Word: baathist
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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...gamble three weeks ago by Syrian Nasserites that by yanking their six ministers from the Cabinet they could bring the government down, touch off street rioting, and snatch control from the dominant Baath Party in the resulting confusion. Up to a point, that was exactly what happened. Baathist Premier Salah Bitar had to quit; his replacement was Dr. Sami Jundi, supposedly a Nasser admirer. But as it turned out, Jundi, too, had Baathist leanings; after three sleepless days and nights of trying to persuade both sides to cooperate, he wearily stepped aside to let another Premier seek a solution...
...Arab world. Twelve members of oil-rich Kuwait's 50-man legislature formally requested unity with the U.A.R. Even Nasser's traditional enemies, the monarchies of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, made efforts at reconciliation. Jordan's King Hussein discreetly let 56 Nasserite and Baathist political prisoners out of jail and sent off friendly feelers to Nasser. In Saudi Arabia, alarmed by a pro-Nasser demonstration that cost 19 lives, Premier Prince Feisal tried to modernize his regime by allotting $1,200,000 as compensation to slave owners who would free their chattels...
...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...
...revolution in Syria is unlikely to be the final firecracker on the string. Baathist and Nasserite elements are known to be at work in Jordan, especially among the Palestinian Arabs. Saudi Arabia can no longer trust its small air force or even the officer corps of its regular army. If it comes to fighting, the Saudi rulers will depend on their "white army," the Bedouin tribesmen traditionally loyal to the King. But if the road ahead looks rough for the monarchies, it by no means is smooth for the "liberated" states, since victory most often presents only new occasions...