Outright Assassination
Page 25
2. A Clash of Personality
This thesis was first raised by Kamal Jumblatt in his 1949 interpellation to the Lebanese parliament.17 It rests on two premises: (1) that responsibility for Sa’adeh’s execution lies squarely with Riad Solh and (2) that the saga bears the imprint of a personal vendetta orchestrated by Solh to remove Sa’adeh out of his way. The role of individual personalities in politics will always be a contentious subject. There is good reason to suppose, however, that in this case personal differences served as an important source of friction between Solh and Sa’adeh.
According to Jumblatt, the first acrimony toward Sa’adeh appeared in 1946 when the SNP leader sought to recover his personal travel documents to return to Lebanon:
I was the minister of economy then. It was therefore possible for me to keep tabs on this conflict as it passed from one stage to the next. I may have missed out on some of the details, but I will try to link events as much as possible. When Sa’adah tried to come back home, the Foreign Ministry refused for a long time to grant him a visa on the orders of the then Prime Minister, Mr. Riad Solh, and that is clearly an arbitrary act sanctioned neither by international conventions nor by Lebanese law.18
Solh did, in fact, play a confused but stubbornly delaying action to deter Sa’adeh from returning. He exercised undeniable pressure on the Foreign Ministry and the Lebanese Legation in Argentina and utilized bureaucratic red tape to achieve his goal. In unison with this, in 1944, Solh cut a deal with the party’s home-based leadership in which he agreed to grant the SNP a license to operate freely and legitimately in Lebanon in return for major concessions from the party, including changes to its name and political platform. The SNP had to re-orient itself to Lebanese realities, as defined in the National Pact, dump Syrian statehood as an objective, and abandon its confrontational style. Solh also demanded that Sa’adeh be excluded from the party’s leadership:
Contacts took place between the chairman of the Supreme Council in the National Social Party and the Prime Minister to settle the issue. This all took place in my presence and with my help. His Excellency, Prime Minister Solh, all the time insisted that Sa’adeh should be excluded from management of the party.19
Behind this assault on Sa’adeh stood complex emotions connected with Solh’s self-image as leader par excellence of the unionist movement in Lebanon. Sa’adeh seemed to Solh little more than a poseur who represented a sentimental fiction of unity that stood in the way of his own union schemes. The Lebanese premier never quite rid himself of the dislike he felt for Sa’adeh after their first and probably last encounter in 1936 when the SNP leader, who “was not a man who would bend or ingratiate himself,” refused to “pay tribute to Solh or pledge his loyalty to him” in keeping with the political ritual of the day. Nor, it seemed, was Solh able to forgive Sa’adeh for siding with Kheir Din Al-Ahdab in the 1937 parliamentary elections which, according to Abdullah Qubarsi, may have cost Solh the victory he required to claim the Lebanese premiership.20
Sa’adeh’s judgmental attitude towards Lebanon’s independence has also been advanced as a likely reason for Solh’s aversion:
After 1943, His Excellency blamed Sa’adeh for saying that independence was gained with the aid of British spears. However, Solh wanted people to believe that he alone was the hero of independence. He thus regarded this [remark] as a personal insult aimed at him personally. His Excellency would constantly repeat before those who were prepared to listen, “Get rid of him for me, gosh!”21
Apparently, when the issue of Sa’adeh’s return was broached, Solh exploded into a rage that “left everyone of us [in the cabinet] completely amazed and baffled.”22 His strident tone came out even more sharply after Sa’adeh delivered his inflammatory speech on 2 March, 1947. The Lebanese stalwart was offended by Sa’adeh’s aloof and crude assault on Lebanon’s nascent statehood and came to regard his remarks as an attack on his person. He was offended all the more by Sa’adeh’s swift reinstatement as undisputed leader of the SNP and by the collective expulsion from the party of his (Solh’s) sympathizers in one single blow. Solh counteracted this action of Sa’adeh by encouraging the expellees to form a separate political party, but the scheme backfired and the SNP reconsolidated firmly around Sa’adeh.
Even outside the party the impact of Sa’adeh’s personality and political views was considerable. His tactical flair and lightning intelligence, his rousing personal appeal, his defiance of the government, and his success with the Lebanese press irritated Solh to the core. It brought into focus Solh’s intellectual inadequacy and arrogance and exposed him as a caricature of the tragic reaction of the old school. Hence Jumblatt’s characterization of the animosity as the outcome of an inferiority complex in Solh:
Through his personal capabilities and knowledge, Sa’adeh had singlehandedly managed to create a massive and highly organized party, a state within the state as was noted by [public prosecutor] Charbel, comprising many members from various countries and sects. Without help, he knew how to breathe in them the spirit of nationalism and the will to fight. In contrast, the pan-Arab leaders have had to resort to churches, priests, threadbare and decadent expressions, as well as sectarian partisanship to spread their ideas and control the masses.23
The situation was gravely aggravated by two other closely related issues. The first issue grew out of the 1948 Palestine war. The doubts that the war raised in the people’s minds about the competence of the old leadership in Lebanon translated into gains for Sa’adeh. He was able subsequently to expand his party into urban centers that had up to that time been solid Solh territory and to lure to the party prominent Beiruti Sunnis, including Muhammad Baalbaki, editor of the Beirut daily Kul Shay and one of Solh’s most trusted backers. As Yamak has observed:
. . . the traditional political leaders and particularly Riyad al-Sulh and his followers were greatly concerned about its [i.e., the SSNP] relative success among those segments of the population whom they regarded as their natural supporters. It is thus believed that the idea to get rid of Sa’adeh and the SSNP began to take form about that time, i.e., toward the end of 1948.24
The second issue is what may be described as a guarded desire in Solh to prevent Sa’adeh from claiming the nationalist mantle. Historically, Sa’adeh and Solh shared certain general common characteristics: both men made their political debut as Syrian nationalists; both had a secular outlook; both initially had rejected Lebanon as a nation-state; and both had Arabist aspirations of one form or another. But whereas Sa’adeh remained ideologically committed to his national and secular ideals, Solh abandoned his unionist leadership role and assimilated into Lebanon’s sectarian political system. Solh continued to regard himself as the foremost representative of Arab nationalism in Lebanon, but after becoming Lebanon’s first premier when the little country became independent in 1943, his dedication to Lebanon overshadowed his faith in pan-Arabism. As Time magazine succinctly noted, “Solh stood for Lebanon’s complete independence.”25 It is not entirely impossible, then, that Solh became indignant of Sa’adeh for undermining his popularity inside the Sunni community from which he drew substantial support and for overtaking him in the national leadership role that he, Solh, had once held but then gave up to become a leader in a small country.
Whatever the truth, in Lebanon at least, the “personality clash” hypothesis remains a talking point to this day. Many Lebanese accept it because personal feud is a dominant feature of their political life. Personal feuding in politics is of course common to almost all political systems. The British historian Correlli Barnett once said, “Any political rivalry, whether it is within a party or between parties, is almost always rooted in mutual personal dislike.”26 Personal rivalries have occurred throughout history even when they were dressed up as ideological differences. In Victorian Britain, for example, rival prime ministers, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, “loathed each other’s guts.”27 Somebody once asked Disraeli if he knew the difference between a disaster and a catastro
phe. Disraeli thought for a few minutes then explained that a disaster would occur if Mr Gladstone ever fell into the River Thames. A catastrophe would happen, he continued, if someone should pull him out. The Indian parliamentary system, which followed the British model, had its own famous political feuds, the most famous one being between Krishna Menon and Acharya Kripalani, both veteran parliamentarians. Kripalani, who hated Menon, contested against him in every election and lost. However he would win an election later and come to parliament and then would give Menon a harrowing time in the parliament during the question-answer sessions. In one of those verbal duels, Kripalani was harassing Menon (who was then the defense minister) for not sharing adequate information on a defense deal. Menon, who was well known for an acid tongue, retorted “I can give the respected member all the information he needs, but I am sorry, I cannot give him the intelligence to understand the issue.”28 They remained sworn enemies until their death.
Occasionally, personal rivalries have led to actual physical violence and death. Was Elizabeth I’s sending Mary of Scotland to her death much different than the murder of Trotsky by Stalin, except for being dressed up as an official action of the state? Former Uruguayan president, founder of newspaper El Dia and Colorado Party leader José Batlle y Ordóñez and founder of El Pais newspaper and Blanco Party member Washington Beltran traded jabs through their respective editorials until Batlle accused Beltran of libel. Not willing to retract, Beltran accepted a duel. Batlle killed him with a bullet to the heart on 2 April, 1920. And who could pass over the political feuds between two of the founders of the United States, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr? After Hamilton stymied Burr’s attempts to become president in 1800 and governor of New York in 1804, their mutual animosity culminated in a duel that saw the Vice-President of the United States, Burr, shoot and kill the Secretary of the Treasury.29 Strangely enough, Burr is not the only Vice-President to have shot somebody while in office.
In the Solh–Sa’adeh dispute opinions are divided over the importance of their personal rivalry. For Kamal Jumblatt it was the “principal factor that accelerated the plot to bring down the SNP, and Sa’adeh in particular.” Others have placed it alongside domestic and regional causes. The hypothesis is not altogether implausible if it can be shown that Solh was the key player behind Sa’adeh’s demise. Here it is worth quoting Zisser at length:
Such reactions, as well as various attempts made by PPS members to take revenge for the death of their leader, caused Khuri to deny any responsibility for Sa’ada’s trial and disclaim any involvement in his execution. In his memoirs, he depicts his own role as altogether passive, saying that Sulh alone had conducted the whole affair, informing him only at the very last moment. He relates how Sulh woke him up at 2.30 a.m. on 7 July 1949, telling him over the phone that “Sa’ada has been seized and is being held at the base camp of the gendarmerie. I was greatly surprised . . . for as far as I knew Sa’ada was at Damascus enjoying Za’im’s protection.”
As against this, people close to Sulh painted a very different picture. They asserted that Sulh had been against the death sentence; it was only under pressure from Khuri that he had given consent for the execution to be carried out. ‘Azm noted in his memoirs that Sulh later admitted to his friends that this had been a mistake, made solely in order not to spite Khuri. It was, Sulh conceded, one of the three major mistakes of his career (the other two being his support for Khuri’s re-election as president and his consent to the dissolution of the customs union with Syria). But ‘Azm’s convoluted relations with Sulh should caution us not to take his version too literally.
Viewing the picture as a whole, there can be no doubt that Sulh was the prime mover in the series of events ending with Sa’ada’s death. He had thought of him as an instrument in the hands of Za’im, the man he hated most. But then, if Za’im and Sa’ada posed a threat to anyone in Lebanon, it was to Khuri rather than to Sulh. Moreover, Khuri was in control of the army and the security services who in turn were in charge of Sa’ada’s extradition, trial and execution. Therefore, he must have had at least as much of a say in the matter as Sulh. It is thus extremely difficult to accept Khoury’s claim that Solh informed him only at such a late date of a matter so important to both their careers and to their country.30
Andrew Rathmell, in his terse study of the Sa’adeh affair, puts a different spin to the rivalry, but arrives at a comparable conclusion:
At the time the Lebanese government was in the hands of President Bechara al-Khuri and President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) Riyad al-Sulh. Khuri had been elected to the Presidency in 1943 and was widely regarded as ‘Britain’s man’ as the United Kingdom had backed him against his pro-French rival Emile Edde. Sa’adah clashed with Khuri soon after his return as he opposed Khuri’s plans to amend the constitution to enable him to serve a second term as President when his mandate expired in 1949. The antagonism between Sulh and Sa’adah was more deep-rooted. In 1937 Sa’adah had backed Khayr al-Din al-Ahdab’s government against Sulh’s challenge. More fundamentally, the SSNP’s ideology was in total contradiction to the terms of the National Pact which Sulh had been instrumental in negotiating in 1943. Under this informal arrangement, the Lebanese Sunni elite had agreed to accept the existence of a Greater Lebanon separate from Syria in return for Christian acceptance of the country’s position in the Arab world.
During 1948 tensions between the SSNP and the government increased as Sa’adah intensified his criticism of Sulh’s government for its failure to deal with Israel, the existence of which Sa’adah intransigently opposed. These tensions often spilled over into violence as gendarmes broke up SSNP rallies. By early 1949 Sa’adah was convinced that Sulh was out to destroy his party and had come to believe that co-existence between the SSNP and the government with its ‘feudal allies’ was impossible and that it was ‘them or us’.31
Solh’s supporters in Lebanon disagree. They argue that since the President was the person responsible for the ratification of the death penalty, the blame for Sa’adeh’s death lay squarely with Khoury not Solh.
It is difficult with all these claims and counter-claims to determine the soundness of this hypothesis, but it is interesting. Of course, a fuller and more detailed study would have to take into account the attitudes and perspectives of both Solh and Khoury and other key politicians who had an innate interest in Sa’adeh’s destruction. These were many but their role is still unclear. Moreover, given the lack of detailed information available, the effect of the complex characters is highly conjectural. Thus, while it has been apparent what issues were in dispute, the precise content and actual arguments deployed by either side have not been clear.
It is also wrong to dwell exclusively on the question of personalities. At stake were genuine political differences, particularly over the attitude towards the national question, which can be traced back to the opposing principles that existed for many years. These differences came into clear focus just as the Lebanese State was attempting to consolidate itself as an independent entity. The idea that Sa’adeh was the victim of an esoteric “personal vendetta” mounted by Solh must not be dismissed lightly, but it must not overshadow the ideological and political rift that Sa’adeh had with the Lebanese State.
The clash of personality hypothesis rests on the assumption that Solh and Sa’adeh were locked in a personal feud, that it was all about personalities rather than principle, that there was no ideological daylight between the two men, and that any tension arose solely from one’s overriding ambition to destroy the other. This contains some truth, but it presupposes the existence of a feud between the two men and it doesn’t explain Sa’adeh’s part in the feud or whether he seriously thought of Solh as a nemesis. Besides, the ideological differences between the two men were in place long before the personality fissure evolved. In the ensuing struggle, Solh comes across as the hothead whose distaste for Sa’adeh was deeply personal and sometimes cruel, but the information about Sa’adeh’s attitude toward Solh
is so incomplete and dispersed that historians have had little to work with.
3. A Grand Conspiracy
The idea that Sa’adeh was killed as part of an international grand conspiracy arose almost immediately after the execution. Since then it has gotten stronger and more widely accepted. This increase in belief in a conspiracy has taken place even though the accumulation of evidence has lagged behind the list of theories. Moreover, in the absence of realistic evidence, such conspiracy thinking itself has ironically taken on the characteristics of a new “regime of truth” possessing its own discursive rules, diffusion networks and ideological struggles.
1. France
Various observers have raised the possibility that France was behind Sa’adeh’s destruction. The basic premise for the allegation about France is that the French, for political and historical reasons, had always harbored the strongest desire to topple Sa’adeh. Examples of this kind of thinking range from the mundane to the truly plausible. One popular version of it has sought to explain the execution as the outcome of France’s continuing interests in Lebanon and concern for the fate of its Christian Lebanese clients in the event of an SSNP ascendancy. The earliest exponent of this view was Adel Arslan, Zaim’s Minister of Defense at the time.32