Akram al-Hawrani

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Akram al-Hawrani (arabic:أكرم الحوراني) (born Hama 1912, died Jordan 1996), was a Syrian politician who played a prominent role in the formation of a widespread populist, nationalist movement in Syria and in the rise of the Ba'th Party. He was highly influential in Syrian politics from the beginning of the 1940s until his departure into exile in 1963, and held various positions including a government ministry and the joint vice-presidency of the United Arab Republic.

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[edit] Background

Born into a formerly wealthy land-owning family in Hama, al-Hawrani himself grew up in modest circumstances as the family wealth had been dissipated. He was educated in Hama and Damascus before joining the medical faculty at the Jesuit University in 1932. He was forced to leave the institution soon thereafter, having been implicated in the attempted assassination of former Syrian president, Subhi Barakat.

In 1936, he enrolled in the Damascus Law School, and became a member of the Syrian Social National Party. In 1938 he left the party and returned to Hama to practice law. There he took over the Hizb al-Shabab (Youth Party) founded by a cousin.

The province of Hama in the earlier part of the twentieth century was characterised by feudal relations between the large landlords who owned most of the land and the peasants who worked it. The landlords exercised complete control over the peasantry, backed up by what amounted to private armies. Al-Hawrani set about attacking this system, organising bands of qabadays (the groups of young men who defended the various districts of Syrian cities) to engage in expeditions aimed at punishing the exactions of the landlords. These exploits gained him considerable popular support in Hama and its province, and in 1943 he was elected as a deputy to the Syrian parliament. He retained his seat in the elections of 1947 and 1949.

While it was in defence of social justice in his home region that al-Hawrani made his name, he also had a strong Arab nationalist outlook, and headed to Baghdad to support the Rashid Ali movement in Iraq in 1941; in 1948 he commanded armed groups who engaged in attacks against Zionist settlements in Palestine.[1]

[edit] Closer to power

In 1950 al-Hawrani renamed his party the Arab Socialist Party; at that point, Batatu states, "it counted no fewer than 10,000 members and was able to attract as many as 40,000 people from the countryside when in the same year it convoked at Aleppo the first peasant congress in Syrian history."[2]

Between 1949 and 1954 Syrian politics was punctuated by four military coups, and al-Hawrani was widely considered to have played a part in all four. He was initially particularly close to the leader of the third and fourth coups, Adib al-Shishakli, who effectively ruled Syria from the end of 1949 until 1954. Al-Shishakli's decision to sign a decree distributing state lands to the peasantry in January 1952 appears to have been under al-Hawrani's influence.[3] However, as the dictator grew more autocratic his influence waned, and when al-Shishakli decided to ban the Arab Socialist Party in April 1952, he went into exile in Lebanon. There, in November that year, he agreed to merge the Arab Socialist Party with the Arab Ba'th Party led by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar. The latter thus gained a substantial base of active supporters for the first time. The unified party, operating under the rules already adopted by the Ba'th Party, adopted the name Arab Ba'th Socialist Party.

[edit] The Arab Ba'th Socialist Party

Al-Hawrani was a member of the Baath Party national command from its establishment in 1954 until 1959. Along with the other Ba'thists and members of most of Syria's political forces, he played a prominent role in the agitation and political mobilisation that forced al-Shishakli to give up power in early 1954.He was speaker of the Syrian parliament from 1957 to February 1958, and in that position forced the cancellation of the planned November 1957 municipal elections after failing to receive a guarantee that the Ba'th would be awarded 51% of the available seats. This has been described as the point where the Ba'th party "turned their backs... on party politics altogether."[4]

[edit] The United Arab Republic

After the treaty of union between Syria and Egypt in 1958, al-Hawrani became Vice-President of the United Arab Republic (UAR) under Gamal Abdel Nasser, a post he held until 1959. After Nasser launched a bitter verbal attack on the Ba'th in December that year, followed by a campaign of repression against its members, he resigned his position and went into exile in Lebanon. He subsequently differed with Aflaq and al-Bitar over the party's position regarding the UAR: while he favoured secession, the other two historic leaders opposed it.

When a military coup in Syria led to the dissolution of the UAR, al-Hawrani publicly supported separation. With the Ba'th in favour of reunification, al-Hawrani left it - he was officially expelled in June 1962 and re-established the Arab Socialist Party, but popular support for unity hampered its growth and it was strong only in his original stronghold of Hama. In September 1962 he joined the secessionist cabinet formed by Khalid al-Azm.

[edit] Exile and death

After the Ba'thist-led pro-reunification coup of 1963 al-Hawrani went into exile in Iraq, and lived the rest of his life between that country, Lebanon, France and Jordan, where he died in 1996. His memoirs were published in Cairo in 2000.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ This section is based on the account of Hawrani's origins and early political career given by Batatu, pp. 728-729.
  2. ^ Batatu, p. 729.
  3. ^ Seale, p. 47.
  4. ^ Mufti, p. 89.

[edit] Sources

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