Outright Assassination

by Adel Beshara

  This was no doubt a crucial setback for Sa’adeh. Again he solicited Qabbani’s help to “get some explanation for things that no longer seemed to make sense to him”79 but to no avail. Zaim procrastinated in order to avoid any more meetings with him: “No sooner than I would broach Sa’adah’s request [for a meeting] he would change the topic and ask me to put off the whole thing until after the referendum.”80 The resulting break in communication with the regime created all sorts of problems for Sa’adeh, which Lieutenant al-Husseini further exacerbated by breaking off all contacts with the SNP. Al-Husseini’s silence added ominous undertones to the situation. The crisis really hit home when Zaim issued his orders to dissolve all political parties in Syria ahead of the plebiscite on 25 June. Despite repeated requests to spare the SNP from the dissolution order, in acknowledgement of previous commitments, its offices across Syria were shut down and its members were subjected to serious transgressions: “News arrived from some provinces that local authorities there have gone to extremes in pursuing party members and bearing down heavily on them. Even members’ private houses were raided and shut down.”81 Zaim “had turned into a totally different man.”82

  Unbeknown to Sa’adeh, Zaim was all that time in the Lebanese town of Shtura trying to thrash out a secret deal with his Lebanese counterparts, Khoury and Solh. According to an-Nahar, Sa’adeh was an item on the meeting’s agenda, but the paper gave no further details.83 However, “it has been variously suggested that the Lebanese Premier, Riyad al-Sulh, ‘bought’ him from Za’im and that Egypt was induced to put pressure on the Syrian dictator to hand him over.”84 Andrew Rathmell, in his Secret War in the Middle East, posits the issue in a somewhat inverted manner:

  The SSNP has always claimed that Egypt’s King Faruq first encouraged Sulh to move against the SSNP and then pressured Za’im to hand him over. The reason, the party argues, was Sa’adah’s opposition to the armistice accords with Israel. In this view, Sa’adah ‘paid . . . the price of the Israeli-Arab armistice accords’. Although Sa’adah’s opposition to the armistice talks may not have been the motive, it does appear that the SSNP’s accusations are accurate. The Egyptian establishment’s hostility to Sa’adah is shown by the fact that even two years after Sa’adah’s execution, the Egyptian commentator Muhammad Heikal sought to blacken the party’s name by claiming that Sa’adah had agreed with Israel in 1948 to mount a coup in Lebanon.85

  Curiously, after the plebiscite, Zaim asked Qubbani never to “bring [Sa’adeh] here. He should never appear in public. The Lebanese are seriously demanding him. I deny that he is in Syria, but they have spies planted everywhere. I hate to create a crisis now that they have agreed to release Tabarah and reluctantly to recognize me and my government.”86 It was an oblique admission that the deal with the Lebanese had included Sa’adeh, but it proves that Zaim was disinclined at that stage to give him up. Perhaps he was buying time to force Sa’adeh out of Syria.

  While Zaim procrastinated, his newly-appointed Prime Minister, Muhsin al-Barrazi, struck hard. Al-Barrazi cancelled all previous commitments to Sa’adeh “due to delays in Syrian-Israeli truce talks”87 and issued a ministerial directive to Syrian newspapers via the publications department to launch into the SNP.88 Sa’adeh was placed under tight surveillance and al-Barrazi’s private security unit started to collect background information and intelligence data about the SNP. This information, according to Qubbani, was passed on to the Lebanese government without Zaim’s knowledge.89 Al-Barrazi also aroused questions in Zaim’s mind about the danger that Sa’adeh represented and the risk he ran to his own regime by arming the SNP.

  The situation took another turn for the worse when the local security forces rounded up SNP members in the northern Latakia district ahead of a planned party assault on Lebanon. Sa’adeh was in the Syrian capital at the time working on a plan of action against the Lebanese regime and grappling with recent developments. By all accounts he was privy to everything around him but resisted all appeals, from inside and outside the party, to change trajectory. Finally, on Saturday, 2 July, he broke his silence to Qubbani:

  The situation we have reached is appalling because your friend [Zaim] has broken his promises to us. We are fighting a life-or-death battle here. For us to remain hand-tied toward the extermination measures taken against us in Lebanon would only mean the end for us. Let us die honourably if death is our only way out of this crisis.90

  Words like these infuriated and frustrated Qubbani more than invective and lies possibly could. But he was not able any longer to assist because he had resigned in protest against al-Barrazi. A plea for help formed Sa’adeh’s last words to him:

  For the last time I plea with you to call your man, Husni, to discuss the situation and make him understand that if it were not for his promises to us, we would have taken a different course in our war with the [Lebanese] government. I am asking you this even though I know you have resigned from your job and no longer associate with him. But human lives are being spent and any help could make a difference.91

  Qubbani’s only recourse was the Deuxième Bureau. “Don’t bother,” he was told. “It is useless. Yesterday, the Premier issued orders to the police to keep tabs on all party members in Damascus and to locate Sa’adeh. The plan to help Sa’adeh is now history.”92 Qubbani quickly passed the information on to the party secretariat in Damascus and pleaded with him to relocate Sa’adeh to another part of the city “just in case”.93

  In retrospect it does not seem difficult to perceive, when one is familiar with the details in question, that the logical course for Sa’adeh was really to flee the Syrian capital. Why he did not change tack or hold back remains a mystery to this day. The silence is curious but it has not prevented many analysts (including those far removed from his outlook) from assuming without warrant that Sa’adeh was overcome by his altruistic nature. The theme of self-sacrifice does indeed resound through his writings: “life is but an honourable stand;” “the blood that flows through our veins is not our property but the property of the nation and therefore must be produced at any point it demands it;” “we all must die, but few will die for the sake of a belief.” However, altruism only dogmatizes the matter and sheds hardly any light on objective factors. Even if the explanation is only partially true, it does not mesh well with Sa’adeh’s strong beliefs in human struggle. Therefore, the answer lies somewhere else and more directly in the mixed signals that Sa’adeh continued to receive from the Syrian regime. To illustrate: while the cleansing of his supporters in Latakia was taking place, at the other end the Syrian military was providing his supporters with logistic and hardware equipment: “On one occasion . . . [Syrian] gendarmerie and army vehicles [of the Syrian army] even took part in helping the nationalists transport weapons from the mountains to the borders.”94 The fact that Zaim did not personally attempt to intimidate Sa’adeh is also crucial: it may possibly have given Sa’adeh the impression that, in spite of everything, Zaim was merely procrastinating because he was under pressure.

  The Final Showdown

  Despite the explosive nature of the situation and Zaim’s impulsiveness, in early July 1949, Sa’adeh proclaimed a revolution against the regime in Lebanon. The revolution was planned by two junior army officers, neither of whom had any experience in revolutionary warfare. A large map of Lebanon was produced by the officers to evaluate the surrounding topography and to determine the appropriate targets and other details of the attack including troop strength, armament, etc. After deliberating with Sa’adeh, who shared their sense of urgency and devotion to military affairs, they came up with a plan that proved well beyond the party’s capabilities.95

  On the same day, at a session of the party’s top cadres, a military revolutionary committee headed by Sa’adeh was formed to oversee the revolution. Sa’adeh, though, had relatively little to do with the actual mechanics of the insurrection. That was left entirely to the military officers who quickly surrounded themselves with a core of reliable nationalists. Logistically,
the plan consisted of specific practical targets: the Rashayya Fortress in the Lebanese South; gendarmerie precincts on the outskirts of Beirut; and the seizure of key highways to isolate the country’s provinces from each other. Abdullah Qubarsi records in his autobiography that Sa’adeh’s optimism was aroused by the expectation of widespread support for the revolution inside Lebanon once it got underway:

  Under no circumstances could I envisage that Saadeh foresaw victory by taking over some police precincts or cutting roads off here and there. He most probably thought that these actions would inspire his allies . . . [and] the forces opposing Beshara al-Khuri and Riyad al-Sulh to rally around the uprising. Saadeh was banking on the chance that the anger of the people will erupt with the mere declaration of the revolution.96

  By now Sa’adeh was borne aloft by a force greater than himself. As a first step, on 4 July, 1949, he issued a communiqué reflecting the urgency of the situation. It contained a chronology of events and a statement of objectives. Comparatively little is known about how Sa’adeh worked on this communiqué, but it is known that he used the occasion to deliver a few appropriate remarks. He emphasized that the revolution was purely an act of self-defense directed not against the people of Lebanon but against the ruling clique: “Those who currently exercise power over the Lebanese people through methods of terror, rigging of elections, and violent intimidation of the emerging political forces that embody the principles of a new social life . . .”97 Sa’adeh also made it clear that the revolution did not aim to affect the status of Lebanon as an independent entity but only the system of government and its confessional underpinning. He thus carefully avoided any mention of unity with Syria.

  In preparing the document Sa’adeh followed his usual habit in such matters using great deliberation in arranging his thoughts and molding his phrases mentally. He scolded the government for the Jummaizeh incident and other acts of foolhardiness, defended himself against the various charges, and warned the people of harsher conditions if they failed to rise up. The objectives of the revolution were most clearly formulated in seventeen points:

  To bring down the government and dissolve the parliament.

  To form a [new] government.

  To draw up a modern constitution emanating from the will of the people that would replace the present constitution, which lacks sound constitutional character, guarantee full equality of civil and political rights for the people, and base political representation on the national interest instead of the confessional or narrow clannish interests.

  To let the previous political circumstances pass.

  To consolidate the Lebanese independence on the basis of the free will of the people.

  To uphold all international treaties and agreements concluded until now.

  To protect public security and private property.

  To counter communism.

  To secularize state and society.

  To purge the Administration of bribery, corruption and despotism.

  To set up a national economic policy based on the economic unity of [geographical] Syria and the necessity of a stable industrial-agricultural development.

  To erase immediately the injustice inflicted on the workers and farmers.

  To put an end to capitalist monopoly and tyranny.

  To release and compensate the prisoners who were unjustly detained [during the reprisal campaign].

  To reinstate every Social Nationalist and anyone else who lost his job during the campaign of detention and persecution.

  To reinstate and compensate every Social Nationalist who was discharged from the public service on account of his membership to the [Syrian] Social Nationalist Party.

  To suspend all regulations that nullify civil and political rights.98

  On the day of the uprising, armed units of the SSNP attacked a number of gendarmerie posts near the Syrian-Lebanese frontiers, in southern Biqa’ (Rachaya and Mashghara) and in the mountains over Beirut. Their mission was to seize weapons before the main contingent, led by Lieutenant Assaf Karam, moved in to occupy those areas. Hisham Sharabi, who was at Sa’adeh’s side, described the mood as follows:

  Although Sa’adeh was speaking about the revolution as though it was certain to succeed, still in the statement which he issued just before the proclamation of the revolution he indicated that it was the “first social nationalist revolution”. Was he expecting that the uprising might fail and that it would be followed by a second revolution in the future? Was he discreetly grasping that the revolution was a mere adventure set off by despair and that it was very unlikely to succeed? I believe that he did indeed understand all of that. But, nonetheless, he did not reveal any worry. He kept on speaking in a very confident way and laughing merrily, as though he did not have a worry in the world.99

  Only hours into the uprising, things went horribly wrong. The SSNP units that engaged Gendarmerie posts seized only a few weapons and were outnumbered by a larger and better-equipped force. In view of the large number of SSNP members thought to be hiding in the Lebanese village of Bshamoun, a special task force was sent there to prevent them from linking up with other rebels. In the ensuing engagement, the officer commanding the force, Captain Tufic Chamoun, was killed. Several members of the SSNP were injured and considerable numbers arrested.

  The collapse of the uprising was imminent. There was a clear lack of planning and a grave deficiency in personnel: the participants were small in number, ill-equipped and inexperienced in military warfare. With the exception of one or two field officers, the insurgents were mostly irregular recruits and civilians who probably had never been in a military situation all their life. It soon became apparent that the Lebanese Government was being alerted in advance of their plans through Muhsin al-Barazzi, who passed the information to his brother-in-law Riad Solh in Lebanon. Rightly or wrongly, some blamed the collapse of the revolution on faulty weapons. In reality, the fundamental problem lay in Sa’adeh’s tenacity and in his exaggerated optimism that the uprising would destroy the inertia of the local population. On balance, he had neither the resources nor the time to communicate and coordinate with the general population in Lebanon, so much so that most Lebanese remained oblivious to the uprising.100

  Treachery at the Palace

  The collapse of the uprising placed Sa’adeh at the crossroads of life. He had several options, but each option was as problematical as the next one. Surrender was one option but it went against his character. Fleeing was another, but that would amount to dereliction of duty: “I confronted Sa’adeh with the [travel] documents in my hands and suggested that he should leave ash-Sham [Syria] at once because his life was in danger. I stretched my hand out expecting him take them from me but he refused to even look at them. Instead he looked at me and said: “Do you really expect a leader who has called a revolution and whose supporters have answered his call and are staring death in the face in search of martyrdom, to abandon them for the sake of his own personal safety?”101 Persons close to Sa’adeh later claimed that he didn’t think that the Syrian President would dare double-cross him in the presence of his Chief of General Security, Major Adib Shishakli, who was a Syrian nationalist at heart.102 The third option for Sa’adeh was to seek political asylum in Syria or to confide in Zaim. Sa’adeh decided to have one last crack at Zaim.

  As late as 3 July, Muhammad Baalbaki of the Beirut daily Kul Shay, overheard Sa’adeh saying “Zaim is different [from Muhsin al-Barrazi]. He has expressed to me his readiness to adopt the views of the party . . . and he is helping us.”103 It was scarcely a good reason for optimism. With Egypt and Saudi Arabia breathing heavily down his neck, Zaim was in fact under more pressure than at any time before to rein in Sa’adeh. He was battling on two fronts, Husni al-Barrazi and now King Farouk’s private emissary, Brigadier General Muhammad Yusuf, who arrived in Damascus at the beginning of July with instructions to twist Zaim’s arm.104 The Brigadier’s mission was to convince the Syrian leader that Sa’adeh was a British mole stirring problems to faci
litate Hashemite and British expansion over the Eastern Mediterranean and that, if Zaim didn’t comply, the Lebanese government would seek foreign military assistance to stop his rebellion.105

  There also are, or there seem to be, good grounds for believing that Zaim was under a different kind of pressure from his personal friends and staff:

  One day Captain Ibrahim al-Husseini turned up at my house and said: “We are in a morass and I have fears about its consequences.”

  Husseini was Zaim’s right hand man and Chief of the Deuxième Bureau in the Army and the Head of the Military Police. Husseini added: “Antun Sa’adeh is in Zaim’s protection, but I think that Zaim intends to hand him over to the Lebanese authorities.” I was truly astonished. How on earth could Zaim think of this after he had assured Sa’adeh, gave him a house in Damascus to live in, and regarded him as a political refugee! I replied: “This is just not possible.”106

  The author here is Nadhih Fansah, Zaim’s brother-in-law and private secretary. When Fansah turned up for work the next morning, Zaim was there to listen and to reply to his queries. “Deport him. Give him travel clearance to another country of his choice,” Fansah supposedly told him. “Great idea”, responded Zaim. “I will ask him to go to Argentina where he has a substantial family and a strong party base.”107 Elatedly, Fansah dashed over and kissed Zaim: “I repeated to him not to cause a shameful blot to be recorded against his administration by handing Sa’adeh over to the Lebanese State.”108 Both Fansah and Colonel al-Husseini repeated the waning to Zaim that day: “Husni, do you swear by your military honour that you will not hand Antun Sa’adeh over to the Lebanese authorities?” “By military honour,” he replied.109 The belief today is that al-Husseini also pressed Zaim to dump Sa’adeh in advance of a 25,000 pound reward that the Lebanese government had set aside for Sa’adeh’s capture.110