Yusuf Zuayyin

Yusuf Zuayyin, 1967

Yusuf al-Zuayyin (center) between Foreign Minister Makhous (right) and Ambassador al-Jundi (left) in Paris in 1967

Yusuf Zuayyin ( Arabic يوسف زعين, DMG Yūsuf Zuʿaiyin ), sometimes also Zuayyen , Zayyen , Zaine or Saijin transcribed (* 1931 in Abu Kamal ; † January 10, 2016 in Stockholm , Sweden ) was a Baathist Syrian politician . Between 1965 and 1968 he was Prime Minister of his country twice.

Early years

Zuayyin comes from a Sunni family. After attending school in Deir ez-Zor , he studied medicine in Damascus and became a pediatrician. In Damascus he joined the Ba'ath Party in 1956 , but represented what is known as the "radical" wing, known as the "left" wing. Together with Nureddin al-Atassi and Ibrahim Makhous , he fought for four years as a field doctor with the Algerian insurgents of the National Liberation Front against the French colonial power. After the revolution of March 8, 1963, when the Ba'ath Party came to power in Syria, Zuayyin first became Minister for Land Reform, which was described as the main task of the March Revolution, but was then deported to London as ambassador in 1964.

Prime Minister for the first time

After several bloody internal Baath power struggles between the military and civilians, old Baathists and neo-Cathists as well as "left" and "right", Baath co-founder Salah ad-Din al-Bitar was overthrown as prime minister and replaced by Zuayyin. Zuayyin announced an ambitious program of radical social reforms towards a socialist transformation of Syria and a close foreign policy alignment with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

President Amin al-Hafiz , Bitar and the right wing of the party opposed this program and already forced Zuayyin to resign in December 1965.

Prime Minister again

After a renewed internal coup, the so-called Movement of February 23 , Hafiz and Bitar were finally overthrown by the left wing of the Baath under Salah Jadid in early 1966 . Al-Atassi became the new president and Zuayyin was again prime minister. With the renewed appointment of Makhous as Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister (Makhous had already been Foreign Minister in Zuayyin's first cabinet in 1965), who, like Zuayyin and Atassi, was a doctor, Syria was externally represented by "three doctors". For the first time, Zuayyin's government was even a member of the Syrian Communist Party . On April 26, 1966, Jadid, Atassi, Zuayyin, Makhous were elected to head the Syrian Ba'ath Party. Inside Syria, however, a power struggle raged between the "left" military around Jadid and the "right" military around Hafiz al-Assad , which came to a head after Syria's defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War , which damaged the popularity of Jadids, Atassis and Zuayyin enormously.

Zuayyin held such extreme and sometimes unreal views, such as eliminating the consequences of the defeat, liberating the Palestinian people ("people's war") and promoting socialist development (nationalization), that they earned him the nickname "Syrian Stalin ".

Fall

Under pressure from Assad, Jadid had to drop Zuayyin in October 1968, Atassi initially took over the office of prime minister. Makhous was offered the office of Syria's ambassador to Moscow, which he refused. After a first attempted coup in 1969, Assad finally deposed Atassi and Jadid as a result of the " corrective movement " in 1970 and established a military dictatorship of Alevite Baath officers. Zuayyin was arrested or placed under house arrest until 1982 and has not played a political role since then. His former Foreign Minister Makhous, however, founded the Arab Socialist Democratic Ba'ath Party with Jadid and Atassi supporters and joined the democratic opposition movement in 1980.

literature

• Lothar Rathmann : History of the Arabs - From the beginnings to the present , Volume 6 (The struggle for the development path in the Arab world). Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1983, pp. 31-36.
• Werner Rosenberg : Die Welt 1966 - data, facts and information from 1965 . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1966, pp. 492-496.
• Werner Rosenberg : Die Welt 1967 - data, facts and information from 1966 . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1967, pp. 494-499.
• Gustav Fochler-Hauke (Ed.): Der Fischer Weltalmanach 1967 . Frankfurt / Main 1966, p. 173.
• The International Who's Who 1988-89 . 52nd edition. Europa Publications, London 1988, p. 1670 (Zeayen)
• Rotten gang . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1968 ( online ).

Web links

• Yussuf Zayyen , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 51/1968 of December 9, 1968, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dr. Yusuf Zu'ayyin from the city of Albu Kamal, a former prime minister of Syria, has passed away in Sweden