Word: baath
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...there are in Damascus people who consider Nasserism a crime, then how do you expect me to cooperate with them?" What set off Amer's flood of rhetorical questions was the threat posed to Nasser's dream of Arab unity by the gyrations of Syria's Baath Party leaders, headed by tall, lugubrious Premier Salah Bitar. The Baath leadership wants Arab unity as much as does Nasser, but it has refused to let the party be drowned in an all-encompassing Nasserite national front. The conflict became acute last month when the regime began purging the Syrian...
...Inch. At week's end, however, Jordan was still intact, and it was the Arab unity movement that was reeling. It had to do with a Cabinet crisis in Syria between the majority belonging to the Baath Socialist Party and the minority of strongly Nasserite ministers. The struggle had been brewing for two months, and pro-Nasser ministers frankly told newsmen that they intended to overthrow the Baathists. The Baath counterstrategy, as enunciated by its founder, Michel Aflak, was: "Do everything to preserve unity, but don't give an inch, and don't surrender any power...
When rumors of a pro-Nasser army coup last week swept the volatile Syrian capital of Damascus, Baath acted. More than 100 army officers were dismissed or clapped in jail. In retaliation, all six Nasserite ministers handed in their resignations. Deputy Premier Nihad El-Kassem, who had led a Syrian unity delegation to Cairo last March and had sobbed with joy on Nasser's shoulder, cried, "We are giving up our responsibilities because we have not been given the means to carry them...
...Cabinet walkout was intended to bring the Baathists to heel, and it well might. Isolated in power, with the street mobs sympathetic to Nasser and the army of uncertain loyalty, Baath's only available allies are the merchants and landowners, who most oppose Nasser's social objectives. Their embrace could be as fatal to Baath as Israel's would be to Hussein...
Sticking point is Nasser's insistence on a single political party for the whole U.A.R., modeled on his own Arab Socialist Union in Egypt. Since this would swallow up and probably destroy the Baath movement, Baathists have held out for a looser, more representative system, including the Baath-created National Front in Iraq, and the Baathist-Nasserite Unionist Front in Syria. In the end, Nasser would probably have his way on this, as on other limitations to political democracy. A Cairo spokesman explained, in a phase definitely not borrowed from U.S. democracy, that "freedom will be guaranteed...