A Cure for Sick Brothers

With his iron-grey hair, light blue eyes and dimpled chin, Syrian Strongman Amin Hafez, 42, conveys so genial a manner that it is hard to believe he is called the Butcher of Damascus. Last week he once again lived up to that name. Syria was a charnel house. In the midland city of Hama, mothers wailed over the bodies of dead sons, the famed Sultan Mosque lay in ruins, and the corpse of one rebel leader, riddled with 50 bullets, was contemptuously dumped by soldiers from an open jeep onto the sidewalk. The bloody-handed Baath (Renaissance) Party was again engaged in its favorite pastime: killing.

High Leaders. When the Baathists seized power in March 1963, they seemed little different from their many predecessors; in 18 years of independence, Syria has had 15 coups, eight of them successful and almost all bloodless. But last July, when there was an uprising by rebels supporting Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, the difference be came clear. Baathist Strongman Hafez smashed the revolt and slew 27 Nasserite leaders -- the first such mass execu tion in modern Syrian history. Warned Hafez: "Let them think twice before trying again. And if they try, let them be ready to die!"

Nasser responded by denouncing Baath as atheistic, and the cry was picked up by Moslem religious leaders as well as by Syria's merchants and landowners, worried by Baath's militantly socialist program of nationalization and land reform. Hafez replied: "Allah alone knows who are atheists, and will punish them." The Baath regime in neighboring Iraq was toppled last fall, but in Syria the Baathists continued to preach class war, pitting workers, peasants and the army against everyone else. Early this month, Baath expropriated all landholdings over 25 acres and nationalized six of the country's largest corporations.

As unrest spread, a 15-year-old schoolboy in a classroom in Hama (pop. 110,000) erased the Baathist slogan, "One Single Arab Nation with an Immortal Mission," and wrote instead, "The Atheist Baath Is Against God!" The boy was sentenced to a year's hard labor, and his classmates went on strike. The sheiks and mullahs of Hama's 65 mosques denounced Baathist oppression, and surging Moslem mobs filled the streets. The police opened fire and the battle of Hama began.

Lowered Minaret. The well-organized mob soon routed the police and drove back the first troop detachments with fire from barricades, rooftops and minarets. Reinforcements were rushed in. Strongman Hafez left his huge marble office in Damascus with its yard-long model of a Russian T-54 tank and flew to the scene. His ultimatum: Unless the rebels surrendered their arms and handed over 19 suspected rebel leaders--mostly from Hama's big landowning families--the army would attack with overwhelming force. Said Hafez: "You have until dawn to decide."

During the night, Hafez moved up additional units, including T-54s. Next morning, the tank columns and armored infantry broke through the barricades and drove the rebels into last-ditch positions in the rabbit warrens of the old city and in the Sultan Mosque. Tanks and artillery hammered at the mosque for an hour, and shells brought the 60-ft. minaret, together with a rebel machine-gun nest, crashing down.

Beat Congregation. As Hama was hammered into submission, with an estimated 115 dead, sympathy strikes broke out across Syria. A young man tried to defend the regime in a mosque at Horns, and the congregation beat him to death. In Damascus, the Street Which Is Called Straight, where St. Paul once walked, fell silent as the sooks selling carpets and Damascene steel, slippers and brocades rang down their iron screens. The shopkeepers were confident that no regime could stand against the strike. But Hafez ordered the arrest of Aleppo's ten leading merchants and distribution of their goods to the poor. When he did the same in Horns, the Damascus merchants got the hint and opened for business.

Strongman Hafez returned jauntily to his capital and by week's end blandly announced a new provisional constitution which technically lifted martial law. Earlier, Hafez told a cheering Baathist rally that the revolt had been the work of the Zionists, Nasser, Iraq, and the "imperialists," in league with native reactionaries--a pretty fantastic band of confederates. "In our good country," he told the crowd, "there are still feudalists, capitalists and exploiters. We consider them our sick brothers. We will try to cure them by simple medication, but if surgery is necessary, we shall not hesitate to amputate." With a white-toothed smile, Hafez explained, "Our enemies are playing games, but we are not."

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