Baʿth, al-

BAʿTH, AL-

a pan-arab political party.

The Arab Socialist Renaissance (Baʿth) party was founded in Syria in 1944. In one version of the foundation myth, it was established by two Damascus schoolteachers, Michel Aflaq, an Orthodox Christian, and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim; in the other, it was started by an Alawite, Zaki al-Arsuzi. In both versions, the party advocated a mixture of national socialism, independence from foreign rule, and pan-Arabism (the creation of a unitary Arab state), and was to be the main instrument through which the goal of Arab unity would be achieved. Its main slogan was and is, "One Arab nation with an eternal mission." Baʿthist ideology is muddled and often contradictory: It advocates socialism yet at the same time stresses the sanctity of private property. The two countries in which Baʿthism has flourished, Syria and Iraq, either have been or still are dictatorships where any form of political pluralism is or has been either closely controlled or severely repressed.

Syria

During its early days in Syria, just after the departure of the French, the party drew support from radical secondary school and university students. Initially, the Baʿth did not enter formal politics, preferring to focus attention on developing its ideology rather than attempting to gain political power. Small party branches were established in Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq in the late 1940s. Political instability in Syria and the crushing Arab defeat in the Arab-Israel War of 1948 led Aflaq and Bitar (alArsuzi had left the leadership by then) to merge their organization with Akram al-Hawrani's Arab Socialist Party in 1953, and as a result the group's membership increased from five hundred to two thousand members. The party ran candidates in the Syrian elections in 1954 and won sixteen seats.

By the middle 1950s, however, the dominant opposition force in Syria was the Syrian Communist Party, whose leader, Khalid Bakdash, had also been elected to parliament in 1954. The Communists' popularity was boosted by their association with a Czech arms deal in 1955, under which the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states agreed to sell arms to Syria and Egypt. Fearing eclipse by the Communists, Aflaq and Bitar approached Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser with a scheme proposing Syrian-Egyptian unity, which resulted in the creation of the United Arab Republic (UAR). The Baʿth was taking a calculated risk; they knew that Nasser had dissolved the Egyptian Communist Party and would require the Syrian Communist Party to wind up its affairs, but they also knew that the Baʿth Party would be dissolved as well. The gamble did not pay off and the UAR gradually developed into a way for Egypt to exploit Syria, for which Aflaq and Bitar received much of the blame. In 1961, a military coup in Syria brought the UAR to an ignominious if un-lamented end. The Baʿth leaders and Hawrani went their separate ways, leaving the party open for new leadership and young recruits, primarily from junior Alawi officers in the army.

In March 1963, a group of Baʿthist officers took control of Syria scarcely a month after a Baʿth-supported coup in Iraq. As the military began to dominate the Syrian party, disagreements began to develop between them and Aflaq and Bitar. On 23 February 1966, a neo-Baʿth coup led by Ghassan Jadid ousted a moderate government led by Bitar. Bitar retired from politics and went to France and Aflaq went into exile in Iraq, where he was appointed secretary-general of the Iraqi Baʿth Party in 1968, a position he held until his death in Iraq in 1989. The new and more radical Syrian government, with a strong Alawi support base, nationalized industry, implemented a land reform program, and vigorously supported the Palestinian struggle against Israel. Jadid aligned himself with the civilians in the party and was challenged for the leadership by his minister of defense, the former air force commander Hafiz al-Asad.

By 1970, Asad had gained control of the internal security apparatus and forced Jadid from power. Asad's principal support came from the Alawi minority in Syria (about 12% of the population) and from family members and trusted associates who held key positions in the security services and the military. By the middle 1980s, much of the more radical social and economic measures taken by the neo-Baʿth had been reversed or abandoned and the socialist sector of the economy no longer had much importance. In addition, a major rift had developed between Asad and the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. By the time of Asad's death in 2000, Baʿthism was devoid of whatever coherent ideological content it might once have had and the party was largely confined to applauding the actions of the leadership and eventually of endorsing the succession of Asad's son Bashar al-Asad.

Iraq

Baʿthist ideology was brought to Iraq by Iraqi students studying in Syria. The first Iraqi secretary-general was Fuʾad al-Rikabi, a Shiʿite engineer from Nasiriyya who collected a following of some one hundred to two hundred individuals, mostly recruited from among his own relatives and friends. Unlike the Syrian party, the Iraqi Baʿth remained at least nominally under civilian leadership. When Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Iraqi Free Officers overthrew the monarchy in July 1958, the Baʿth initially supported his coup but in 1959 ordered Qasim's assassination, fearing his left-leaning proclivities and the fact that he was dependent on the Communists. After the failure of the assassination attempt, the perpetrators, including Saddam Hussein, went into exile to Syria and Egypt.

In 1963, the Baʿth supported a military coup led by the Nasserist Abd al-Salam Arif, which overthrew Qasim and initiated a campaign of persecution of the left, but its initial success was short lived. A split between the militant pragmatists and the centrists led the centrists to appeal to Damascus for mediation, and in the ensuing confusion, Arif ousted the Baʿth from the government. While out of power, the Iraqi Baʿthists, led by General Ahmad Hasan alBakr and his young relative Saddam, reorganized themselves, deriving support increasingly from their kinsfolk from their home town, Tikrit, while seeking to maintain political legitimacy by remaining



loyal to Aflaq. Now more politically astute and better organized, the Baʿth organized a coup on 17 July 1968, quickly purged their non-Baʿthist coconspirators, and took complete control of the Iraqi government on 31 July.

By 1970, the Iraqis had separated completely from the Syrian Baʿth. The new Iraqi constitution established a Revolutionary Command Council to operate as the supreme executive, legislative, and judicial institution of the state, separate from the regional command of the party. With Saddam in charge of security, al-Bakr was able to control the government, purging the party of military officers who opposed him. In 1972, in an extremely popular move, the government nationalized Iraqi oil. The boom that followed the oil price rise in 1973 created jobs, and improved health, educational and social welfare services, and the economic lot of Iraqis, especially Baʿth party members, whose numbers increased substantially throughout the 1970s. Oil revenues went straight to the government, by then coterminous with Saddam and his circle, with no accountability as to how the money was spent.

At the same time, Saddam systematically purged his rivals from power and consolidated his position sufficiently to urge al-Bakr to retire in 1979. Between then and his fall in 2003, as head of both government and party, Saddam substituted personal for party rule. Relying more and more on family members for important positions, he repeatedly purged the party and the military and maintained the party structure purely for ceremonial purposes. His miscalculations in foreign policy during the war with Iran and during and after the invasion of Kuwait and the serious social and economic dislocations that followed resulted in the reversal of economic gains for most Iraqis, with the exception of a small coterie of loyalists. The U.S.-led coalition did not take the opportunity to remove him from power in 1991. Both Baʿthism and pan-Arab nationalism have been discredited by the activities of the Syrian and Iraqi regimes.

see also aflaq, michel; alawi; arab–israel war (1948); arafat, yasir; arif, abd alsalam; arsuzi, zaki al-; asad, hafiz al-; bakdash, khalid; bitar, salah al-din al-; hawrani, akram al-; hussein, saddam; nasser, gamal abdel; qasim, abd al-karim; tikrit; united arab republic (uar).

Bibliography

Baram, Amatzia. Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Baʿthist Iraq, 1968–89. New York: St. Martin's Press; Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1991.

Batatu, Hanna. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Baʿthists, and Free Officers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Batatu, Hanna. Syria's Peasantry: The Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Farouk-Sluglett, Marion, and Sluglett, Peter. Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, revised edition. New York; London: Tauris, 2001.

Hinnebusch, Raymond A. Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Baʿthist Syria: Army, Party, and Peasant. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990.

Mufti, Malik. Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Tripp, Charles. A History of Iraq. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Reeva S. Simon

Updated by Peter Sluglett