by Adel Beshara
Sa’adeh then leaned toward the Reverend and whispered in his ears these exact words: “Swear to me, revered Father, by all that you hold dear to announce everything you saw and everything you heard from me to everyone.”29 According to Said Taki ad-Din, Sa’adeh told Barbari, “I don’t care if I die; it’s what I die for that matters. I don’t count the years that I lived; I count the deeds I did. They will execute me tonight, but believers in my creed will be victorious and their victory will be vengeance for my death.”30 It is noteworthy that Az-Zaman similarly quoted Sa’adeh at those moments, saying “Antun Sa’adeh has now died, but his name will be immortalized and his party will live on.”31
The Execution
At 2.30 in the morning, Sa’adeh was handcuffed and led out to the prison’s courtyard and then to a waiting military jeep. As he marched out, the night wardens locked up the peepholes on the cells, a custom practiced when a prisoner is about to be condemned to death, to conceal Sa’adeh’s identity from his imprisoned sympathizers. One of them, however, got up to investigate and fainted when he realized that the person at the centre of the commotion was Sa’adeh himself:
I heard his footsteps . . . these are surely his footsteps, I could never mistake them. It was exactly their pace as if he was coming to the social function in my house . . . or parading the members at a party occasion, not as if he is walking to his execution. Fearful silence subdued the place. I visualized him before me, and mumbled, ‘Long live Syria, long live Sa’adeh.’ I fainted as teardrops inflamed in my eyes.32
Sa’adeh walked to his death “with strong quiet steps and smiling unperturbed as though an execution was something that he had undergone many times before. He did not burst out into hatred or vengefulness or bluster like somebody hiding fear.”33 As he approached the jeep he saw a white coffin on his right. For a third time he asked to see his wife and three children, but was again denied. “His features sharpened and in that brief instant of that night, alone, the lightning of emotions appeared through the storm of his manhood.”34 He climbed into the waiting jeep, flanked by six soldiers and an army officer. A combined detachment of the Lebanese Army and gendarmerie guarded the five-minute route while the convoy, consisting of mounted police and several military vehicles, as well as a separate jeep for the coffin, made its way to the execution site. No journalists or members of the public were allowed in the vicinity of the route and soldiers were ordered to shoot at any movement.
When Sa’adeh saw the execution post he uttered, “I was anticipating this fate from the very first moment I was arrested.”35 He again protested against the swiftness of the trial and execution, but all to no avail. He then walked to the death post “calmly, showing no anxieties or irritability and wore the white gown.”36 Captain Najjar, the military physician, stepped forward to examine Sa’adeh’s heart and pulse. Sa’adeh gave him a friendly smile and sarcastically said, “Is my pulse beating faster out of fear?” When Captain Najjar had finished his medical examination, Lieutenant Braydi moved closer to blindfold Sa’adeh with a scarf and the following exchange took place:37
Sa’adeh: “Why are you covering my eyes? Seconds and it will be all over. I told you I don’t have a fear of death.”
Lieutenant Braydi: “It is the law.”
Sa’adeh: “I respect the law.” Lieutenant Braydi then asked Sa’adeh to kneel down.
Sa’adeh: “I have no fear of bullets. Can’t we do away with these formalities?”
Lieutenant Braydi: “It is the law.” He then tied Sa’adeh to the post.
Sa’adeh: “Thank you.”
After the court-clerk read the death sentence, Sa’adeh gave him an otherworldly smile and thanked him.
The death squad of twelve men chosen from the elite corps lined up. Sa’adeh was heard complaining that the gravel under his knees was paining them and asked the attending officers if it was possible to remove it and they did. He thanked them twice. Lieutenant Braydi then shouted, “Fire.” According to one eye-witness, the order was given in French (feu) and Sa’adeh was heard saying loudly “say nar,” its equivalent in Arabic. As they fired, he cried out “Tahya Suria” (long live Syria). It was a perfect last line for Sa’adeh, typical in its combination of ideological fervor and the cause of his life-struggle.
Seconds later, Sa’adeh was dead, “his head hanging down and his right lung splattered out and his left arm shattered: it was now only held to his shoulder by some skin so that it hung down.”38 In keeping with execution customs, Lieutenant Braydi then stepped forward, placed his pistol against Sa’adeh’s head, and fired one shot. Five minutes later, after Captain Najjar had examined the body and declared Sa’adeh dead, the corpse was untied and placed in the coffin.
The convoy headed directly to the cemetery to bury Sa’adeh without a funeral. “They were about to bury [him] without any prayer had I not shouted out.”39 The State Commissioner for these matters, Hassan al-Zein, who had the arduous task of arranging a speedy burial, reluctantly concurred. “Pray but make it snappy,” he told the Reverend.40 A short funeral was administered by Reverend Barbari, assisted by a second priest. The only other person allowed into the church was the Justice of the Peace. During the funeral service, “blood dribbled from coffin which, by all accounts, was poorly-built from . . . timber.”41
Sa’adeh was laid to rest in a remote part of the cemetery. A wooden cross, assembled on the spot, was placed on top of his grave and security guards were placed around it to prevent any person from approaching the site. Four days after the execution, Sa’adeh’s next of kin, Nayfi Mujais, attempted to have the corpse exhumed for reburial in the family grave, but the Minister for Interior Affairs rejected her request: she was told that the corpse could not be exhumed before a lapse of one year. On 13 January, 1950, five months after the execution, Sa’adeh’s supporters secretly moved the corpse to a more decent section of the cemetery. Shortly afterwards, George Abdul Massih, who became the first Chairman of the SSNP after Sa’adeh’s execution, allegedly removed the corpse and placed it in his house in Beit Meri.42 Meanwhile, a proper grave was erected in the cemetery where Sa’adeh was originally buried by party members who contest Abdul Massih’s account: the grave has become a rallying-point for his supporters and on 8 July of every year, at the precise time of Sa’adeh’s execution, they roll up in droves to pay their respect to him.
The Litigation Continues
After executing Sa’adeh, the government decided to administer heavy doses of coercion against his followers. With an additional force of one hundred and fifty new recruits to the gendarmerie43 it launched a nation-wide campaign arresting anyone suspected of aiding the rebellion or demonstrating any empathy for Sa’adeh. Hundreds were rounded-up and tried in tribunals set up specifically to deal with the suspects.44 Lebanese General Security Forces even crossed to Syria to collect twenty Lebanese nationals who had recently been detained by the Syrian police for taking part in pro-SSNP activities.45
The litigation against the suspects began in earnest on 16 July. First up were those who took part in the rebellion. Over two days, sixty-eight of them were tried in a military tribunal on charges varying from public disorder to taking part in an armed rebellion to attempting to overthrow the government forcibly.46 Since martial law was still in force, the tribunal operated under accelerated procedures and without right of appeal. The trial was public but attendance was restricted. As before, the case for the prosecution was presented by Youssef Charbel, who delivered an accusatory political speech about Sa’adeh and his national ideology, and described the accused as victims of Sa’adeh’s political opportunism. The prosecutor thus sought to put the defendants’ political views on trial, but refused to consider the case political. Treated as ordinary criminals, the defendants were handicapped by the court’s denial of most of their arguments. In other ways, too, the defendants were at a disadvantage. The courtroom was overcrowded and its atmosphere was not conducive to a sober analysis of evidence.
The trial lasted a mere fifte
en hours. Twelve of the accused were sentenced to death and fifty-three to imprisonment with hard labour varying from life to three years. Of the twelve who received the death sentence, six had their sentence commuted to life imprisonment and the other six were executed at approximately the same morning hour and precise spot where Sa’adeh was executed.47 A press release issued by the Bureau for Propaganda, Publication and Information in Beirut, described how President Khoury evaluated the execution files:
The Board of Pardon spent two full days studying the cases of the twelve condemned to death. Likewise, His Excellency the President also spent a fairly long time going through the files and examining the sentences one by one and the result was condemnation of six to death and commutation to life imprisonment with hard labour for the other six. These are: Mustafa Said Mula’ib, Youssef Hussein Qa’id Bey, Khalil Yaacoub al-Tawil, Said Abdul Raouf Hammad, Nseir Saleh Raya, Fayez Fahd Zein. It was learnt further that the reasons that caused His Excellency to commute the sentence of the six are due to the fact that Mustafa Said Mula’ib had lost his cousin during the rebellion and so the government, out of mercy, does not want to cause the family any further hardship; that Youssef Hussein Qa’id Bey had been cooperative in the investigation which helped to clarify the case; that Khalil Yaacoub al-Tawil benefited from his slender age of few months past his eighteenth; that Said Abdul Raouf Hammad was under-age and his brother is among the six to be executed and so it wouldn’t be fair to execute two brothers for the same incident; and that Nseir Saleh Raya and Fayez Fahd Zein did not play a vital role in the rebellion.48
While President Khoury was considering the fate of the accused twelve, a large demonstration was taking place in front of the Defense Ministry and the presidential palace calling for commutation of all death sentences.49 It probably explains why Khoury was mildly compassionate towards the accused six and why this time he was more observant of the rules of the appellate process. Nonetheless, it should not deflect from the cruelty that was subsequently administered against the condemned six: denied the right to see their immediate relatives, despite repeated pleas from outside the prison walls, they were each pierced with twelve bullets in the body and a single one to the head and left to rot where they were executed.50 According to an-Nahar, the six faced the firing squad with “exceptional courage.”51
A week later a second group of rebels was brought to trial over attacks on gendarmerie stations. And again the defense counsels for the accused attempted to argue the case on political grounds, pointing out that the defendants were members of a recognized political party: they were unsuccessful.52 To make its case more serious, the prosecution tried to link the defendants with “terrorism” which, under Lebanese Law, are criminal, not political acts. The tribunal voted in favour of prosecution and sentenced most defendants to long prison terms with hard labour. Two rebels tried in absentia were given the death penalty.53 Three defendants, arrested for collecting two hundred Lebanese pounds in aid of the families and children of their comrades54 were adjudged not guilty.55
Next up was the trial of those adherents of the Syrian National Party who were detained after the Jummaizeh incident. Nineteen in total, they were tried under Article 119 of the Lebanese military law, which stipulated the imprisonment of anyone caught with illegal weapons or explosions. The central issue was a basket of broken down hand-grenades found in the printing building at the time of the incident. The accused denied any knowledge of the basket and were rather bewildered by the charge. Their defense attorney,56 a man with a reputation for republican reliability, raised fundamental legal questions about the admissibility of the evidence. He furthermore told the tribunal that the basket may have been the work of police agents in a classic “Reichstag Fire”57 mould to show that government propaganda about an SNP revolution being imminent was actually true.58 The tribunal refused to accept his logic, but returned light sentences: almost half of the accused nineteen, including future scholars Labib Zuwiyya Yamak and George Atiyah, were adjudged not guilty, and the rest were jailed for two months and banned from carrying firearms for five years.59 Ironically, the accused were re-detained upon their release, “after the authorities were alerted by the Bureau of General Security that the offenders were active functionaries in the [Syrian National] Party and therefore should be incarcerated for the time being.”60
But the end was not yet in sight. The Lebanese government had one other opportunity to vent its anger. On 30 August, the functionary corps of the party was brought to trial en masse for acts unrelated to the planned uprising. In fact, none of them had taken part in the actual rebellion. The trial itself, though, was a sensation in that the weight of some of the evidence presented in earlier trials was carefully evaluated and shown to have been completely mishandled through tampering or falsification. If this evidence of the prosecution had been offered at Sa’adeh’s trial before a learned court, the great bulk of it would have been excluded either on the grounds of incompetence or irrelevance. First of all, it was revealed that Sa’adeh was not an enemy of the Lebanese State and that his party never intended to use force against the established system. This fact emerged during proceedings not from the actual testimonies of the defendants, whose opinions on this issue mattered but a little, but from the testimony of Ni’met Thabet, the ex-president of the Syrian National Party, who Sa’adeh had expelled from the party in 1948 for propagating a Lebanese-accommodating policy. Thabet bluntly told the tribunal that Sa’adeh never devised a plan for the destruction of the Lebanese state but was merely appalled by the government’s duplicity:
The late Antun Sa’adeh always insisted on an unequivocal propagation of the party’s ideology defending this stance on the ground that if some Lebanese are allowed to speak openly about an Arab nationalism why they can’t be allowed to speak of a Syrian nationalism. I tried to convince him that the political situation in the country allowed one but not the other, but he was not convinced.61
The prosecution tried to capitalize on Thabet’s disagreement with Sa’adeh to extort an unsympathetic testimony on the SNP, but to no effect. Thabet told the tribunal that his dispute with Sa’adeh was never over Lebanon’s right of existence but over strategies and priority options.62 He well noted that the French mandatory authorities found no evidence to indict Sa’adeh on subversion or treason against the Lebanese state. To the profound displeasure of the prosecution, Thabet then gave a flattering opinion of Sa’adeh’s attitude towards Palestine, thus contradicting the allegation of a Sa’adeh-Zionist pact.
Secondly, we learned that the evidence on the basis of which Sa’adeh was convicted for high treason, namely his collaboration with the Jewish State, was completely baseless. This was the highlight of proceedings. It began when one of the two primary suspects in the saga, Mohammad Jamil Yunis, took the stand to answer for his part in the conspiracy:
The Court’s Chairman: “Did you act as an intermediary between Sa’adeh and the Jews?”
Yunis: “I have no knowledge of this at all.”
Chairman: “It can be inferred from the investigation and testimonies of witnesses that you made contact in Tarshiha through [one] Jabar al-Dahesh with the Jewish leadership to plot jointly against the Lebanese entity and to destroy the status quo in it, and this is confirmed in documents and testimonies.”
Yunis: “I demand that you read out the document in full.”
The Chairman here produced a testimony by one Muhammad Araka and read out several paragraphs from it. He then told Yunis that Araka’s testimonial file contains a letter written by him. At Yunis’s insistence, the Chairman holds out a copy of the letter and reads it out loud.
Defense counsel Mughabghab: “There are two primary witnesses involved here, Muhammad Araka and Ni’mat Thabet. I demand they be brought to the court for questioning.”
The Prosecution: “There is no need for another testimony from Muhammad Araka as he has already provided one to the police investigator.”
Yunis: “Araka testified under political pressu
re.”
Defense counsel Mughabghab: “I insist on having Araka brought to the court.”
Defense Counsel Taki ad-Deen: “I am rather bewildered that the prosecution has not charged Araka for making contacts and negotiating with the Zionists.”
Prosecution: “The answer is in Araka’s testimony itself.”
Defense Counsel Lahhoud: “Yunis requested that the document be read out in full and I second his request.”63
A letter, ostensibly written by Yunis to Sa’adeh about his [Yunis’] trip to Palestine, was produced on the spot and read out by the Chairman.
Yunis: “This is only one part of the letter. I implore you to read the other part.”
The Prosecution: “There is no need for that. It suffices that the defendant has confessed to having made contact with the Jews.”
Defense Counsel Lahhoud: “Meeting with Jews is not a sufficient ground for conviction as many people meet Jews and are not deemed criminal. How do we know whether or not Muhammad Yunis met the Jews to spy on them or for them? I therefore insist once again on a full reading of the document because it would be sacrilege if we say “There is no God” and omit the second part of the holy verse.”
The Prosecution: “I believe that the allegation as stated in Araka’s testimony stands. At any rate, we are here to prosecute him on the charge of plotting against the Lebanese State. As for the Jewish issue, it is merely to inform the public opinion who Muhammad Yunis really is.”
Defense Counsel Lahhoud: “I insist on a full reading of the document.”
Defense Counsel Mughabghab: “I second the notion and call on Araka and members of the High Arab Committee to come forward to testify about this person.”
The Chairman: “Yunis is accused of many things, and this charge is only one of them.”