"The Ba'athists"

Tariq Ali

Given that different factions of the Ba'ath Party have ruled Syria and Iraq for almost half a century, a study of its origins is not a purely academic exercise.

The party was the brainchild of Michel Aflaq (1910-89), a left-leaning Arab nationalist intellectual of Greek Orthodox Christian origin, who was born into a nationalist household in Damascus in 1910. Both his parents were politically engaged. His father had been imprisoned by the Ottomans and their French successors. Michel Aflaq was educated at the Sorbonne, fell in love with Paris, founded an Arab Students Union and discovered Marx.

On his return to Syria in 1932 he worked closely with the local communists and wrote for their magazine. Like many others he assumed that the French Communist Party favoured the independence of French colonies, but this illusion was broken in 1936 when the Popular Front government left the colonial structure intact, and the Syrian communists accepted this as an accomplished fact. Many years later he told an interviewer:

"During this period I admired the hardness of the Communists' struggle against the French. I used to admire the toughness of the young men in the Communist Party. After 1936 and the assumption of power in France by the Leon Slum Front government, I became disenchanted and felt betrayed."

He now decided that the local communists were loyal, not to an idea, but to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet state, and for that reason would be unreliable allies in any protracted struggle. This experience pushed Aflaq, his close comrade Salah Bitar and other young idealistic Arab nationalists away from any internationalist perspective. They were shocked by the 'imperialist nature' of European socialism and communism. For them the key question was how to achieve freedom and independence for their countries. Everything else was subordinated to that goal.

It was during the Second World War that Aflaq developed the theory which motivated his followers: there was one Arab nation, one Arab people, and they required one Arab republic. This unity derived from history. Islam and its Prophet had united the Arabs as never before, and this historical experience was now the property of all Arabs, not just the Muslims. Nation and nationality became the main focus of his work in the early period. This, coupled with his total disillusionment with the pro-colonial European left, led him to view the Second World War through a strictly nationalist prism. A defeat for the British and French empires would be good for the Arab cause. Nationalists, as exemplified by the Alexandrian crowd, hoped that Rommel might make their task easier. The Ba'ath was founded exactly one year after Rommel's 1942 defeat in El Alamein. After Syrian independence in 1947, it began to work closely with non-communist socialists and its influence grew throughout the Arab world.

Underground parties were established in Jordan and Iraq, cells operated in the Hijaz and the Yemen. Syria and the Lebanon alone permitted legal, functioning parties for varying periods. It was Syria that first repressed the party and arrested Aflaq, who served four spells in prison in 1949-54. In Paris he had been impressed by the toughness of French communists. In Syria he impressed this need for 'toughness' on the new recruits, most of whom were students.

Throughout Aflaq's tenure -- 1943-65 -- as the secretary-general of the Ba'ath, he made sure the party was seen as a Pan-Arab organisation and dominated its policies and its organisation. He shunned the attributes of power, preferring his job in the party. It was Aflaq who had been the moving force behind the Egypt--Syria merger in 1958, but the mutual antipathy between him and Nasser proved too strong. Both men were modernising, anti-imperialist nationalists with the elements of an anti-capitalist programme. Both shared a passion for ideas, but whereas Aflaq was essentially a party insider, Nasser was a public leader and one whose name had become a symbol of anti-imperialism. It irked him to deal with Aflaq as if he were an equal. This explains why the Syrian ideologue was prepared to share power. Nasser, however, preferred a monopoly. And it was the highhandedness of Abdel Hakim Amer, the Egyptian pro-consul in Damascus, that brought the union to an end.

But underlying these divisions was a material reality of more recent vintage. Since the defeat and collapse of the Ottoman empire after World War One, the new states encouraged by the imperialist powers had developed a sub-nationalist existence of their own, based on a combination of modernity and local/regional histories and traditions. The Ottomans had united the Arab East from without, but had not established the structures that could do so from within and, as we have seen, Egypt enjoyed a semi-independence after Napoleon's brief occupation. Subsequently, nationalist ideology proved too weak a vessel to contain regional rivalries. This was the case even where the imperialist-imposed divisions were most awkward geographically, as in Syria and the Lebanon. The peninsula was another story altogether. Ignored by the Ottoman empire for most of its existence, tribal divisions had created multiple sovereignties in the region. Even though the British-backed al-Sauds had finally taken the peninsula, it had been the discovery of oil, the creation of the US oil giant ARAMCO and the giant USAF base in Dhahran that preserved the unity of Saudi Arabia and made it a bastion of Arab reaction.

Imperialism, oil and, after 1948, Israel, were the three factors that gave a tremendous boost to Arab nationalism. The existence of the Soviet Union provided it with a pillar to which it could cling in moments of difficulty. If the Zionist state had not existed it is likely that Arab nationalism would have disappeared with the withdrawal of Britain and France from the region and been replaced with each country defending its national interests. The rivalry between Egypt and the Ba'athists in Syria and Iraq weakened all three states. The final blow to Arab nationalism was being prepared in Tel Aviv.