Word: baath
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Paranoid Violence. The men responsible for all of this comprise a remarkably young group of radical leaders who belong to the far-left wing of the Baath Party, a mystical Arab brotherhood whose main aim is the nationalization of everything and everyone in the Middle East. Since they seized power from a more moderate group of Baathists last year, Syria's new leaders have turned the country onto a path of near-paranoid violence. Oddly enough, the three men who administer the government are all trained physicians: Premier Youssef Zayyen, 36; Chief of State Noureddin Attassi, 37; and Foreign...
Fully 200,000 skilled managers and technicians have fled the country; hundreds more are in jail for political crimes. Wheat, usually harvested Dakota-style with giant combines, will henceforth be grown on uneconomical 40-acre plots by government decree. Not even the weather has cooperated with the Baath: 1966 brought a crop failure that severely cut wheat and cotton production and drained Damascus of precious foreign exchange. Western banks have almost unanimously refused to lend further money. To try to recoup some cash, Jadid recently cut the Iraq Petroleum Co.'s pipeline through Syria and attempted to blackmail...
...repaid with poor political performance. A trend to the right set in. Nasser began mending his fences with the U.S. A moderate Prime Minister, Abdel Rahman Bazzaz, took over in Iraq. Yemen's little war cooled off, and even in steaming Syria the moderate wing of the socialist Baath Party seized the initiative from the extremists. So Moscow's new men, concluding that Nikita might not have been all wrong, have started the rubles flowing again...
...long-turbulent Syria, no one has yet been able to topple the ruling Baath (Renaissance) Party. To be sure, there has been a dizzying chain of uprisings within the governing hierarchy itself, but they always left the top man intact: Strongman Amin Hafez, 43. Last week the party went through its 15th major reshuffle since seizing power in 1963. Only this time, Hafez himself was shuffled right...
...important pro-Hafez army garrison in the north was still holding out at week's end, but nevertheless the rebels went on the air to call themselves "the provisional command of the Baath Party," and termed the coup a party affair to "correct" a situation that "threatened to impose a dictatorial regime on the country." As their chief of state, they named Noureddin Attassi, a Jadid-style leftist and Hafez' onetime second-incommand. As Premier, they appointed -once again-Youssef Zayyen...