by Adel Beshara
Sa’adah was not sentenced to death for staging a revolution. His execution or assassination was pre-determined before the infamous Al-Jummaizah incident. Contrary to reports published in the Lebanese magazine Al-Jamhur, there was no strong friendship between the two leaders [Zaim and Sa’adeh]. There is a world of difference between a man of morals and conviction and you know what.13
Another dramatic condemnation of Zaim came from his brother-in-law and private secretary at the Presidential Palace, Nadhir Fansah:
I used to be very fond of Zaim and admire his simple nature, charm, piety and compassion, even when his personality took extremist turns due largely to his diabetes. In spite of all this, I consider the Antun Sa’adeh affair the biggest black mark against his short regime. Not a single drop of blood sullied his regime until the moment it was sullied by Antun Sa’adeh’s blood, and then by his own blood and that of his prime minister, Husni al-Barrazi.14
Almost all biographies of this period depict a general revulsion of public feeling over the affair, and a bitter indignation against Zaim for his part in it. Some authors denounced the execution as cruel and degrading due to the nature of the death penalty; others termed Zaim’s betrayal of Sa’adeh as a sad day for Syria and a blot on Arab honor.15 The repulsion that exploded after Zaim’s execution translated into popular sympathy for Sa’adeh and subsequently into significant political gains for his party in Syria. The SSNP went on to win several seats at the next elections. Its position in the Syrian Army gained in strength and it became a key player in Syrian politics until the Malki Affair in 1955.
The Reaction Abroad
Overseas reaction to the news of Sa’adeh’s execution was mixed. In the Western hemisphere it was generally welcomed in the press as a positive step in the global fight against fascism. The New York Times expose of his execution is a case in point:
Anton Saadeh, who tried from the little mountain land of Lebanon to become the Hitler of the Middle East and had maintained branches of his Syrian Popular Party in the United States and Latin America, died early this morning before a firing squad.16
Echoed throughout the American press, the report described Sa’adeh as the “fuehrer” of a “completely Fascist organization,” who “may have been influenced by the Fascist movement in Brazil at that time.”17 For all the talk of individual rights and due process in law, one is struck not only by the paucity of the report but also by the lack of any reference to the unfairness of the trial or to the severity of the sentence. The fact that the verdict was made in advance for the purpose of obtaining a conviction was completely overlooked. Ironically, the flaw was picked up by the Reverand Joseph Awad, a Maronite priest who “favoured outright military alliance between Israel and Lebanon.”18 Awad offered the following qualified response: “Albion Ross’ were the earliest full reports to reach this country of the suppression of Antun Saadeh’s attempt to destroy the independence of Lebanon. Welcome as that news was to us here, to most of us – I must point out – the summary execution of Saadeh seemed a painful departure from Lebanon’s tradition of regard for constitutional human rights.”19 Coming from a staunchly pro-Kataib (Sa’adeh’s arch-rival) figure20 this was truly an important concession and reflected the remarkable transformation that Sa’adeh’s execution was causing in Lebanon and abroad.
British press reports about the saga were equally uneven. As elsewhere, the emphasis was on the transgression rather than justice and the event was stated too exactly to fit the minds of the war-weary British public:
Antoun Saadeh, founder of the National Syrian Party in the Lebanese republic, has been executed after a secret trial by court-martial. The activities of the party culminated in terrorist acts and the formation of armed bands which attacked police stations. It has been vigorously suppressed by the government, who arrested Saadeh and more than 500 adherents.21
Governmental reaction to the saga was muted. Despite its farcical nature, on the whole, Western governments remained tight-lipped relying on continued uncritical acceptance of the official Lebanese version of events, while routinely rejecting all arguments to the contrary. What role, if any, Sa’adeh’s image as a relic of fascism played can only be speculated. Still, the question is interesting. At the very least, Sa’adeh symbolized everything the West opposed – a fact which prompted unfavorable coverage of his case in the foreign press – although he was regarded (and remained for many years after his death) as Britain’s man in the Near East.
One other fact bears recording. Several days after Sa’adeh’s execution, adherents of the Syrian National Party in the Ghanaian capital of Accra cabled Eleanor Roosevelt, Chairman of the Human Rights Commission at the United Nations and a draftee of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, imploring her to act:
In the name of Rights of Man for which you nobly struggled, Syrian Social Nationalists and hundreds of immigrants strongly protest against [the] cruel prosecution and arrest [of] party members and tyrannous execution of leader Antoun Saadeh by Lebanese Government which actions contradict Man’s rights as ratified and accepted by UNO members. Please use your influence for immediate enquiry and stoppage of bloodshed.22
A crusader for social justice who became an advocate of the rights and needs of the poor and the disadvantaged,23 Eleanor Roosevelt conveyed the telegram to the US Department of State. A month later, on 4 August, 1949, she received a tepid reply from the Assistant Secretary, George McGhee, expressing a cavalier attitude of noninvolvement:
According to the information available to the Department, the members of Syrian Popular Party, beginning on July 2 and continuing for several days, staged an armed rebellion against the Lebanese Government. The leader of the party, Antoun Saadeh, was captured on July 7, tried by court martial and executed on the morning of July 8. Although the action taken may be considered of a summary nature, the Department feels that the Government of Lebanon was acting within the sovereign rights in suppressing this revolutionary activity which aimed to overthrow the Government by force, as well as in punishing those who took part in it. It would not be appropriate for the Government of the United States to protest this action, which is a strictly internal matter within the jurisdiction of the Lebanese Government.24
Elsewhere, in the Lebanese diaspora, the mood was one of bewilderment and disbelief. A telegraphic memo signed by two hundred and sixty prominent Syro-Lebanese figures in Brazil – artists, writers, professors, students, journalists and industrialists – expressing regret at the conduct of the trial was cabled to and published in the Lebanese daily an-Nahar. The message deplored the execution as a blatant violation of Sa’adeh’s basic human rights and international conventions “stipulated and declared by the United Nation.”25 An-Nahar deleted the condemnatory passage from the memo to avoid legal action. On another front, reports reached the Lebanese Foreign Ministry in July 1949 that the Lebanese Legation in Argentina was attacked by local Lebanese expatriates appalled by the government’s execution of Sa’adeh: the minister plenipotentiary in Buenos Aires, however, denied the reports.26
The Reaction Inside Lebanon
In a bid to pre-empt public criticism of Sa’adeh’s trial and execution, the Khoury regime issued on 9 July a public statement presenting its version of events. The statement sought to present the SSNP and Antun Sa’adeh at once as enemies of Lebanon and Arabism in order to placate various components of the Lebanese population, Christians as well as Muslims:
Freedom of opinion and freedom of association were among the leading principles adopted by the Lebanese government in the era of independence and national rule. The government demonstrated its devotion to the spirit of these principles by authorizing political institutions, parties and organizations to hold their meetings and engage in their activities within the framework of the law. Although the Syrian National Party, headed by Antun Sa’adeh since its establishment, never embraced the Lebanese national creed, or Arabism, the government’s tolerance, first in allowing the SSNP leader to come back to Lebanon from Argent
ina, and then in permitting the party to resume its activities and issue a newspaper, stemmed from its desire to respect freedoms and political beliefs on the one hand, and also from the pledges made by the SNP leadership that their political activities would not contravene the existing Lebanese entity and correct Lebanese belief.27
The customary depiction of Sa’adeh as a traitor hell-bent on destroying the Lebanese State was regurgitated but in still vaguer terms: “The Social National Party had been steered by its leader to destroy the Lebanese entity as a preliminary step towards a coup . . .”28 The statement’s wildly chaotic presentation of the relevant material manages to conceal the circumstances that led to the insurrection. Instead, it concentrated on the government’s own response to it, while scrupulously keeping more significant information under wraps. In terms of content, the statement signaled no substantive departure from the fragmentary reports published earlier in the press. It scrupulously avoided any mention of trial procedure. Judicial violations were cleverly concealed behind relevant articles of the military penal code to convey a sense of legitimacy and credibility to the government’s action. Basic details about the appellate stage were also deliberately falsified to shield the government from criticism. The statement recounted familiar judicial procedures to give both finality and sanctity to procedures and an appearance of law and order to the regime. Its description is not supported by the evidence, however.
The statement gave rise to much criticism by segments of Lebanese public opinion as well as by the comparatively free domestic press. Virtually every important newspaper in Lebanon condemned the government and ridiculed the trial. The tone was set by Kamil Mruwi of the generally pro-Solh al-Hayat newspaper. Less than twenty-four hours after the publication of the government’s statement, he deplored the circumstances of the affair and the legal facade that the Government was hiding behind with a fiery front-page article:
Al Hayat yesterday published the first government communiqué concerning the execution of Antun Sa’adeh. With all due respect to the explanations mentioned therein, popular opinion about the case has not changed. A case that has resulted in the arrest of thousands of young men, death or injury to many, an intervention from the army, and finally death sentences, such a case calls for more than merely a hundred lines to be pronounced by the government after a whole month of silence.29
Ghassan Tueini, the distinguished editor and publisher of an-Nahar, delivered a stinging and eloquent riposte in which he described the execution of the SSNP leader as outright assassination: “The people are not sure whether Antun Sa’adeh was executed or killed, whether it was a trial or a conspiracy that took place.”30 He added:
The authorities have succeeded in arresting Sa’adah, giving him a speedy trial, sentencing him, and executing him, in such a speed which left most people dumbfounded and bewildered. It was difficult to comprehend the reasons for this most unusual and un-called for action, especially that the rebellion was successfully and swiftly suppressed. Even Sa’adeh’s arch-enemies were at a loss of words to justify the Government’s action. Those same enemies are now saying, “What a great tragedy”. Although the Government wanted to get rid of the man as speedily as possible, fearing he would bring terror to Lebanon, yet, by its rash action it has created a great giant, stronger than Sa’adeh ever was, and has made of him a martyr, not only to his followers but to those who never wished him better than death.31
In 2004, speaking to an audience of SSNP members who gathered at the Issam Fares Auditorium in Beirut to celebrate what would have been Sa’adeh’s 100th birthday, Tueini reflected on the circumstances of his article: “On that horrible night, I was still at the an-Nahar offices with Gibran Hayek and other worried reporters like us, when a young officer came into the room . . . and described to us Sa’adeh’s execution in detail. So I erased all that I had already written and I wrote with Gibran Narawi the story of the execution, minute by minute.”32
As more details about Sa’adeh’s killing emerged, other newspapers which had initially supported the government now joined the anti-regime campaign. On 20 July, the chief editor of Al-Sayyad newsmagazine published a moving and sympathetic article on Sa’adeh. Its author, Said Frayha, depicted Sa’adeh as brave and dignified as any man could hope to be in the last moment of his life: “He accepted the death sentence as though he was accepting an invitation to lunch.”33
The criticism continued. On 30 September journalist Elias Abdallah Khoury savaged the government in an article entitled “Lebanon’s incumbent government before public opinion.”34 Questioning both the wisdom and legality of the government, the author accused key members (Khoury, Solh and Majid Irslan, the then Minister of Defense) of a crime of international proportions: “Working in cahoots with one another, those tyrants killed Sa’adah, the mentor, in such a way that cannot be accepted by any sound-thinking mind, one that can only be undertaken by people who still follow the manners and behavior of the bygone Turkish era.”35 The author likened the Lebanese leadership to the Nazi Germans and melodramatically visualized them standing before an international tribunal to account for their “atrocious” crime:
If those three “prominent” persons were brought before judges like those who sentenced the German criminals in Nuremberg to death by hanging, what would their sentence be after they have perpetrated the worst crime the world has ever witnessed? There is no doubt in my mind that these judges would pass a law with great speed, faster even than the time it took to execute Sa’adeh, to have them executed by more horrific methods than hanging, thus allowing justice to take its course with these exceptional criminals.36
An interesting sidelight in the article is the affirmation, probably for the first time after his execution, of Sa’adeh’s loyalty to Lebanon: “Sa’adeh was never an enemy of the Lebanese State. The truth is that he loved Lebanon more than anything else, and never did put anything before it. He was a man of an honorable cause, but was conspired against and killed.”37 In comparison, the Lebanese leadership was “indeed barbaric, unfit to rule the cultured people of Lebanese.”38 The author added, “Yet, what is to be expected from people who snatched power through forged elections? Stifling people’s freedom, dragging their pride through the mud and executing free people whenever they pleased and whichever way they pleased are the only things to be expected. They are tyrants akin to Jamal, the thug.”39
Men of religion also added their voices – and names – to the chorus of condemnation. While continuing the attack on the fairness of the proceedings, the reverend Mikhael Dhaybah focused on the human tragedy in the Sa’adeh saga – the decision to deny the defendant “the right to see his daughters and wife under the pretext that they were not in Beirut.”40 Exposing the trial as a brazenly political exercise, he described the execution as a disgraceful act by a regime that now stands at the lowest end of human civilization. Justice and political tolerance of dissidents and rebels, he pointed out, were observed better under European occupation than they were under national government. “A few days ago,” he confessed, “I expressed my displeasure at Father Awad’s criticism of Lebanon’s government and the publisher of al-Huda. Yet, it presently became clear to me that they were both right in their sharp criticism of that wayward government.”41
As always, there was an exception to the rule. The Lebanese Phalange greeted the execution with all the fanfare of a grand public occasion. Hours before the execution, the editor of its daily al-Amal wrote, “The hanging ropes, the blindfolds, the columns, and the pits are all but for this moment . . . we must not delay it any further.”42 Not content, the Phalange proceeded to ask the Khoury regime to close down the American University of Beirut (AUB) because “it had been a center of agitation of Antun Sa’adeh.”43 At one point, al-Amal described the AUB as
. . . a slum that stinks with intrigues against Lebanon and her existence . . . [where] all those who conspire against us from our neighbors have learned hatred of Lebanon and methods of working against her.44
The
Lebanese press judged the remark as distasteful and furiously attacked the Lebanese Phalange over the matter. It was dismissed as a symptom of its narrow sectarian mentality and enduring Francophilia:
The Falange is one of the principal representatives politically of the largest religious group in the country, the Maronite Catholics, who are strong supporters of the historic Roman Catholic French University of Saint Joseph . . . During the French mandate the American University’s student body acquired a reputation of being the center of opposition to the mandate while Saint Joseph was not only a French institution but received a French Government subsidy and was a great center in this part of the world of Catholic French culture. The American University, representative of Anglo-Saxon culture, was originally founded by Protestants.45
A week later, the Lebanese Phalange recanted and its leader Pierre Gemayyel formally apologized to AUB President, Stephen Penrose, for the “misunderstanding.”46 Its newspaper, al-Amal, performed a somersault that same week saying, “We would be barbarians to ask the closing of the American University.”47
Meanwhile, the line of disgruntled Lebanese was taken up in Parliament. Much of the campaign, though, was waged by vocal opposition leaders through the forum of an-Nahar, as well as in other, less frequently published periodicals. First up was the presidential aspirant Camille Chamoun.48 More than any other Lebanese politician of the time, Chamoun ideally fitted the role of an arbiter on the Sa’adeh saga due to his even relationship with both the regime and the SNP. He was a liberal politician, an Establishment figure, and a fervent Lebanonist, which precluded the possibility of bias or compassion toward Sa’adeh. As part of a political serial published in an-Nahar, Chamoun blasted the regime (ahd) for its mismanagement of Sa’adeh’s trial and even claimed that the military tribunal which condemned Sa’adeh had failed to prove the main charges against him, “his connection to a foreign state and contact with the Jews of Israel.”49 What is interesting about Chamoun’s exposé is that it gave great prominence to Sa’adeh’s dedication to Lebanon and to the constructive role that his party played during the independence fervor of 1943 and subsequent years: