Word: baath
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...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...
...forged the United Arab Republic in 1958, only to see it collapse in a welter of bickering three years later. During the past five weeks of negotiations in Cairo, rumors spread of wrangling and dissension between Nasser on one side and the Syrian and Iraqi leaders of the Socialist Baath Party on the other. Both picked at the "festering wound" caused by Baath's breakup of the earlier, ill-starred union of Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic. Each put the blame for failure on the other...
Finally, at a plenary session in the gilt-and-cream great hall of Kubbah Palace, Nasser proposed a sharing of guilt. "The presence of Baath in the Arab homeland is a necessity," he declared. "The resignation of the Baath ministers from the U.A.R. government in 1961 was a mistake. Accepting the resignations was also a mistake." The Baathist delegates clapped and cheered this burying of the hatchet. In a startlingly un-Arab spirit of amity and compromise, both sides accepted the other's good faith and minimum terms...
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...