Chapter 11, Part 4: The Annulment of Two Deputies' Seats

Section Two
The Annulment of Two Deputies' Seats

In the elections held in 1954, Messrs. As'ad Harun and Nawfal Ilyas won in Latakia. Their success came as a shock to the people of that good city, because they had not voted for them or backed their candidacy. Rather, the pressure groups had intervened, secretly and openly, and imposed them by fraud and coercion.

The government of Said al-Ghazzi, which had been brought in as a neutral cabinet to ensure that the elections were fair, was unable to stand up to the men of the Deuxième Bureau, and so it shut its eyes to the unlawful acts committed by the supporters of those two candidates.

The backbone of the fraud was a man called "Abu Hani", who owned lighters and motorboats used to carry goods arriving by ship for Syria, and goods exported from it to foreign countries.. He took large commissions and levies, which he extracted by the means of pressure at his command. He did harm to the Syrian economy by harming Syrian owners of goods and foreign shipowners, because he had absolute control over when the cargo of this ship or that one would be unloaded. A ship whose cargo is unloaded late is certain to suffer heavy losses, because of the dues and delay charges it incurs in port. There are also goods that by their nature spoil quickly, and if they are not unloaded fast their owners suffer heavy losses. To avoid the losses and the dues, owners of goods and shipowners would hurry to "Abu Hani" to buy his favor.. By this crooked method the man made obscene profits and amassed a large fortune for himself.

Workers' demonstrations broke out against him.. and he did not hesitate to send his henchmen to confront them. They beat them and opened fire on them, especially on 21 April 1954, to break their spirit and spread terror among them until they held their breath.

He needed protection to shield his abuses, and he found that the best thing he could do was to plunge into the political arena and back certain candidates with his money, his supporters and his men, so that they would keep anyone from interfering with his ill-omened exploitation. But his influence could not reach every part of the city, so he worked in coordination with the political security services and their agents, and together they committed acts that no penal legislation could stand by and watch without stirring. It was established that in a single week of that election period he withdrew the sum of 600,000 liras from the banks (in the currency of those days), a sum large enough to cover a deficit in the state budget[1].. So it was no surprise that the fraud and manipulation ended in the election of those two candidates.

The 1950 Constitution had introduced a new and sound method for examining challenges to the validity of elections: it gave the Supreme Court the right to hear challenges and rule on them with final effect, declaring the elections valid or void.

Under the earlier method this right was entrusted to the Chamber of Deputies itself. A candidate whose election was challenged would wait for his fate to be decided according to where he stood.. If he belonged to the majority, he slept on silk; if he was one of its opponents, worry kept gnawing at him with its fangs until his case was settled by a vote of the Chamber.

When the challenge to the election of these two deputies was brought before the Supreme Court, it carried out a wide inquiry, heard the testimony of witnesses and examined official reports.. It reached the conviction that these elections were tainted by many acts of fraud, coercion and bribery, and that Abu Hani, the owner of the lighters, was involved in them up to his ears. It therefore decided to annul their election and to hold the voting again.

Strangely enough, not one person was referred to the courts, neither among the pressure-wielding forgers, official and unofficial, nor among the candidates whose criminal responsibility had been proven, and the government did not move to call to account a single one of those whose criminal responsibility had been established.

Even so, the annulment of these two men's seats was an eloquent moral lesson, and a warning to anyone willing to take heed.

But a moral lesson is not enough by itself. Some group had to move to lance the boil in that city and put an end to the farce of Abu Hani at its root, by tearing out his roots, which reached deep into the land and the sea.

The People's Party deputies became convinced that as long as these lighters stayed in this man's ownership, the corruption would go on. The first to sound the alarm in the Chamber of Deputies was Mr. Muhammad al-Shawwaf of the People's Party, when he commented on two telegrams sent by the port workers complaining of their wretched conditions. Among other things he said:

"These miserable workers work no less than 15 hours a day. But on most days their work goes beyond twenty hours a day. And the work is hard. As for their wages, they do not exceed 4 or 5 liras a day. They asked their employer, Abu Hani, to set their working day at eight hours, and he refused. So they went on strike, and he sent against them his close men, who share the profits of the port with him, armed to the teeth, and they began firing their pistols and machine guns, creating an atmosphere of terror in the city. The people joined the workers in their strike and came out in a noisy demonstration demanding the punishment of the criminals who had opened fire."[2].

He was supported in this stand by the deputy for Latakia, Hanna Sawaya, and by Mr. Jamil al-Abd Allah, who remarked of al-Shawwaf's words "that he had said less than the truth"..

When the party felt that the atmosphere was sound and that nationalizing the port was bound to bear fruit, the government, on the initiative of the Minister of the Interior, Ahmad Qanbar, introduced a bill providing for the nationalization of Abu Hani's company with everything it owned.. The surprise was great in the ranks of those who opposed this measure.. But the government was determined to go ahead with the bill. It was referred to the Judicial Committee, which approved its consideration, and then to the Public Works Committee (according to competence, that is, jurisdiction), where it slept the sleep of the Companions of the Cave.. that is, longer than Article 50 of the Rules of Procedure allows. Then came the second surprise: the Minister of Public Works, Fakhir al-Kayyali, asked that consideration of the bill be put off until the next session.. And some of the deputies who opposed the bill began raising questions about the usefulness of nationalization, what it would cover, and whether the procedure followed was sound.

The People's Party deputy Rashad Jabri answered them that the nationalization covered all the equipment in use, all the means of transport and the other assets of the enterprise, with the workers' rights fully preserved.

Khalid al-Azm tried to win a postponement, even a temporary one, but Rushdi al-Kikhya stood up to him and opposed every attempt that might obstruct the passing of the law.

When Raif al-Mulqi took a stand against the nationalization and said: "He is for nationalization and not for confiscation.. This bill is contrary to the Constitution, and I call for its discussion to be postponed so that it is not rushed through half-cooked", we felt that there was a carefully woven plan to rescue Abu Hani and keep his hold on the riches of the port. At that point Ahmad Qanbar moved to stop the farce from going on, and spoke on behalf of the government, saying:

"I am glad that four years ago I stood at this rostrum defending a similar bill, the nationalization of the electricity and water companies, at the end of January 1951. The deputies who spoke then agreed with the principle, just as the deputies who agree with the same principle today. And the strange thing is that a group of deputies now are asking to postpone discussion of the matter for the very reasons that deputies gave 4 years ago for postponing a similar nationalization.. I want to stress that the government studied this bill a long time ago. As soon as it came to power it formed a ministerial committee, which met the director of the port company and its lawyer, studied the matter from every angle and brought this bill before you. And it is determined that it be passed."

At this point a request was made for urgent consideration. Husayn al-Sha'bani objected to the urgency, saying that the Minister of Public Works, Fakhir al-Kayyali, had neither asked for urgency nor defended it, although the matter fell squarely within his competence.

The truth is that al-Kayyali had agreed to the urgency and then left in haste for Cairo, and from there telephoned the Prime Minister asking for study of the bill to be postponed. We felt that the foul smell was becoming suffocating, so I, together with the deputies Rashad Jabri, Rizqallah Salim, Ratib al-Husami, Bahjat Nassur and Isbir al-Yaziji, all of them People's Party deputies, submitted a new request for urgent consideration under Article 92 of the Rules of Procedure. This was done in coordination with the government.

When the urgency motion was put to the Chamber, it approved it. Thereupon Fakhir al-Kayyali hastened to submit his resignation at the session of 6 February 1955.. and the next day the Prime Minister submitted the resignation of the whole cabinet. A new cabinet was formed under Sabri al-Asali on 13 February 1955, from which the People's Party was excluded. Among the ministers of this cabinet were Ma'mun al-Kuzbari, Raif al-Mulqi, Fakhir al-Kayyali and Leon Zamaria.. and from the Baathists, Wahib al-Ghanim entered it as well.

Even so, the People's Party kept following up the nationalization of Abu Hani's lighters. Mr. Qanbar took charge of following it up, and he assured the Chamber that the nationalization would be carried out only after the by-elections.

When this bill was put before the Chamber, it passed it by a majority.. And so this black page of our public life was turned.

Endnotes:

[1] Minutes of the session of the Chamber of Deputies of 14 December 1954, p. 394.

[2] Session of 26 July 1954, p. 1189 ff.