himself, one of their own, still loving them and asking after their own well-being?

Before the enormous crowds, we stood on the balcony, sensing the very stirrings of the people's own hearts. This was a referendum, not a mere reception.

Lieutenant General Jamal al-Faisal, commander of the First Arab Army, a native of Homs standing among his own people and family, stood beside me. I told him: now it is your own turn to speak. He said: and what am I to say, a soldier who knows nothing of the art of oratory? I told him: say what the old knight once said, when he found himself in just such a difficult position:

"If I am no orator among you,

then, when the battle grows fierce, my own sword shall speak for me."

He stepped up to the speaker's platform and opened his own address with this very line of verse, which won the crowd's own admiration at once, and finished his speech in the finest possible form.

Field Marshal Amer, standing beside the President, remarked on Lieutenant General al-Faisal's own use of verse, saying this was "AbdulWahab Homad's own method," referring to the lines of poetry I had woven into my own address in Aleppo.

Indeed, quoting poetry has long been a habit of mine, whenever I stand before an audience, and God grants me the right verses for the occasion, ones I keep ready in my own memory, should I ever need them.

We had lunch at Lieutenant General al-Faisal's own home.

A group of government members then made their way to Damascus, to be present for the President's own reception there the next day.

Sunday the 22nd

Along the whole length of Beirut Street, broad and shaded by towering trees, mere steps from the Barada's own course as it cuts through historic Damascus, those receiving the President stood arrayed beneath a magnificent pavilion, each in the place assigned to him by the Protocol Directorate.

I sat beside Shukri Bey ("the foremost Arab citizen" and our own former president) when the protocol officials informed us that Abdel Nasser would be arriving by plane. We rose and made our way to the old airport in al-Mazzeh, southwest of Damascus, less than three kilometers from the site of the celebration. But we had scarcely arrived there when the protocol officials began apologizing for an error that had occurred, and we returned to the platform set up on Beirut Street (today named Shukri al-Quwatli Street).

The "street's own namesake" remarked on what had happened, saying: "Sharq ishi," and since I did not know Turkish, he explained it to me himself: "things of the East."

My memory carried me back to years past, when I once had to go to his own home to accompany him to an official occasion. He kept putting off getting ready, saying: "bukayyir, bukayyir" (that is, "early, early," in the Egyptian dialect), until a great deal of time had passed beyond the appointed hour, and I felt a real sense of embarrassment before the guests we had invited to the opening of a painting exhibition held under his own patronage as President of the Republic. But when we finally arrived, late as we were, the invited guests turned out to have arrived even later than we had, for we found nothing at the exhibition but a few visitors and some of the artists themselves.

In those days, no one forced anyone to attend an occasion he had no wish to attend, and factories were not shut down nor schools closed to load workers and pupils onto state trucks and haul them off to the site of some celebration, to cheer, applaud, and wave flags for hours on end, after which the children would so often return home with their own trousers soaked through.

Wednesday the 24th

The President made a tour of the southern provinces, received, as always, with every mark of welcome and honor.

He would give one address, or more, if circumstances called for more than one.

In al-Suwayda, he devoted his own address to attacking the Baathists, and was extremely harsh toward them, without naming them outright, though the campaign against them left no doubt as to who was meant. In attacking them, he used an expression not customary for an official to use in a public address, saying:

"The people will crush them beneath their own feet."

I was not alone in feeling a certain unease at hearing such talk of crushing men underfoot from a senior official standing in a position like Abdel Nasser's own. It seems that some expressions from his own days in the military, buried in the unconscious, sometimes slip out unbidden, against their own speaker's will.

Wednesday, 2 March

The President remained in the Northern Region.

President al-Quwatli held a dinner reception for him, inviting the members of the government, and we all noticed how Abdel Nasser did everything in his own power to praise al-Quwatli, honor him, and preserve his own standing in the people's eyes.

Thursday, 3 March

The President held a great dinner reception for the members of the government and the members of the National Union's own committees. A meeting followed the dinner, at the Zahra cinema.

Abdel Nasser gave an address at the reception lasting nearly two hours, addressing the issues of the day with boldness and clarity.

In it, he attacked Israel and the Zionist Jews who support it, and named Britain and France outright in his own threats.

He then turned his own attack on Truman, President of the American Republic, branding him a mere tool in the service of world Zionism.

He then turned to domestic affairs, repeating his own fierce attack on the Baathists, accusing them of obstructing the formation of the National Union's own institutions, and of branding its own members as spies for the regime, and of no longer believing in the very socialist and unionist slogans they themselves had raised, he said, in falsehood and deception. Had they truly believed in them, they would never have obstructed their own implementation, begun by others after their own break with the national consensus.

At this meeting, Abdel Nasser announced the formation of a "single National Assembly," and this was the evening's own great surprise.

That evening, Nihad al-Qasim, Minister of Justice, who had taken my own place at that ministry, told me that the President had sent him to Akram al-Hourani to deliver a stern warning that he cease his own "activities," word of which had reached the ears of those in authority.

Friday the 4th

I took delivery today of my own small private car, a Simca.

It cost me 10,500 lira, plus another 500 lira in registration fees.

We were all delighted with it, for I had now become free to take my wife and son wherever we pleased, without eyes watching us, wondering whether we were "squandering" the state's own money. It is regrettable that people are generally unaware that a minister's official car is allotted to him for his own personal use and that of his family for the duration of his term, and that the state pays him a fixed sum toward the gasoline he consumes in his own travels, so that if his own consumption exceeds this sum, he must pay the difference out of his own pocket.

I recall, with fondness, our own colleague Ali Bouzo, Minister of Interior. Being Kurdish, and living in the Kurdish quarter, perched on the slope of Mount Qasioun, his own financial situation did not allow him to buy a private car, and so he used to ride the bus, the large public passenger vehicle, on Fridays, whenever he came down into the city, as though he were not even a minister with a state car and driver at his own disposal.

He once explained this habit of his to me, saying: I will never, one day, be able to afford a private car, and the state's car is only borrowed. It will go, the moment this cabinet resigns, to the new minister, and then I will go back to riding the bus with the rest of the people. For this reason, I prefer not to sever my own ties with my fellow citizens, for fear that, should I ever stop riding the bus, they would be startled one day by my own face, jostling for a seat beside them, the very day the radio announces the cabinet's resignation.

I recalled this wise saying of his one bitterly cold, snowy day, passing by a secondary school in our own neighborhood, when I saw a great many "official" cars carrying the fortunate children home, while the others looked on with clear resentment, suffering as they were under the violent, snow-laden wind.

The purse in the hand is a very different thing from the hand in the purse.

Sunday the 6th: The Nationalization of the Bank of Syria

The government, under Abdel Nasser's own chairmanship, held a series of meetings at the Guest Palace. He pressed very hard for the advancement and industrialization of the Northern Region, for raising its own standard of living, and for fortifying it with culture and science.

He called for the urgent need to eliminate child mortality, saying that unless the region's own population reached ten million, it would remain a continuing target of Israeli aggression, indeed exposed to dangers we could sense and already knew of.

He discussed the problem of marriage, and the need to find practical solutions to it, in order to increase the population, while preserving virtuous morals and resisting the corruption of the young.

He dwelt at length on the application of socialism, urging that the country's own prosperity reach every corner of it, rather than being confined to a single city or region, and that among the things that would help spread this prosperity were the building of dams to collect rainwater for use when needed in summer, the expansion of pastureland for sheep, camels, and other livestock, the storing of fodder against the barren seasons of drought, and the expansion of low-cost housing construction.

He pressed hard for clipping capital's own claws, so that the country and its people would never fall under its own dominance, and, in closing his own remarks, announced that he would nationalize the Bank of Syria.

This was a powerful French bank, lending to landowners and merchants, holding sway over them, and reaping, on top of this, enormous profits that rightfully belonged to the people themselves.

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Endnotes:

[1] This line of verse is by the late Shafiq Jabri.