The dynamics of power in Syria since the break with Egypt

Bibliographic Data

ID10280392
AuthorsMartin Lipset Seymour (corresponding author), Martin Seymour
Year1970
Volume6
Issue1
Pages35-47
Publication date1970-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMiddle Eastern Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-3206 • E-ISSN: 1743-7881
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00263207008700137
OpenAlexW2018576213
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited2

However bewildering the frequency with which the king-making tanks from Quneitra have rumbled into Damascus since 1961, a straightforward piecing-together of Syria's overt political history during these eight years poses no great problems. 'A shilling life', as Auden begins a poem on the black sheep of another family, 'will give you all the facts'. What this paper will attempt to do is to identify, behind the visible facts and acts, some of the springs of action and faction: to disentangle the strands in the rather untidy rope pulling the Syrian body politic along its lonely path. Syria, it is often claimed, has been the cockpit of the Middle East for millennia. In the last few feather-spattered years the audience may have rather lost interest and turned its back, save when another squawk from the pit momentarily arrests attention; and even then the average observer may react like readers of Morte d'Arthur when they come to yet another gruelling chapter headed 'More of the same battle', and skip a bit. For the benefit of any who may have skipped a bit, it may be as well to recapitulate the outline sequence of events. Of the movement which ended the Union with Egypt on September 28, 1961, some aspects, not least the identity and motives of the organizers, have been obscured by successive layers of propagandist lava. The Cairo Unity Talks (or Reticencies) of eighteen months later, fascinating as the records are, removed some layers but added others. Rather than rake over the ashes, I will confine myself to picking up one or two minor features which have a bearing on what follows. One of these is that the soldiers who led the breakaway movement from in front were quickly eased out and disowned (if not worse) by those who led it from behind-a pregnant precedent for the future. The second point concerns the attitude of teading Baethists to secession. This was of course equivocal.' Afiaq's initial reaction from Party Headquarters in Beirut was to condemn secession, whereas Bitar was one of those who signed the secessionist manifesto on October 2 -a 'betrayal' which exposed him to the most painful of Nasser's barbs at the 1963 post-mortem. 'I believe', pleaded Bitar lamely, 'that my signature did not bind me. I mean it was a lone incident that had no link with the past and has no effect on the future.'2 As for Aflaq's attempts during the Cairo talks to explain away the 1959 resignations of Bitar and other Badthist ministers, Nasser's only comment according to the published record was: 'You smoke a lot.'3 By the time of this cross-examination, of course, they were at least able to use Hawrani, an unashamed secessionist and already expelled from the Party, as a scapegoat. But the equivocal attitude of the Baethist fathers in 1961 was an anguish from which they never escaped; and their inability ever to take a clear-cut line on relations with Cairo was a contributory cause of their moral assassination by their own pupils in 1966. Before I return to the sequence of events, it may be worth observing

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Body politic · Genealogy · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society

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