Salah al-Din al-Bitar

Salah al-Din al-Bitar (صلاح الدين البيطار; 1 January 1912 – 21 July 1980) was a Syrian politician who co-founded the Arab Baʿth Party with Michel Aflaq in the early 1940s.

According to historian Hanna Batatu, Bitar was born in the Midan area of Damascus in 1912; he was the son of a reasonably well-off Sunni Muslim grain merchant.

His family were religious, and many of his recent ancestors had been ulama and preachers in the district's mosques.

Bitar grew up in a conservative family atmosphere and attended a Muslim elementary school before receiving his secondary education in Maktab Anbar.

He was exposed to the political vicissitudes of the time, as Midan played a leading role in the Great Syrian Revolution of 1925 against France—then the mandatory power in Syria.

The district was heavily bombarded with considerable loss of life and physical damage.

Bitar traveled to France in 1929 to study in the Sorbonne.

There he became acquainted with Michel Aflaq, also the son of a Midan grain merchant who was from a Christian Orthodox family.

They were both interested in the political and intellectual movements of the time, and began applying nationalist and Marxist ideas to the situation of their homeland.

As students in Paris in the early 1930s, the two formulated a doctrine that combined aspects of nationalism and socialism.

Bitar later served as prime minister in several early Ba'athist governments in Syria but became alienated from the party as it grew more radical.

Bitar returned to Syria in 1934, and took a job teaching physics and mathematics at the Tajhiz al-Ula, where Aflaq was already a teacher.

During the next two years, Bitar, Aflaq and other associates edited a review entitled al-Tali`a (the vanguard).

According to Batatu, this publication displayed more concern with social issues than with national problems.

Bitar and Aflaq's political stance was closer to the Syrian Communist Party than to any of the other political groups in Damascus.

They became disillusioned with the Communists in 1936, after the Popular Front government came to power in France.

Although the French Communist Party was now part of the government, France's approach to its colonies barely changed.

Bitar and Aflaq were unhappy with the Syrian party's stance in these circumstances.

In 1939, Aflaq and Bitar began to attract a small following of students, and in 1941 they issued leaflets agitating against French rule, using the title al-ihyaa' al-'arabi—"the Arab Resurrection".

Their first use of the name al-ba'ath al-'arabi—which has the same meaning—came some time later; it had already been adopted by Zaki al-Arsuzi—a nationalist activist from Iskandarun province in north-western Syria who had come to Damascus in the wake of his native area's annexation by Turkey.

On 24 October 1942 both Bitar and Aflaq resigned from their teaching positions to take up politics full-time.

They slowly gained supporters and in 1945 the first elected Bureau of the Arab Ba'ath Movement was formed, including both men.

The following year, the organisation gained many new members when most of the former supporters of Arsuzi, led by Wahib al-Ghanim, joined it.

In 1947, during the first party congress held in Damascus; Bitar was elected secretary general.

Aflaq took the pre-eminent position of 'amid, sometimes translated as "doyen"; this made him the effective leader of the party with sweeping powers within the organization under the constitution adopted at the congress.

In 1952 Syria's military leader Adib al-Shishakli banned all political parties.

Bitar and Aflaq took refuge in neighboring Lebanon, where they came into contact with Akram al-Hawrani—an experienced politician who had recently established the Arab Socialist Party and had a considerable following among the peasantry of the Hama region in central Syria and a valuable foothold in the military officer corps.

The three politicians agreed to merge their parties and co-operated in the overthrow of Shishakli in 1954, following which a congress ratified the merger of the two parties into the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party.

The rules and constitution of Bitar and Aflaq's party were adopted unchanged.

All three were elected to the party's new National Command, along with a supporter of Hawrani.

Following the overthrow of Shishakli, Syria held its first democratic elections in five years.

Bitar was elected as a deputy for Damascus, defeating the secretary general of the Syrian Social National Party—one of the Ba'ath's bitterest ideological enemies.

He became Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1956 and held the post until 1958.

Along with other Ba'athists, he agitated in favour of the unification of Syria with Nasser's Egypt.

Bitar expected to be appointed the Vice President of the United Arab Republic (UAR) but instead he was appointed the Minister of State for Arab Affairs, and later the Minister of Culture and National Guidance.

At the beginning, Bitar was the only Syrian in the central cabinet.

He and other Syrians in the UAR leadership became dismayed over the dominant role Nasser gave the Egyptians in administrating the UAR.

Nasser had opposed the formation of a joint leadership council of Egyptians and Syrians.

On 23–24 December 1959 Bitar—together with Hawrani (the UAR Vice President and central Minister of Justice), Mustafa Hamdun (Syrian regional Minister of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform) and Abd al-Ghani Qannut (the Syrian regional social affairs and labour minister), as well as all former members of the Syrian Regional Branch of the Ba'ath Party who worked within the UAR bureaucracy—resigned their posts.

In 1966 he fled the country, lived mostly in Europe and remained politically active until he was assassinated in Paris in 1980 by unidentified hitmen linked to the regime of Hafez al-Assad.