Ba'ath Party - The 1966 Split

The 1966 Split

The challenges of building a Ba'athist state led to considerable ideological discussion and internal struggle within the party. The Iraqi branch was increasingly dominated by Ali Salih al-Sadi, who surprisingly declared himself a Marxist, surprising because of his previously anti-communist stance, in the summer of 1963. He was supported in his ideological reorientation by Hamoud el Choufi, the Secretary General of the Syrian Regional Command, Yasin al-Hafiz, one of the party’s few ideological theorists, and by certain members of the secret Military Committee.

The far-left tendency gained control at the party’s Sixth National Congress of 1963, where hardliners from the dominant Syrian and Iraqi regional parties joined forces to impose a hard left line, calling for "socialist planning", "collective farms run by peasants", "workers' democratic control of the means of production", a party based on workers and peasants, and other demands reflecting a certain emulation of Soviet-style socialism. In a coded attack on Michel Aflaq, the congress also condemned "ideological notability" within the party. Aflaq, angry at this transformation of his party, retained a nominal leadership role, but the National Command as a whole came under the control of the radicals.

In 1963 the Ba'ath Party seized power, from then on the Ba'ath functioned as the only officially recognized Syrian political party, but factionalism and splintering within the party led to a succession of governments and new constitutions. On 23 February 1966, a bloody coup d'état led by a more left-wing, radical Ba'athist faction headed by Chief of Staff Salah Jadid, overthrew Aflaq and the Salah al-Din al-Bitar's Government. The coup sprung out of factional rivalry between Jadid's "regionalist" (qutri) camp of the Ba'ath Party, which promoted ambitions for a Greater Syria and the more traditionally pan-Arab, in power faction, called the "nationalist" (qawmi) faction.

Jadid's supporters were seen as radically left-wing then Aflaq and his peers. Many of Jadid's opponents managed to make their escape and fled to Beirut, Lebanon. Jadid moved the party in a more radical direction, although he and his supporters had not been supporters of the victorious far-left line at the Sixth Party Congress, they had now moved to adopt its positions The moderate faction, formerly led by Aflaq and al-Bitar, were purged from the party.

In the aftermath of the 1966 coup, the Ba'ath Party split in two; out of it a Damascus-based Ba'ath Party and a Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party were formed, with each maintaining that it was the genuine party and electing a separate National Command to take charge of the international Ba'ath movement. However, both in Iraq and Syria, the Regional Command became the real centre of party power, and the membership of the National Command became a largely honorary position, often the destination of figures being eased out of the leadership. A consequence of the split was that Zaki al-Arsuzi took Aflaq's place as the official father of ba'athist thought in the Damascus-based Ba'ath Party, while the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party still considered Aflaq the de jure father of ba'athist thought.