Syria: Right with the Crowd

For months Syria’s militantly leftist regime has protested the steady march to political moderation in the Arab world. Last week Damascus itself joined the parade.

The shift grew out of a split in Syria’s ruling Pan-Arab Baath Party between General Salah Jadid, leader of a powerful clique of pro-Peking officers, and Strongman General Amin Hafez, top dog in Syria since 1963. At the Casablanca conference of Arab leaders last September, Hafez pledged Syria to an agreement not to meddle in other states’ internal affairs. Objecting, the Jadid group blamed a “right-wing reactionism” for the moderating tendencies in other Arab nations, argued for Syrian leadership to restore the “progressive Arab socialist outlook.”

For weeks, the debate raged between the opposing Baathist cliques, and being Syrians, Jadid’s men naturally began plotting a coup to topple Hafez from his position as head of the powerful Presidency Council, which serves as a sort of collective chief of state. Two days before the revolt was to come off last month, the garrison commander at Horns jumped the gun by arresting three pro-Hafez officers—counting on Syria’s notoriously poor telephone and telegraph communications to keep the word from reaching the capital 90 miles away. The news got back anyway, and the conspiratorial commanders were arrested. In a ten-hour showdown behind closed doors, Hafez retained the support of Baath’s eleven-member “International Command,” made up of Lebanese, Iraqis and Jordanians as well as Syrians, and Jadid ducked underground.

Picked to form a new government last week, replacing the pro-Jadid Premier Youssef Zayyen, was Salah Bitar, 53, Baath co-founder who holds that “to take Marxism as an absolute and comprehensive ideology conflicts with the Arab revolution, which is basically nationalist.” Syria would remain socialist, if somewhat less stridently. Abroad this would mean happier relations with its moderating socialist as well as non-socialist Arab neighbors (last week Damascus received an envoy from Kuwait to renew negotiations for a $56 million Kuwaiti loan), and at home a better break for what remains of Syria’s long-beleaguered middle class.