Year 1960 - Part 6: Akram al-Hourani's Own Account of Why He Resigned

Monday the 28th: A Visit to Akram al-Hourani

The feast is an occasion for honoring one's own family and meeting with friends.

An odd custom has taken hold among people, that of leaving the country "to relax," resting from the endless receiving and seeing off of guests throughout the blessed days of the feast.

But I have long detested this custom. Even when traveling, I make a point of returning home to be there during the days of the feast, to receive my own visitors.

I decided to take the occasion of the feast to visit Akram al-Hourani at his own home, and made my way there at five in the evening, unannounced.

He received me in his own pajamas, apologizing that he had been out in the Ghouta and had returned tired. After we exchanged the small talk one cannot avoid, the rain, the change in weather, he asked me: how do things stand?

I judged that he wished to discuss the general situation, and I had been hoping for, and seeking out, just such a conversation, wanting to hear directly from the man himself why he had resigned and what he intended to do next.

I told him of my own conversation about them with the Field Marshal, the day he received me to see whether I would resign along with them or not, and that I had asked him to repair the bridges that had broken down between them and the government.

Akram al-Hourani remarked on my own advice to the Field Marshal against bringing in ministers from the armed forces, saying they wished to draw the army's own strongest elements out of it, to weaken it and make it easier to control, and that officers accustomed to blind obedience in their own profession would prove just as thoroughly obedient to their own superiors in civilian government as well.

I asked him to tell me honestly what had been happening behind the scenes, and how matters had grown so severe as to lead to resignation.

I summarize here, in complete honesty, what he told me.

He said:

I felt the Union had strayed from its own proper course, and so I agreed with Salah al-Din al-Bitar to resign, though we decided to wait for a suitable occasion, since we were determined to resign without any uproar.

The first blow came when Riyad al-Maliki (Minister of National Guidance) was dismissed in a manner not free of open defiance and insult.

I decided to raise with the President what we believed to be in the Union's own interest, and we met, with Field Marshal Abdel Hakim present at the session, and I told him:

"Government must rest on wide-ranging decentralization, and the Northern Region must be given the broadest possible form of internal self-government, with its own local government, its own chamber of deputies, and wide democratic freedoms, for the Syrians are a people of convictions, and every party ever formed in this country has had its own convictions. The very position of the Syrian region, bordering Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, requires that political organizations exist within it. No one is unaware that half a million Syrians visit Lebanon every year, and see for themselves the freedom the Lebanese enjoy. And if Syrians are now deprived of easy travel to Lebanon, this state of affairs cannot be allowed to last."

I told the President, al-Hourani went on, that the National Union could never serve as the basis for a democratic system of government, and that among its own ten thousand members were spies and traitors. Even granting them the benefit of the doubt, their very composition made them unfit to establish a democratic order at all.

We never once said that all members of the National Union were spies, as the President accused us of claiming, in his own speech at the Zahra cinema.

And he was lying when he said this.

I recalled to myself the very slogan they themselves once raised: God, the Homeland, and the President.

The Union has become nothing less than Egyptian domination over Syria, with everything that word "domination" truly carries.

When we called for Union, we were answering our own people's unionist convictions, and Abdel Nasser never bought us with money. The Egyptians spent enormous sums in Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, yet it brought them no benefit at all.

I told Mr. al-Hourani: is Arab unity not, in itself, a sacred goal, one found in the programs of every party, including the Syrian Nationalist Party? And were you yourselves not the ones marching at its very forefront, forbidding anyone from voicing an opinion the day Union was proposed in place of federation?

I reminded him of the People's Party's own position, which had championed a federal relationship preserving each region's own internal affairs, merging only the offices of the presidency into a single institution and establishing a central government covering foreign affairs, defense, and foreign trade. But you insisted on full union, and you yourself were chairman of the Chamber of Deputies that abandoned the federation it had approved for the union you all then embraced instead.

He answered: I now think how right you all were in calling for a mere federation. Indeed, I say today: how I wish we had succeeded instead in achieving a federation with Iraq.

I remarked to him that the People's Party's own leaning toward federation or union with Iraq, under a monarchy and beneath British bayonets, had never once been put before the party's own councils, and that this was a charge leveled against it and exploited against it in the ugliest possible way.

And that Abdel Nasser was working to "fragment" Syrian society.

He had already fragmented the political parties, then fragmented the Syrian army, scattering its officers, so that only four or five of them remained, kept close to him in Egypt.

Al-Hourani went on:

"He once tried to implicate me at one of our sessions together, in Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj's own presence, asking my opinion on throwing three or four hundred reactionaries into 'Ras Gharib' (a prison in Egypt), while recording the conversation. I told him: do not do this, for you would only be making martyrs of them. I later heard, from Abdel Nasser himself, that al-Hourani had proposed to him detaining the reactionaries in Gharib prison, but that he had rejected this proposal, finding no justification for it. So where does the truth actually lie?

Abdel Nasser's own policy of assassinating Arab statesmen can never lead him to any acceptable national outcome.

Only days ago, the 'spy' Abdullah al-Rihawi (one of the Jordanian Baath leaders who never showed solidarity with us, remaining loyal to the Union instead) sent two brothers to Amman to assassinate Prime Minister al-Majali, but they fell into the hands of Jordanian security.

He also tried to have Abdul Karim Qasim killed in Baghdad, through innocent members of our own party, without ever consulting us."

Al-Hourani went on:

I told the President that a policy of assassination serves no purpose unless killing the man himself can bring down the regime. It is far from certain that assassinating Qasim would bring down his own regime in Iraq. It is entirely possible that, were he killed, Iraq would either revert to British rule or become an openly communist country.

He said:

The regime in power is a dictatorial one. Such rule might be tolerable for a time, if it rested on a collective foundation. The Soviet Russian system, the Nazi system, and Fascist Italy's own system were all dictatorial regimes, yet they rested on some collective basis. But a purely personal regime, resting on propaganda alone, will end without leaving any trace behind it at all. History and its own record bear witness that some men were, for a time, heroes, only for history to curse them afterward and hold them up to shame.

He added:

I told the President that a regime resting on propaganda alone might succeed in Egypt, but it will never succeed in Syria, given the intelligence and shrewdness of the Syrian people.

Mr. Akram closed his own remarks by pressing three essential points:

The first: he said, "For my own part, I have given it up," speaking of public life, meaning that he had withdrawn from political activity altogether.

The second: he expressed his own sorrow and regret at the deteriorating state of the Arab nation, which mourns no enemy and rejoices for no friend. The radio stations never fall silent, each president cursing the other, while the whole world laughs at every one of them.

And Israel alone reaps the fruits of this rampant hostility.

The third: that he and his own brothers in the party regretted the mistake they had made in handling the Union, and were relieved to have their resignations accepted, for a nightmare had been lifted from their conscience and from their own necks. He himself, personally, had "had his fill of humiliation" from Abdel Nasser's own neglect of him, cast into a room no one ever entered to see him, a plaque on its door bearing the grand title: "Vice President of the Republic."

Mr. al-Hourani closed his remarks by criticizing Abdel Nasser for nationalizing the Canal and thereby bringing on a devastating war. He said: he wanted to exploit this nationalization for propaganda purposes. Had he simply waited a few more years, the agreement's own term would have expired, and the Canal would have returned to Egypt without any "problems" at all, and Egypt would never have had to pay out compensation to the wealthy shareholders of the Canal Company.

There is no injustice to history uglier than this one.

I myself was among those who lived through the Suez Canal crisis, marching in the processions celebrating the Syrian-Egyptian union, cheering Abdel Nasser's own heroism in repelling the French-British-Jewish aggression against Egypt (and the Arab nation), and hailing the Union's establishment, which we considered the greatest achievement of the Arab nation in this generation, indeed in any generation. For this reason, I found Mr. al-Hourani's own talk of dictatorship, of federation with Iraq, and of weakening the army by bringing in its own warring factions as ministers, genuinely astonishing.

I left his home for mine, to record this conversation.

And now, as I set it down here, my own memory returns to the dangerous maneuvers al-Hourani and his own brothers carried out on the stage of Syrian politics.

I have said it many times: the socialist doctrine we all believe in is not something to be held against them, or against me. The Syrian peasant's own condition is one of the worst social conditions imaginable, and it is neither right, nor any longer even possible, for him to go on accepting his own wretched lot.

That said, I hold a good opinion of Akram al-Hourani personally, one many other politicians would dispute. In my own view, he is a politician of honest intent and clean hands. But he relies, first and foremost, in achieving his own political ends, on the military men within his own party's ranks, and it was he who brought politics into the army in the first place. This is why he always stood in the very front rank of every coup, indulging his own violent passions and his love of domination.

Even the Union itself is, in my own view, a kind of military coup. But we went along with it, hoping Abdel Nasser might restore stability to Syria, on top of our own genuine nationalist convictions.

The Baathists terrorized a great many deputies, sometimes through "civilian" rule, during the cabinets of Khalid al-Azm and Sabri al-Asali, both of whom raised the white flag in exchange for keeping the "premiership" itself, content to merely watch the currents swirling around the "first presidency's" own chair, and sometimes by brandishing the military whip directly.

They invented the whole "Baghdad Pact" affair and pinned it on politicians who had simply remained loyal to the principle of separating powers, especially keeping the army out of politics, a principle the overwhelming majority of officers themselves subscribed to, out of respect for the text of the 1950 constitution then in force, whose Article 30 read:

"The army is the guardian of the homeland, and its mission is confined to defending the homeland's borders and its own safety."

We had all sworn to this very text, as the nation's own representatives in its chamber of deputies.

But some officers became entangled in political affairs, taking to objecting to the formation of governments, vetoing this or that minister, and interfering in the state's own general policy, encouraged in this by certain opportunistic politicians, and those among them enamored of power grew so accustomed to exercising this influence that they began gathering into rival factions, one set against another, until certain weapons themselves came to be counted as belonging to this party or that.

Abdel Nasser's own system was no secret to the Baathists: the man had dissolved the parties in his own country, and would not accept union with Syria except on the two conditions of dissolving the Syrian parties and forbidding officers from political activity. And they accepted both these conditions, just as Shukri al-Quwatli, Khalid al-Azm, Sabri al-Asali, and Mamoun al-Kuzbari all accepted them, as the Union document itself, announced in February 1958 from the balcony of al-Tahira Palace in Cairo, bears witness.

And yet they marched along in the Union's own procession, right up until their own political influence was curtailed, at which point they suddenly remembered that Abdel Nasser was a dictator.

The most astonishing thing in what he said was his criticism of Abdel Nasser for nationalizing the Suez Canal, for this nationalization shook the whole world, and restored to Egypt its own greatest asset, one that has since become its largest source of hard currency, from the tolls ships pay to pass through it.

Had it not been for this heroic nationalization, the Canal would never have been restored to Egypt when the international agreement's own term expired, for the Western powers would have found a thousand ways to force Egypt into a new agreement instead. What is more, what Egypt paid in compensation for the shares was only a small fraction of a single year's own toll revenue. Had the Western powers not known this very truth, they would never have waged war on Egypt at all, but would instead have sought some settlement to guarantee ships safe passage, at modest tolls.

One word remains for me to say on the Egyptians' own domination of government in Syria. I do not deny this claim entirely, but neither do I embrace it entirely. I bear witness that a great many of our own people were glad to see the officers' own influence curtailed. Among them was Sabri al-Asali, whom they worked to remove from power and demanded be put on trial, a grudge he kept to himself, though I heard him speak of them in terms uglier than what Malik ibn Anas ever said of wine, at his own country house, then under construction in the Zabadani plain, in the company of Rushdi al-Kikhya and Rizkallah al-Antaki.

I will return to weighing this view in its proper place, apportioning responsibility between the Syrians and the Egyptians, when I come to speak of the causes behind the Union's own unraveling.

Tuesday the 29th: The Local Administration Law

A republican law, No. 124, dated 28 March 1960, was issued, comprising the "Local Administration Law."

Its purpose was to broaden citizens' own participation in managing local affairs, in their own town and province, through the election of councils for villages, districts, and provinces, working under the supervision and patronage of the Ministry of Local Administration.

Legal scholars regard the people's own election of these councils as genuine, substantive participation in the practice of democratic life, and in laying its own foundations.

In countries with a multi-party system, these local elections are seen as a gauge for the general elections to come, in choosing deputies and senators and determining which party enjoys the greatest popularity to take up the reins of government.

The view of them differs in "hereditary republics," which rely on a single party as their own tool, with other "parties" existing only on paper, as a facade, and where the division of the spoils, between the two sides, follows the same logic as the division between the lion and the jackal.