Year 1961 - Part 2: The Debate Over National Capital and al-Sarraj's Suspicions of Homad's People's Party Ties

Tuesday the 24th

The government held its first meeting, in Heliopolis, chaired by Abdel Nasser, who surprised us with a direct, specific question:

"Do we, myself included, believe in a democratic, cooperative socialist policy?" He fell silent, waiting for our answers. We spoke.

Four of us stood up, quite candidly, in favor of protecting private national capital and the need to encourage it, given Syria's own geographic position on the border, and to encourage the 600 or 700 million Syrian lira that had fled to foreign banks, escaping nationalization or fearing confiscation, to return home. Should it truly return, the wheels of industry would turn in the shape the workforce and the demands of a shaky economy actually required.

These four were Nour al-Din Kahhaleh, Husni al-Sawwaf, Fakhir al-Kayali, and myself. The President objected to this answer, saying quite plainly:

"National capital, in my own view, means small capital, not the Five-Man Company."

What I recall well is that the President himself had held this very view, in an address he gave this past July in Cairo, before the National Assembly, where he announced that state policy was committed to encouraging national capital.

At my own ministry, I had been operating on exactly this basis.

The discussion ranged widely and touched on many subjects, and I paid close attention to the President's own words, since he is the head of state, and the one who, in the end, sets its own policy. Beyond that, let believe who will, and let disbelieve who will. The simplest rule of logic says that whoever does not believe in a principle ought to leave its application to those who do.

What follows is a summary of the discussion, as I recorded it after the session, which ran on until two in the morning:

Abdel Nasser said:

He was working to build a democratic, cooperative society, resting on these great foundations:

Our new society must rest on liberation from economic, political, and social exploitation. So long as we proclaim this principle publicly, we must be its very first believers.

We must mobilize all the state's natural and human resources to carry out the Five-Year Plan, to push the country forward a decisive step on the path of progress and prosperity.

Achieving an economic and social foundation on which genuine political freedom can rest.

His own view was that formal elections, held amid an unsound economic and social order, could never truly express the nation's own will.

For this reason:

Wealth must not be confined to a few hands, meaning the removal of class disparities and securing justice in the distribution of the homeland's own bounty, though he did not say: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Reviewing the institutions inherited from colonialism and purging them, so that they become capable of responding to socialist policy's own goals.

The necessity of doubling national income within ten years.

This is a duty resting on the state itself before it rests on individuals, since the state is responsible for drawing up the plan and carrying it out.

The reality of our present society is this:

The consumer represents the weak sector, and the merchant represents the strong sector within it.

The tenant represents the weak sector, and the landlord represents the strong sector.

It is cooperative socialism's own duty to protect the weak from the tyranny and exploitation of the strong, by distributing the nation's wealth justly, gradually, and without improvisation, until every social stratum and every individual within it enjoys a fair share of the common good. Only in this way can the nation's wealth be freed from the clutches of dominant monopolists.

Every individual, as a citizen of the state, must secure his own legitimate opportunity to work, on an equal and fair basis, with no one favored over another, except on the basis of competence and the ability to deliver a better return flowing into the pool of the public interest.

This means securing work for laborers, to fulfill themselves and provide for their families, and directing the national economy toward the benefit of the stratum that missed its own opportunity in the past.

We must work with all our strength to prevent capital from dominating government. This is a policy that must remain firm and respected.

From this, we must understand that private capital is not the Five-Man Company in Damascus, or Ahmed Abboud in Cairo. Private capital is the millions of small individuals, small merchants and small farmers. Were we to add up the small capital in their own hands, together with their own working capacity, we would find they possess more than the great monopolists themselves. For this reason, they must be protected, and their own interests, which are the nation's own interests, safeguarded. Should we enter into bargaining with the great monopolists to appease them, we will never reach any sound solution with them at all.

They want a free hand, unrestrained by any sense of the common good, and if we do not stop them, they will turn to sabotaging the very body of society.

Any bargain struck with them will, in the end, mean straying from the plan's own course, and allowing them to seize control of the state.

The state must encourage cooperatives, pooling small capital together until it becomes substantial, capable of carrying out great projects. These cooperatives can rescue the national economy from monopoly and exploitation. It is therefore our own duty, as those responsible, to direct the economy toward the benefit of the whole, and it falls to us, as a state, to shoulder the greater part of this burden ourselves.

We must reconcile the social goal, that is, establishing genuine social justice, with the demands of a developing economy. The tractor serves the social goal, since it is a means of increasing production and putting it within reach of consumers of every social stratum, but it can also reduce the need for the peasant himself, leaving him without work.

Our national duty requires that we rely on ourselves first and foremost, reducing our own dependence on foreign countries to obtain scarce foreign exchange, "hard currency" as they call it in Egypt. To achieve this goal, we must throw ourselves, tooth and nail, into heavy industry, establishing the industries we need most, to achieve self-sufficiency, and export the surplus to world markets, to obtain hard currency.

It is regrettable that this "prophecy" was only partly fulfilled.

For the countries of the Third World, our own among them, turned instead to foreign banks, the International Monetary Fund, and the finance ministries of the First World (the developed West) and the Second World (the Soviet bloc), borrowing cash, goods, and factories, until they fell to their own knees, no longer able to pay even the high interest owed on their own enormous debts.

At the time I write these memoirs (March 1995), I read staggering figures in the newspapers:

116 heads of state and government took part in the UN Social Development Summit held in Copenhagen, capital of Denmark (which concluded its work on 11 March 1995), with 180 countries represented in total.

The studies presented to this summit showed the following:

The gap between the richest and poorest nations has doubled over the past thirty years.

There are, today, around 1.3 billion people in the world living in absolute poverty.

There are, in the world, around 1.5 billion people with no access to even the most basic health services or care.

Women make up 70 percent of the total number of the deprived.

[A figure that ought, in itself, to shame humanity, casting women as it does into the depths of hardship.]

The number of armed forces personnel worldwide fell, in 1990, from 27 million to 23 million.

This figure means 4 million people, once held within military service, moved into the civilian sector, already suffering from high unemployment to begin with.

The clearest sign of this problem appears in Russia (once part of the Soviet Union before its dissolution), where military employment fell by 60 percent, by 26.7 percent in the United States, and by 40 percent in Western Europe.

The World Bank announced that the debts of the poor nations (the Third World) had reached 1,945 billion dollars (only).

These are staggering figures, and were we to calculate the interest owed on them at a rate of 6 percent (a modest rate), we would find it comes to around 116 billion dollars a year.

Knowing that the Syrian state's own budget this year comes to 162 billion Syrian lira (with the dollar today standing at around 50 lira), we find that the interest owed on Third World debt alone comes to about 33 times our own annual budget, development and local budgets included.

The 77 developing nations (now numbering 131 poor countries) found no choice but to approach their own creditors, pleading for their debts to be forgiven in whole or in part, for the remainder to be rescheduled, and for a new international bank for social development to be established.

No one can say, with any real accuracy, exactly how much Arab states owe in debt, since they generally conceal it, so that their own peoples will not learn they are heading toward bankruptcy and ruin.

Among the more striking forms of protest, "humanitarian" activists hung 750 dead-children dolls from the trees and statues of Copenhagen's own square, to remind the conference's delegates that 210,000 children would die of hunger around the world during the very period the conference itself was in session.

President Abdel Nasser continued his own remarks:

It is essential to develop agriculture, by developing irrigation methods and the use of fertilizer, and drawing on impartial foreign expertise. Agriculture cannot succeed unless we reconsider the rural economy, the village economy, on a genuinely rural basis.

The very first thing we must then do is provide rural people with services, food, water, clothing, and housing, by creating work for them. This is the state's own duty.

Among our foremost social duties is enabling the Syrian Economic Organization to function. Should the private sector wish to operate, it must accept the regulations the state sets for it. But it will demand reassurance. And once we reassure it, it will demand still more reassurance. However much reassurance we offer it, it will go on complaining and demanding more, never satisfied at all.

I sensed the President was responding, with this remark, to what I myself had repeatedly called for, reassuring private capital.

And I had indeed called for this many times, not only at this session, for I believe the present stage, and Syria's own geographic position especially, obliges us to offer this reassurance, so that capital does not flee and unemployment does not spread.

The state must take part in investment on a large scale, including consumer investments, and must take part in profitable investments as well, rather than leaving them to the private sector alone, to reap their fruits without the state sharing in them at all.

The President said: the socialism on which we are building our state requires the nationalization of banks and insurance companies.

I am not entirely certain whether he added "the major factories" as well, and so I record it here with some reservation, out of a wish to remain faithful to what was actually said.

He did insist, however, that private property remains inviolable and respected, as the constitution itself provides, and that we must honor its own articles.

The President explained and commented on these points without anyone interrupting him. Before him lay a sheet of paper with a few bullet points, which he glanced at each time he finished addressing one point.

This was my own habit as well, when I used to lecture at the university.

I have always detested, and still do, those who improvise without a single note in hand. I regard them as mere pretentious showmen, for any train of thought can wander, and it is a mark of respect for one's own listeners to keep a lecture's own course coherent, so that real benefit and understanding can follow.

This is achieved, in practice, only if the speaker arms himself with notes laid out before him.

At this "historic" session, I repeated what I had already said about protecting private capital, for I am, in truth, a socialist, though not a scientific socialist, and what the President said still fell within a "socialist" framework.

Among the ministers, Ahmad al-Hajj Younes spoke, at some length, and we listened to him, as the President and his deputies did as well.

I noticed that Abdel Nasser kept his eyes fixed on whoever was speaking, never once showing impatience or discomfort, and never interrupting, however long the speaker went on.

What al-Hajj Younes said may well have had little to do with the session's actual subject.

The same was true of what Thabet al-Aris said, a professor of French literature living in the worlds of poetry and fine rhetoric, untroubled by the financial matters that concern the state's own treasury, and citizens' own pockets, livelihoods, and children.

But the one who spoke with a "loaded calm" was Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj.

My own sense is that he spoke, not to explain a point of view, but simply to say that believers in socialism ought to be strict in applying it.

He meant me, without doubt, and the other "moderate" ministers as well.

He believed he had found a contradiction in the reports I had explained across more than one of the sessions held over Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, sessions that ran on into the earliest hours of dawn.

But while personal feelings reflect love and hatred, the language of numbers is a cold one, knowing neither love nor hatred, a rigid, strict statement of fact alone.

The figures were in my own hands, and I had published them with complete honesty. And so, as the saying goes, Juhayza's word cut short every orator's speech.

I had not known that Abdel Moneim El-Kaissouni, the central minister, remained so ignorant of the Syrian financial situation, which I had kept him informed of continuously.

At the end of a session that broke up at three in the morning, I met Nour al-Din Kahhaleh and Husni al-Sawwaf over a cup of coffee at the Hilton cafeteria. Their own view was that a shift in social direction, beginning on the financial front, was already being prepared, and that I was, in part, its own personal target.

I am not unaware that a certain lost affection, inherited from the past, stands between al-Sarraj and myself. He is very close to the President, given his own vigilance over security matters, and his own departments had compiled several reports on my meetings with Rushdi al-Kikhya and the members of the dissolved People's Party. The President knows of this, since I explained to him my own human bond with old brothers who ask nothing of the state beyond living within it like any other citizen.

Indeed, I recall the President once reproaching me, when I told him: I find nothing dishonorable in maintaining old ties, which amount to nothing more than friendship and courtesy.

And if the President believes that maintaining these ties affects state policy in any way, I place my resignation in his own hands.

I bear witness that he reproached me over a suspicion with no basis in reality at all.

He praised Rushdi al-Kikhya, whom he met at my own request, and came away pleased with him. In his own generosity, he went further than mere verbal courtesy, entrusting me to travel to Aleppo on his own behalf, to visit him and the "brothers," conveying his own greetings to them.

Which I did.

Perhaps because of these ties, which continued on, al-Sarraj remained suspicious of me, and I never once tried to "dispel his suspicions of me."

To each his own conviction.

Palazzoli did him justice, when he wrote of him as follows:

"Al-Sarraj is a taciturn, reserved man, who served first in the police, then fought in Palestine, taking part as a lieutenant in the armored corps in Husni al-Za'im's 1949 coup.

But his own rise truly began in 1955, when General Shawkat Shukair placed him at the head of the Deuxième Bureau, and he became a specialist in unraveling conspiracies.

He was tied to Akram al-Hourani, a fellow native of his own city.

His own leanings were leftist. Even so, though allied with the Baath, he never accepted its own tutelage, preserving his independence instead. He is a wolf who lives alone, and his own claws, which he never hides.

People call him 'Fouché the Protector.'"[1]

Even so, I bear witness to his own pure patriotism, his sincerity in his work, and his own integrity. But I believe he suspects everyone, seeing in every individual a "potential traitor" or a "lurking spy."

This is how he was raised, and how he has remained.

Two lines of classical verse come to mind, capturing his own condition well:

"Have you not seen that the earth, vast as it is,

becomes, for the frightened, terrified man, no wider than a trapper's own snare?

It seems to him that every fold and turn in it,

wherever he makes for, throws a killer straight into his path."

Tuesday the 31st

In the aftermath of those long official sessions, now concluded, I invited Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi, then in Cairo, to a dinner evening at the famous Auberge nightclub. We spent that evening in an atmosphere altogether different from the world of money, taxes, the rich, and the poor.

This club reminded me of the Parisian nightclubs I used to frequent as a student at the Sorbonne, the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge among them.

I later made a point of visiting them again, in the company of my wife and son, for despite the boldness of the scenes on display, they remain, at heart, refined artistic performances, delighting the spirit and pleasing the eye.

I like to acquaint myself firsthand with the cultures of other peoples, and to experience them directly. Though I sometimes find myself wondering why this baring of the woman's own body must be so.

Indeed, why does a woman ever consent to turn herself into a moving doll, stripped of all modesty, beneath the gaze of people of such varied backgrounds and outlooks?

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Endnotes:

[1] Palazzoli, in his book: La Syrie, le rêve et la rupture, Paris, 1977, p. 175.