Outright Assassination

by Adel Beshara

  The Permanent Military Tribunal

  The case against Sa’adeh was heard at the Permanent Military Tribunal. Members detailed to such tribunals are generally persons who in the opinion of the convening authority are best qualified for the duty by reason of their age, education, training, experience, length of service and judicial temperament. In Sa’adeh’s case, these criteria were annulled and the judging panel was hastily assembled to avoid delays. It was composed of a civilian judge (Justice Gabrail Bassil), a senior army officer (Lieutenant Colonel Anwar Karam, President), and three junior officers from the Lebanese Army: Captain Tanios Samarrani, Captain Aziz al-Ahdab, First Lieutenant Ahmad Arab.

  The trial’s opening was attended by key figures from the ministries of Defense and Internal Affairs, the Lebanese Army, the Gendarmerie, the judiciary, the first secretary of the Prime Minister Office, and several “independent” observers including President Khoury’s sons, Khalil and Michel. It is not clear how the audience was selected, who informed them, or what criteria were used for admission. What is certain is that it was a small audience hand-picked from among loyalist and inner government circles. None of the names that became known in the course of time either knew Sa’adeh at the personal level or sympathised with his ideas, which indicates that the audience was carefully scanned.17

  Sa’adeh was brought into the courtroom at noon flanked by soldiers armed with machine guns and other light weapons. He was unshaven, with hair tousled, and wearing a light brown suit. After the courtroom cleared of the rumbling noise of soldiers walking in and out and everyone had been seated, the presiding judge opened the hearing with the customary questions to Sa’adeh about his full name and date and place of birth. He then asked Sa’adeh to nominate another defense lawyer because John Tian, his first selection, had declined the offer to represent him. Why Tian had forsaken Sa’adeh at such a critical moment has never been satisfactorily explained. The official explanation that he “snubbed Sa’adeh for ideological reasons” is not overwhelmingly convincing since Tian and Sa’adeh were close personal friends and the lawyer was strongly indebted to Sa’adeh for his recent election as Chairperson of the Lawyers Syndicate in Lebanon. A snapshot taken in March 1949, only four months before the trial, shows Sa’adeh and Tian sharing a drink at a party function!

  Sa’adeh then nominated an able local lawyer named Emil Lahhoud. Short, quick, and imperious, he was one of the most seasoned trial lawyers in the country. Lahhoud was whisked into the court within minutes and agreed to take on the case on the condition that the trial be adjourned for 72 hours so he could study the evidence. The judges quickly conferred amongst themselves and rejected his request. Lahhoud then asked for 48 hours, but his request was again overruled. He went down to 24 hours: the motion was blocked yet again. This last objection made the task of the defense a formidable one and served to confirm certain prevailing suspicions about the trial. In protest, Lahhoud withdrew from the case and the left the courtroom.18

  Recognizing that the trial was a mockery, Sa’adeh interceded with Lahhoud: “Stick around, Emil. I don’t need you to defend me, just to stay and keep note of what I say so that you can repeat them to the comrades.”19 But Lahhoud brushed the suggestion aside and, in a perfectly calm voice, said “Antun, this smells fishy to me.”20 In a recent seminar on Sa’adah’s trial, Attorney August Bakhos recounted how he and several other colleagues vainly tried to dissuade Lahhoud from leaving. He allegedly answered them, “They brought him here to kill him, not to try him.”21 He subsequently explained his departure in philosophical terms: “It is better for the sentence to be passed so oppressively than to be issued the way it was previously prepared . . . so that it would be said that we defended him but were not successful.”22

  The feeling inside the courtroom favoured the selection of another lawyer, but the court would brook no delays and appointed first lieutenant Elias Rizkallah as Sa’adeh legal counsel. Sa’adeh strongly objected to this “on the ground that he did not know the officer and did not know if he was competent enough to take on the case or whether he was learned in the law.”23 However, the presiding judge dismissed the objection and told Sa’adeh “to speak out in his own defense within what is humanly possible.”24 Apart from the judges and attending military officers no one else in the courtroom had previously heard of Rizkallah. Until recently, it was commonly believed that he was appointed on the spur of the moment to get proceedings underway. This was not the case, however. Rizkallah was in fact appointed before the trial opening and his selection was made on purely political grounds. Apparently, during a top level meeting between President Khoury and his military chiefs a few hours earlier, the President floated to the Army Commander General Chehab the idea that Sa’adeh’s legal representative at the trial should be an army officer commissioned on behalf of the Military Court. But Chehab politely declined the idea on the ground that he knew of no officer with the right qualifications for the job. The President then leaned toward Al-Rifa’i for someone under his command and Al-Rifa’i proposed Rizkallah.

  Rizkallah’s own recollections, brief as they may be, are revealing:

  One morning as I was heading to my office in the gendarme headquarters, two non-commissioned officers under my charge and fully armed blocked my passage to the office saying that they have orders to do so. At this point, one of Brigadier General Al-Rifa’i’s guards approached us and asked me to go up to Al-Rifa’i’s office, which I did. Instead of receiving me inside his office as usual, Al-Rifa’i stepped out himself and asked me to accompany him to the officers’ room. His eyes sparked as he said to me, ‘This bastard is here.’ I returned, ‘Who is this bastard?’ He said, ‘It’s Antun Sa’adeh himself.’ I replied, ‘What have I to do with that?’ He answered me outright with an edge in his voice that Sa’adeh is due to be taken shortly to the military court, where he will be immediately tried, sentenced to death and executed within a few hours, and that I have been personally appointed to defend him in my capacity as a trial attorney for the court.25

  Rizkallah “initially refused to obey the orders,”26 but al-Rifa’i snapped back, “These are orders of the authority. To refuse to obey them is insubordination.”27 Rizkallah acceded.

  After Rizkallah’s appointment the presiding judge invoked article 68 of the Military Penal Code, or the secrecy clause as it is known in Lebanon to this day, and ordered the journalists and members of the public to leave the courtroom at once.

  The Opening Session

  With the legal preliminaries over, the trial finally got underway “in an atmosphere of tension and fear.”28 The presiding judge began by asking the state attorney to read the charges, which were the basis for the trial. Three main charges were read out:

  Inciting and participating in an armed rebellion against the status quo in Lebanon with the intention of seizing power.

  Engaging in hostile action against military barracks and the Army, its officers and troops.

  Causing death to Captain Toufiq Chamoun and attempting to cause death to other members of the Security Forces and attacking police stations and similar installations.

  When the state attorney had finished reading the charges, “the questions began to rain down on [Sa’adeh] like a torrent; all of them pointing to death and execution. Sa’adeh answered every question calmly and with exemplary courage. Every question invited more questions.”29 The prosecuting attorney produced scores of documents to substantiate the charges against the SNP leader. Had Sa’adeh nurtured any hope of receiving charitable treatment at the hands of the judges, it must have quickly dissipated when six of his own sympathizers were brought into the court and put on the stand to tell the facts of the raid. The presiding judge, assuming the dual role of judge and prosecutor, asked them in order “Do you identify this man behind the steel bars?” All of them answered in the affirmative except one, a disabled young man who apparently had lost some of his bodily movements under torture: he snapped back at the judge, “Be quiet. Call him by his proper title
.”30 The gendarmerie beside gave him a strong blow which sent the man crashing hard to the floor.

  Only fragments of two testimonies were published by the Khoury regime. They are reproduced here in extenso because they shed some light on the proceedings and also because the answers reveal certain absurdities bordering either on stupidity or ingenuity, depending on how they are read.31 The first testimony is from one Mohammad Ibrahim al-Shalabi:

  To a question he answered: I don’t have any knowledge of the incidents at Birj al-Barajina and Sarhamoul. I did not travel with him from Syria. I was at An-Nadwa Café in First Avenue in Damascus and the time was ten-thirty. We boarded a mini-bus belonging to a person by the name of Bashir, all fifteen of us, but Antun Sa’adeh was not among us. We met up with two cars at the intersection with Dawoud Street. I saw the leader Antun Sa’adeh in one of them. The buses then took off but I did not know where we were going. I slept on the way and was awakened when we got there. I did not know where I was. It was there that I met the accused. We gave him the salute and he then addressed us and handed out the weapons. My share was a rifle and twenty bullets. From what I could gather from the accused’s speech is that we were on a mission to fight Zionism. He told us to use force if force is used against us and might if might is used. I don’t know where Antun Sa’adeh went after that.

  The second testimony is from one Abdul Sattar Mustafa Maatouk, also a Syrian:

  To a question he answered: This indeed is Antun Sa’adeh. I saw him behind Syria’s borders ten kilometres from Lebanon. I don’t know what the place where we got to is called. I am from Tell Bneen below Saydnaya. I saw this man Antun Sa’adeh handing out weapons to those who were in the car and delivering a speech and inciting them. He was telling them you must take this place and that place, and I remember Rashayya which has a fortress as one of the places he mentioned. There were three guys in the car from Rashayya, but I don’t know their names. They mentioned the Rashayya fortress and said that it had two entrances. They gave a detailed description of it.

  Q: Can you remember the type of weapons that Antun Sa’adeh, who is presently with us, handed out?

  A. There was an assortment of weapons.

  Q. Who else was with him?

  A. The people who were with him were many. They came in two cars. I don’t know what type they were. All I know is that their registration was Lebanese.

  Q. How many people approximately were in the cars?

  A. The large vehicles were three buses. They brought us from Damascus to Zahle after they said to us that there was a wedding in that city. There were twenty-two in the bus that I was riding in and twenty-five in each of the remaining two.

  Q. Where were you when you were picked up and who picked you up?

  A. We were picked up by the operator of the Beirut Garage for a fee of sixty liras for each car. A group of passengers climbed in with us at a hotel in Damascus called Hotel Lebanon in the district of al-Hreiki. They were not armed then, but shortly after we left the city, we stopped in Beirut Street, which is at the end side of Damascus in Lebanon’s direction, and waited there for the groom for a full two hours. Then they said that the groom might have already passed. Shortly after we crossed Maysaloun, to the left, they took us to a spot somewhere there and then to Lebanese territories. We parked at a place until dawn when the leader (pointing to Antun Sa’adeh) turned up and asked everyone to get out. He then gave a speech and they rejoined with “long live the leader,” and “long live the National Party.”

  Q. Repeat the words that the leader was uttering.

  A. We, the drivers, remained inside the cars near the meeting. Of the words that I heard from him I remember: “You must be on full alert”, “attacks” and other inflammatory speeches.

  The evidence produced at that session showed that the SNP and its mass organization were involved in the organization, preparation and execution of the rebellion. As leader of the rebellion, Sa’adeh was held responsible for the attacks on government installations and the slaying of a military officer at Sarhamoul. The SNP leader expressed regret for the Sarhamoul incident, pointing out that casualties are inevitable in armed conflicts, but the court rejected his explanation. It placed the culpability for the single fatality squarely on him on the grounds that he was the leader and instigator of the rebellion.

  The Public Prosecutor Address

  The presiding judge then granted leave to the Public Prosecutor, Youssef Charbel, to address the Court. By all accounts, Charbel delivered a masterly and comprehensive speech during which Sa’adeh was compelled to stand for two hours. All we can do, in the absence of the original text, is to attempt to give some notion of its scope and effect from a revised version penned after the trial. First, Charbel took all of twenty minutes to catalogue the criminal violations perpetrated by the SNP. He placed the onus of responsibility entirely on Sa’adeh for three reasons:

  Because he was outright leader of the SNP and supreme commander of its armed forces at the time of the rebellion.

  Because he personally issued the order for the rebellion.

  Because he was personally involved in the preparation for and execution of the rebellion, including the distribution of arms and incitement to killing.32

  Unable to control himself, Charbel proceeded to attack the character of Sa’adeh, seriously endangering the right of the defendant to an impartial trial. Fairness allows the prosecution to attack the character of the defendant only after the latter has attempted to show his good character in his own aid.33 Against this principle, Charbel addressed himself to a vital question: Was Sa’adeh a man of principle or a mere opportunist? “I believe,” he observed, “that Sa’adeh was not an advocate of a genuine and credible ideology, but of an opportunistic and power-hungry idea. In the depth of his heart he assumed it was genuine, but really it is flawed historically, scientifically and practically, and history attests to that.”34 The strategy of the prosecution was to concentrate its fire on Sa’adeh’s “dictatorial” personality and the SNP’s “terrorist” proclivity. A composite picture of Sa’adeh as a cold-blooded murderer and an agent of foreign endeavours was pieced together on the basis of inconclusive evidence and recollections of alleged conversations. Mustering every ounce of his strength, Charbel stigmatized Sa’adeh as an eccentric and egotistical man: “A man of Antun Sa’adeh’s character is easily tempted to parade his powers before the masses, or to be driven by a grudge or a target that really doesn’t help him and blights the general good.”35

  The stinging attack on Sa’adeh’s character was followed by a savage attack on his national program. With icy logic Charbel portrayed Sa’adeh as a self-deceived utopianist who never really understood the moving forces of society and history: “Antun Sa’adah built this [Syrian] homeland of his on historical and scientifically deductive principles that he repeatedly mentioned in his speeches and addresses. Sa’adah, however, was not aware of the fact that science is not yet capable of accounting for the facts of this universe tangibly enough in terms of time, the principle of evolution, human races, origins of nations, and how countries form.”36 Charbel went on to ridicule Sa’adeh’s pan-Syrian ideology as out of touch with the intrinsic reality of Lebanon:

  If we consult so-called history from the beginning until the present, we will realize this glaring fact. Yet, amidst the realm of claims and assumptions, there are tangible facts that time has produced, and on which homelands, combining diverse factors, were built; homelands including Lebanon, that upheld the banners of fraternity and tolerance until it became an example to follow and a guiding beacon. This is the homeland that Antun Sa’adeh and his party have sought to destroy and to subsume with another weaved in his vivid imagination. This is indeed contradictory not just to the people of Lebanon who, despite their diverse sects, collaborated in building this homeland, but also contradictory to the idea of Arabism which, in itself, is consistent with the presence of several separate states independent from one another, but which, nonetheless, share the bonds of frate
rnity and neighbourliness.37

  He added “Gentlemen, those who adhered to these sound principles lived and let others live as well. Those, however, who tried to turn their fantasies into a reality and their nonsensicality into scientific or social bases, ruined their lives and those of many others.”38

  Charbel now reached that point in his speech for which he was to be sharply criticized later. Sa’adeh, he callously argued, was a national traitor who, in his obsession with power, sold his soul and his country to the Zionist Jews. Coming hot on the heels of the recent debacle in Palestine, it was perhaps the single most stirring issue of the day. Charbel began by declaring his satisfaction with the conduct of Arab governments in Palestine and with the “sects and groups” who, although lacking the resources and energy of governments, did not “obstruct in principle or organized form the endeavour” in Palestine and “did what they could” to help save it.39 With the same icy aplomb he had exhibited throughout his address, Charbel then suggested three ways the SNP “betrayed” the Palestine cause:

  by passing invaluable information to the Jews about the state of the Arabs;

  by contributing to the handover of a section of Palestine to the Jews; and

  by secretly communicating with them for a treaty.40