Whose Puma?
Desmond Stewart writes:
IJILE the Twist was being danced in the ,
Beirut night clubs, -the political party known as the PPS attempted its second coup d'etat in twelve years. The Twist and the PPS exemplify the Herodian aspects of Lebanese life. But the coup's failure shows that the Lebanon for all its cabarets is not as Western as quiet Americans and Englishmen might like. The PPS has the most formidable discipline of any poli- tical organisation in the Middle East. If Nas- serism had had a political organisation half as good, the Syrian coup could not have taken place. But the PPS works in a vacuum; its ideals mean little to the Arab masses.
The founder of this activist party was ;I Christian Lebanese born in South America. An Outstanding speaker, with a quick power of synthesis, Anton Saade was shot in Beirut after the abortive coup of 1949. Saad6 shoN■ed in his programme an obsession, not so much with policies as with identity: who were the people of the Fertile Crescent? Pushing aside both Islam and Arabism, he postulated a submerged Syrian race, making the same claims for it as other racists have made for theirs. His followers show a simple mechanism: they wear co- respondent shoes and appear as modern as they can,, while claiming that everything from the alphabet to chemistry was a product of Glorious Syria. They despise Egyptians as Africans and believe that Greater Syria should include 1.e- banon, Palestine, Cyprus (WO and Iraq. A dated admiration for Hitler shows in many details of their insignia and ritual.
Banned in Syria itself after the assassination of an army chief, Adnan Melki, by one of their number, they reached their final stage of contra- diction in 1958. Although they had. always in- veighed against the separate existence of a Lebanese State, they then proved the most ener- getic allies of President Chamoun in his attempt to bring Lebanon into alignment with the West. Some of the nastiest atrocities of that four months' struggle were attributed to them, in- cluding the assassination of Henri Shehab, an officer in the army and a relative of the present President, as revenge for his part in their Leader's court-martial. The resolution of the 1958 troubles—a return to Lebaru3n's traditional Policy of neutrality between Arab blocs—left them unemployed.
• The reactionary coup in Syria gave the PPS new hopes. The Syrian businessmen and feuda- lists, at whose bidding the army had moved, found themselves in a quandary. Nasser had aroused social consciousness among the Syrian masses, more than 60 per cent. of whom ab- stained from voting in the recent elections. The secessionists knew that their social system could not maintain, as they promised, `the people's social gains.' They needed an ideology stronger than an alliance with King Hussein and King Saud, the two most unpopular men in the Arab East, to offset Cairo's appeal for Arab socialism. It may well prove that the finance for the PPS came via Syria. The best economist in Lebanon told me last week that funds totalling more than 00 million sterling have been paid from abroad into Lebanese banks in the last half- year. Much, he implied, went to finance the Syrian coup. We may conjecture that this money also paid for the machine guns used to celebrate Beirut's New Year. The question now is: where will money be spent next?
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