Syria
Salah al-Din al-Bitar’s Last Interview
We met in Paris, in a small office on the top floor of a building looking out on a courtyard. Salah al-Din al-Bitar answered my questions in what was to be his last recorded interview. The year before, he had founded al-Ihya’ al-‘Arabi, the publication named after the movement that preceded the Baath Party. He devoted all his energy to this new publication. His aim was to provide a forum on Arab unity, the goal to which he devoted his life. The son of a Sunni bourgeois family from Damascus, Bitar was deeply involved in the struggle for Syrian national independence. He saw this struggle as closely related to larger developments in the Arab world. Such was the ideological thrust of the Baath, which he founded with Michel ‘Aflaq.
Syria’s Muslim Brethren
Who are the Muslim Brethren in Syria? What is their significance socially? How are they related to Syria's social structure? What is the social meaning of their ideas and values? Are these ideas and values responses to distinguishable conditions and interests of one or more identifiable social groups? Are the Muslim Brethren, in other words, an incidental phenomenon or the organizational expression of a basic structural force? For the most part, this essay deals with these and related questions. It provides a tentative, exploratory interpretation, with some vivid and sharp images, rather than a thorough and refined picture of the movement.
The Asad Regime and Its Troubles
Syria, under continuous Baathist rule since 1963, has relinquished its image of the 1950s and early 1960s as a peculiarly ungovernable and unstable state. Next year the regime hopes to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. A good measure of its maturity is that a majority of Syrians were born after the revolution. The regime’s younger members may have been 10 or so when the Baath seized power. For several years now entrants to the military academy cannot remember a time when Syria was anything but Baathist.
From the Editors (November/December 1982)
The massacre at Sabra and Shatila camps was an episode that immediately transcended the brutal war it was part of. The Israeli commission of inquiry seems almost a distraction from the obvious responsibility of the Begin government in this affair. Many of Begin’s critics regard the massacre as an inexcusable error of criminal proportions, but its implications are more ominous than this. It was a piece of a larger campaign, beginning in the south of Lebanon in early June, that killed more than 17,000 people. The carpet bombing of the camps in the south, the artillery pounding Beirut — all this the Palestinians survived and the world tolerated.
