What did Abdelhalim Khaddam say through Al-Arabiya – the largest Arab media scoop of 2005 – until the Syrian parliament convened and accused Khaddam of theft and corruption over (4) decades, demanding his trial for high treason, confiscation of his properties, and describing him in the harshest terms! Then the national leadership of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party gathered and decided to expel him from the party, considering him a traitor to the party and the nation.
Do Khaddam’s actions involve revealing military secrets or conveying dangerous information against his country? He criticized the system for its lack of seriousness in reform due to corruption, personal interests, and the monopoly of power. When reform became impossible, he chose the nation over the system and resigned. Is there in this statement – regardless of its accuracy or validity – something that justifies treason and trial?
Shouldn’t we all criticize our governments, talk about the spread of corruption and favoritism? Don’t officials openly admit to it? Didn’t Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad say that corruption in one of his ministries is not hidden?
What is the relationship between criticism and betrayal or allegiance?
I am not defending Khaddam, and his accusations against the system or the system’s accusations against him don’t concern me much. What matters to me is an important aspect of the event that hasn’t caught the attention of many, as they are preoccupied with the act itself and not the reaction. They wonder: Why Khaddam’s statement now? Why did he defect from the regime? Why did the awakening of conscience come after (35) years? Many in Lebanon rejoiced at it, considering it a testimony from one of their own supporting the Mehlis report implicating Syria. Some even said that Khaddam’s departure was a merciful shot fired at the Ba’ath regime.
And some criticized Khaddam’s right, who spent 35 years defending and participating in the regime, for turning into a critic and opposition figure! There are those who expressed sympathy for him, considering him among the deceased or suicidal after his statement.
Khaddam’s statement only concerns us in the context of the Syrian reaction to it. No one asked how a parliament, supposed to be the political elite representing society and overseeing the government’s performance, could remain silent about the corruption Khaddam accuses it of and now decides to accuse him of treason just because he criticized the regime. Is criticizing the regime treason in the standards of national thinking? Then what do we say about the American opposition figure Noam Chomsky, obsessed with opposition, who left no vice unattributed to the American administration and its president, defending every enemy of America, whether communist tyrants or terrorists, considering them victims of American tyranny? If Chomsky were an Arab citizen under revolutionary regimes, he would have been executed immediately for high treason!
And what about the Americans who opposed the war in Iraq and exposed the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison? In our nationalistic concepts, they are considered traitors and agents!
What are the implications of the Syrian scene? Why do the political and cultural elite rush to accuse the opposition of treason and conspiracy? What is the origin of this chronic ailment in the Arab national body? These are questions that should have stopped us since the nationalist Ba’athist poet Salman al-Aissi crafted his poem praising Abdul Nasser, declaring: “To you, Abdul Nasser, whoever opposes Abdul Nasser is a traitor.” This is the root of the dangerous disease, the culture of stigmatization, the pillar of Arab nationalist thought – Nasserite and Ba’athist. Over half a century, stigmatization has been the formidable weapon used by Arab revolutionary regimes against their political opponents, throwing them into their prisons, subjecting them to various forms of torture, violating their dignity, all on charges of treason as enemies of the people and agents of colonialism and the fifth column.
The monopoly of nationalism adopted by nationalist regimes for 50 years weakened the citizens’ immunity against national tyranny and also weakened the nation’s immunity against foreign intervention. The defeat of the nation in favor of the regime, that political monism in nationalism, had the same effect on humanity as AIDS, according to Waeed Abdalmajeed. That inclusive and exclusionary culture produced Arab tyrants, entrenched the legend of the hero in the Arab memory, making them accept despotism and cheer for the life of the dictator, even if it led them to destruction.
The important thing is for the leader, the regime, and everything above the soil to remain sacred, as their poet said. This miserable culture gave rise to a demonic plant that bore fruits once in the Arab land. One manifestation of it was the phenomenon of the narcissistic exclusionary intellectual who imposes his dominance on his fellow intellectuals. The suppression of intellectuals by intellectuals was more severe and painful, with no better example than Ali Akla, who continued as the head of the Arab Writers Union for a quarter of a century. That culture of stigmatization is what led Bilal al-Hassan to write a book called “The Culture of Submission,” accusing anyone who disagreed with his intellectual approach of treason and conspiracy. As Saleh Bashir says, the ignorance of the Brotherhood – the ignorance that drives the great professor Haykel across Jazeera to justify and remain silent on the violations of human dignity and torture in the Nasserist rule’s prisons – it’s no wonder that Saddam’s supporters today justify his crimes of mass graves and genocide, claiming that these victims are traitors, enemies, and agents.
The stigmatization approach is what makes nationalist-Islamic thought conferences hostage to comprehensive regimes, reproducing the culture of oppression, exclusion, submission to the rule of the Arab despot, and accepting Arab-Arab occupation. It calls for resistance to elections in Iraq because they occur under foreign occupation, while blessing rigged elections under the Arab despot. It’s a culture of hypocrisy that does not see the occupation of an Arab state by its neighbor and the imposition of its dominance as aggression, while viewing the liberation of Iraq from a tyrant who humiliated them and violated their dignity as weakening the Arabs and serving Israel!
Why not consider the removal of the festering abscess as a source of strength and immunity for the Arab body?
Betrayal is a counterfeit national commodity that is long overdue to be buried without remorse. It is one of the by-products of comprehensive nationalist systems that oppressed the Arab human and portrayed the world as a conspiracy to justify its dominance, corruption, and opposition to reform. It is time for us to wake up from the delusions of conspiracy theories and the anxieties of intellectual invasion of Arab identity and culture. According to Kamal Gabriel, they are not worth the world fighting against us for them. We should not keep ourselves captive to the colonial heritage in our view of the West, as Wahid Abdalmajeed says. We must get rid of the illusions of misleading revolutionary slogans that dominated the 1960s, keeping us out of history, era, and civilization.
How long will the authoritarian state continue to maneuver through its internal and external crises, blaming external factors as excuses for the continuation of corruption and incompetence? No one is giving up on their patriotism and identity. No one denies their Arabness and nationality. But what identity and what open Arab nationalism to others? A peaceful Arab identity that is not afraid of accountability and an Arab identity that is not enslaved to history and sectarian tendencies, as expressed by Mohammed Jaber Al-Ansari in his excellent series of articles in Al-Hayat. We are with Nasserism and with its constructive criticism when he said: The liberation advocated by Nasserism should have been the liberation of the citizen and society from the apparatus of power and its corruption primarily, not limited to liberation from external colonization and replacing one internal dominance with another. Many victims fell on the path of the nationalist state who chanted songs of sacrifice while the guardians of Arab nationalist thought were intimate friends of their tyrants.
