A Requiem For Ba’athism (Part 2 of 3)

The Birth and Rise of Ba’athism, Factionalism and Schism, Nasserism and the Syrian-Egyptian Union, Six Day Catastrophe, Cold War Dichotomy

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Part 1 of A Requiem For Ba’athism

The overwhelming global dominance of the West in the first half of the last century meant that those in the rest of the world had to respect the power of France, the UK, Germany, the USA, and so on. There was no benefit in just resenting them if you wanted to free your own people. That kind of thinking was defeatist, often fatalist, and only led to turning inwards or traveling down dead end paths.

Arabic/Islamic thinkers like Sayyed Qutb spent time living in the West and concluded that there was no liberation outside of Islam despite the obvious power imbalance between those cultures and the West at the time. Qutb felt that Muslims needed to return to basics, as straying from Islam is what caused the corruption that led them to fall behind the West. More recent Salafi thought leaders have gone further, insisting that everything non-Islamic was to be purged in the Islamic State that was to be ruled by Shari’a.

In parallel to these early Islamists, there were other Arab intellectuals who had also spent time in the West and yearned for Arab liberation from foreign dominance. Unlike the Islamists, they rejected the notion that freedom could only come through Islam. In fact, they liked what they saw in places like France and felt that secularism could unite Muslim and Christian Arabs against their Anglo-French occupiers. To these men, Islam was an impediment to both liberation and progress (even if they could not say it themselves), a ‘backwards’ and ‘superstitious’ faith that divided Arabs against one another. They also were romanced by the socialist strains in Europe, feeling that economic redistribution could serve reduce the lord/serf system still prevalent in Arabic society. These intellectuals were the original Ba’athists.

B. Ba’athism

It’s interesting to note just how many 20th century non-western revolutionary leaders spent time in the West. Iran’s first post-revolution Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomenei represents those whose sojourns were brief, having spent only the three immediate months in a suburb of Paris, France prior to his triumphal return to Iran in January of 1979. We find someone much more interesting at the other end: Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. First arriving in France as a kitchen helper aboard a French steamer in 1911, he went on to become one of the founders of the French Communist Party in 1920 and gained most of his political philosophical education there before decamping to the Soviet Union, and later, China.

Emigres and exiles from the Arab world living in France did not fail to be influenced by the political trends taking place during the tempestuous interwar era. Two Syrian schoolteachers who had studied at the prestigious Sorbonne University had returned home to Damascus to teach at the all-male al-Tajheez school. Michael Aflaq (1910-1989) was Greek Orthodox, while Salah al-Bitar (1912-1980) was a Sunni Muslim. Both hailed from the conservative Damascus neighbourhood of al-Midan, and both came under the influence of the French Communist Party during their studies at Sorbonne.

Both had also been influenced by another Syrian alumnus of Sorbonne, Zaki al-Arsuzi (1899-1968). He too was a schoolteacher who went to France for training and education, and he too returned home under the influence of French political currents, setting up a movement of intellectuals called al-Baath (The Revival). Despite the obvious similarities, Arsuzi and Aflaq could never get along with one another, leading the younger figure to take a more pro-active approach on behalf of Arab nationalism, officially launching a political party with al-Bitar called al-Ba’ath, enraging the older man. Not only was Arsuzi not given a position within the newly-founded party, he was not even invited to its founding conference in April of 1947.

The Arsuzi-Aflaq rivalry having its beginnings at the very start of the Ba’athist movement symbolized the factionalism and personal rifts that went on to colour it over the course of its history. A Pan-Arab political philosophy succumbing to constant splits and schisms is ironic, but should surprise no one familiar with political history, not just in the Middle East, but beyond it as well. The fact that this initial split took place between two middle class Damascene school teacher Sorbonne alumni makes it rather humourous, at least in my opinion.

Aflaq and al-Bitar cast a wider net, seeking to incorporate more Syrians in their nascent movement, giving prominent positions to Jalal Sayyed of Deir Ezzor and Wahib Ghanem (1919-2003), an Alawite physician from Latakia.1 Syria was a very conservative country, only a little over two decades on from being part of the Ottoman Caliphate. Introducing a secularist ideology into a land that was guided by Islam for well over a thousand years was never going to be easy. Making it more difficult, secularism was a western import, a product of the very same contemporary occupiers and ruling authorities! For the first decade of its existence, Ba’athism in Syria remained largely a Damascene affair, with little to no penetration in the countryside.

War With Israel, Coups and More Coups, and Nasserism

Just as the Ba’athists were getting their feet wet in the political pond, the catastrophic Arab-Israeli War of 1948 upended everything in the Arab world. Aflaq personally volunteered for the war effort (in which he took part), and the disastrous performance of the Syrian Army led to him supporting a coup d’état in early 1949. Despite his support for General Husni al-Zaim’s2 toppling of the al-Quwatli regime, the Ba’ath party was outlawed, and Aflaq was imprisoned and tortured by the new authorities.

The al-Zaim coup ushered in a Spanish-like era of constant coup attempts, some more successful than others. Syrian Ba’athists lent support to Colonel Adib al-Shishakli (1909-1964), a powerful figure who launched two successful coups, the first being in 1949, and the second one following two years later. Despite al-Shishakli and Aflaq being comrades who knew one another as vets from the war a few years prior, the former had the Ba’ath party dissolved, forcing the latter and al-Bitar to flee into exile in Lebanon. It was there that the two decided to merge their party together with the Arab Socialist Party (whose leader Akram al-Hawrani (1912-1996) was also exiled there by al-Shishakli) to create the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party.

Unlike the founding duo of the party, al-Hawrani was volatile, charismatic, and most of all, vengeful. He had come from a wealthy landowning family who had been dispossessed:

His Arab Socialist Party was founded on Marxist ideology and centred around a cult of personality. He lashed out against the feudal establishment, accusing them of hoarding the country’s wealth and enslaving the farmers who ploughed the land.

The villages, he reminded the peasants, had no electricity, water, clinics or schools. Al-Hawrani called on farmers to rise in revolt. He would visit them at their homes, remind them they did not own their farms and say: ‘If you work with me, this land could be yours!’ He positioned himself as God-given saviour of Syria’s peasantry, who made up 2 million of its 3.5 million population.

He is also credited with single-handedly introducing new terms into Syrian politics like ‘classless society’ and ‘rule of the working class.’ Before al-Hawrani, such terminology was completely absent from the Syrian dictionary.

Prime Minister Khalid al-Azm claimed that al-Hawrani pledged to ‘fill the empty stomachs of farmers’ with promises of land ownership. His ‘Land Belongs to the Peasant’ campaign took Syria by storm. Thousands answered his rallying cry and chanted: ‘Fetch the basket and the shovel to bury the Agha and the Bey.’

Al-Hawrani turned agitation into violence and encouraged his supporters to burn crops, attack landlords, and make the villages too dangerous for their owners to enter. The Damascus daily al-Fayha wrote: ‘Ever since your youth, you have been feeding on spite, malice, and dissension. You love to play with fire, even at the risk of burning yourself, your people, and your country.’3

al-Hawrani destabilized newly-independent Syria by way of the dreaded Agrarian Question, an issue that had vexed countries on several different continents.

1954 saw yet another coup in Syria, permitting the exiled Ba’athist leaders to return home and to participate in government. al-Bitar became the country’s foreign minister, while economics portfolio was given to Khalil Kallas, also a Ba’athist.

Running concurrently to the Syrian coalition government that included the Ba’athist party was the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. One of the two leaders of the successful Egyptian Revolution of 1952, his political philosophy eerily resembled that of the early Syrian Ba’athists in that it espoused Arab Pan-Nationalism, socialism, and secularism. The humbling of the British and the French during the Suez Crisis of 1956 catapulted Nasser into the pantheon of Arab titans, giving him a leading role in not just the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also in Third World lands seeking to end their colonial status. Nasser was a global hero who held out hope all across the non-Western globe. Syrian Ba’athists had yet to score such a monumental victory against the forces opposed to Arab states.

Egypt’s success led to the formation of a short-lived Syrian-Egyptian Union aka United Arab Republic (1958-61) that saw the two countries fused together in a lopsided relationship that entirely favoured the latter. Despite initial enthusiastic support on the part of the Syrian Ba’athists for the union (in which al-Bitar and al-Hawrani received key government roles), they quickly fell out with their Egyptian partners, resigned from office, and threw their lots in with young Syrian officers stationed in Cairo. A coup attempt in Damascus was successful, resulting in the end of the Syrian-Egyptian Union and the return of an independent Syria, but also in the imprisonment of the Syrian Ba’athist military officers remaining in the Egyptian capital. When they were eventually released and permitted to return to Syria, they were sacked for being “pro-Nasserite”.

These young officers quickly got their revenge as they went on to launch a coup in Damascus. One of the key plotters was a young Hafez al-Assad, who was then named as commander of the Syrian Air Force. In another fit of factionalism, al-Hawrani was evicted from power and sent into exile, no longer playing a role in Syrian Ba’athism. However, al-Bitar became Prime Minister of Syria, with Aflaq staying outside of government to continue to guide the party as its secretary-general.

Ba’athist Syria

Coined ‘Neo-Ba’athism’ by some, the new government got off to revolutionary start as property was confiscated on a wide scale, all opposition parties were shut down along with most media outlets, and nationalization of banks and factories took hold. Syria being Syria, another coup attempt took place, this time by remaining Nasserite officers, but failed. Aflaq protégé Amin al-Hafez (1921-2009) was installed in power as the head of a four-man ruling council, but that regime was successfully overthrown by fellow Ba’athist Salah Jadid (1926-1993) in 1966.

Typifying the factionalism of Syrian Ba’athism, a rift had grown between the Damascene intelligentsia and the younger military officers from the provinces:

“They (the military men) condemned him (Aflaq) for being a remote autocrat, for having ditched the party, for his “rightist” views, but there was also a gulf of generation, education, and style separating them.

City born and bred, steeped in the graces and formalities of Damascus, Aflaq and Bitar were already well into their fifties, whereas the officers were some twenty years younger, where sons of peasants, with the earth scarcely out from under their fingernails.”

“The older men had studied at the Sorbonne where they had read European literature and philosophy, and grown to be at ease with abstract ideas, whereas apart from military training, the soldiers had hardly gone beyond the basic curriculum of a provincial secondary school. Men so different could not hold each other in esteem.”4

Jadid’s seizure of power led not only to al-Hafez’s (short) imprisonment, but more importantly, to the exiling from Syria of the country’s two founding father’s of Ba’athism: Aflaq and al-Bitar5. Aflaq first set up shop in Beirut, but was wooed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose own Ba’ath party had broken with the Syrian one (more on the Iraqi group down below). Aflaq had relocated to Baghdad where he was given special treatment by the Iraqi state as an elder statesman of Ba’athism. He would die in the Iraqi capital in 1989.6 al-Bitar’s fate was very different; he went into exile in Paris, France where he led a group of renegade Ba’athists, only to be gunned down in 1980, presumably by Syrian state security.

The Six-Day Catastrophe and the Cold War Dichotomy

The revival of the Arab world was limited to the independence or quasi-independence of a series of post-colonial states, Nasser’s US-backed symbolic victory over the Anglo-French, and the increasing reliance of the world economy on oil, something that many Arab nations found themselves in possession of, and in large quantities too. Yet these newly-independent states were failing to deliver on the promises made to their people, oil wealth was being misdirected (largely into the hands of the new elites), and Egypt’s Nasser had fallen into an Israeli trap that not only led to the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, but also to his own resignation in shame over Egypt’s catastrophic loss to Israel in the Six-Day War.

The facts of the Six-Day War are indisputable; Israel lured Nasser into closing shipping in the Egyptian-controlled Suez Canal to Israeli ships, providing them a casus belli. The Israelis quickly destroyed the Egyptian Air Force before it was airborne, and then beat back their army, all the way to the Suez Canal. Jordan and Syria both tried to tie down Israeli forces to take the pressure off of the retreating Egyptians in order to allow them to regroup and counterattack, but this only resulted in the loss of the Jordanian-controlled West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Syrian Golan Heights. On the sixth day of the war, a peace agreement was signed that embarrassed the entire Arab world. Only the Sinai Peninsula would be returned to its owners in full, with Israel instituting occupation regimes in the rest of its captured territory. This was an utter and historic humiliation. Nasser’s star had dimmed (although not entirely, as country-wide protests saw his resignation taken back), and Arab unity had failed to beat back a spunky and perceived-to-be underdog in Israel.

More fallout came elsewhere: Ba’athists in Iraq seized power in 1968. Two years later, Syrian Air Force commander Hafez al-Assad launches yet another coup, taking the country over, arresting Salah Jadid and others. With a defeated Egypt still licking its wounds, the spectre of Arab unity had now gone entirely over to the Ba’athists of both Syria and Iraq.

All of us are very, very used to the USA being the sponsor of the State of Israel and the Israeli Lobby being unassailable on Capitol Hill, exerting a tremendous amount of influence over US foreign policy. This was not always the case; recall that during the Suez Crisis that Israel was onside with France and the UK and that it was the Americans who put a stop to their plans to wrest control of the Suez Canal from the Egyptians. Almost a decade earlier, Israel was saved in its first war against Arab states thanks to arms supplies from the communist Eastern Bloc.

It was only with the lopsided Israeli victory in the Six Day War where the USA began to significantly favour the Jewish state in the Middle East. This is when the tide began to gain volume and strength. “Plucky little Israel” showed itself to be able to fend off larger and (assumed-to-be) more powerful armies. America loves an underdog, but the rallying of the American Jewish community to the Israeli cause cemented the Israeli Lobby’s rise.

This was the Cold War era, where the globe was divided between the East and the West (with a third camp of non-aligned states unofficially headed by Tito Broz of Yugoslavia, and featuring Egypt’s Nasser as rising star). Since Israel was now a de facto western protégé, it pushed its enemies into the opposing camp. Egypt flirted with the Soviets, but it was the Syrians who went furthest, becoming a Soviet client state in the Middle East. Faced with a surprisingly resilient and technologically-superior foe on its border, non-alignment was not in the cards for Damascus. It had only one option; to seek help from the other superpower. Much like how the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA, or IRA for short) found itself on the global left during its 30 year fight against British occupation, Syria too found itself on that same side by default. The Irish could not attack the British from the political right, as the right was occupied and the UK found itself on that side of the global ledger. So too could the Syrians not pressure Israel from the global right, as that right was led by its enemy’s sponsor, the USA. Thankfully for Syria and its Ba’athists, it had long championed socialism, making its status as a Soviet client easier to swallow for both Damascus and Moscow.

Like Egypt, Syria too was humiliated and needed to lick its wounds and rebuild. Unlike Egypt, Syria was returned none of the land that Israel had now managed to occupy. A humiliated Nasser managed to stay in power. A defeated Syrian regime was overthrown by Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite in a majority Sunni country. Arab unity was in tatters, and secular Arab nationalism was failing to liberate, emancipate, and revive the Arab world. More challenges were to come soon enough, from within Arab Ba’athism and from more traditional sources.

Next – Part 3: The Battle For Ba’athist Supremacy, More War, Egypt’s Surrender, The Islamic Fundamentalist Challenge, The Fall of Iraq, Anachronism, Final Defeat