Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From Obscurity To Rule: the Syrian Army and the Ba'Th Party

1969; University of Utah Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/106591296902200408

2325-8675

Amos Perlmutter,

Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts

YRIA has had no stable civilian rule since 1949, the year of her first army coup; her politics have become a theater for ambitious army men.' In the twenty-four years since Syria gained independence from the French, the country has had eight years of parliamentary rule (1945-49 and 1954-58) and five years of semi-parliamentary government (late 1961 to February 1966). Long periods of military intervention has alternated with shorter eras of parliamentary and semi-parliamentary rule, while the government has always stood under the shadow of military domination. Since March 1949, Syria has experienced some sixteen army coups nine of them successful. Only three times did the officers who achieved successful coups pass the reins of power to civilians and call for a retreat to the barracks. Since 1963 a pattern has developed in which civilians and the army have alternated in power, but the army has never retreated to the barracks. One instance of this syndrome was the coup of March 1963, when officers, who were members of or sympathetic to the Arab Socialist Ba'th party, overthrew the parliamentary system and handed the government over to the civilian faction of the Ba'th. The army-Ba'th faction acted as king-maker. Between 1963 and 1964 Syria was governed by the Ba'th-army coalition supported by pro-Nasserist Arab unionists. The army increasingly became the dominant group in a Ba'th-dominated government. When unity talks with Egypt failed, Ba'th succumbed to a military dictatorship of General Amin al-Hafiz. This was the end of parliamentary rule in Syria. The army-Ba'th faction which staged the February 1966 coup seemed ready to hand the government over to the civilians, but the transfer of power never took place. And, since that time, the Syrian army has never returned to the barracks, never yielded full executive power and control. The recent coups, as well as the former ones, have not always been engineered independently by the officers: several have been supported, encouraged, and initiated by individual civilian politicians, and by and groups. In fact, some Syrian politicians have even spoken of the coup recently as an election. Since the collapse of the U.A.R. in 1961 there have been at least six political parties in the army: the leftists and the mainstream (moderate) Ba'thists; the champions of civilian and military governments, the Nasserist Unionists, and the anti-Nasser Unionists. Thus a six-cornered struggle exists between the two Ba'th factions and the Nasser and anti-Nasser forces, some advocating civilian rule, others military domination. (As we shall see, conflicts which divide Syria go beyond the political-ideological divisions rooted in the traditional ethnic pluralism, in the ancient urban-rural rivalries, and, above all, in the gap between center and periphery.)