Symbols and Flags of the State in Syria (12) Nazem Al-Qudsi

• He was born in 1905 in the city of Aleppo.
• He studied law in Damascus, then at the American University of Beirut, then at the University of Geneva.
• In 1935, he joined the National Bloc, which was a political movement that aimed to get rid of French control through political dialog instead of armed resistance.
• He later fell out with the leadership of the National Bloc, which failed to prevent the annexation of the Iskenderun Brigade to Turkey in 1939, after which he left the bloc.
• He then decided to form a coalition of intellectuals in Aleppo around the figure of the famous lawyer Rushdi al-Kikhia.
• Both were nominated for parliament in the 1943 elections.
• He was appointed Syria’s first ambassador to the United States of America, who built the Syrian embassy in Washington from scratch and presented his credentials to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 19, 1945.
• In 1947, al-Qudsi and al-Kikhia founded the People’s Party, which was the strongest opposition to the National Party. The founders of the People’s Party were mainly Aleppo notables, who were in favor of unity with the Hashemites in Iraq, democratization, and the development of relations with the West.
• He won elections in 1943, 1947, 1949 and 1962 as a candidate for his party.
• He voted against naming al-Qutli as president, but al-Qutli, backed by the Nationalist Party, was reappointed.
• After the overthrow of al-Qutli’s government in a military coup on March 29, 1949, the new president Hosni al-Zaim asked Nazem al-Qudsi to form a government, but the latter refused because of the unconstitutional way in which al-Zaim rose to power.
• The leader arrested him and closed the offices of the People’s Party. He was released shortly thereafter and placed under house arrest at his home in Aleppo
• He strongly criticized Hosni al-Zaim, especially when he wanted to close the borders with Jordan and Iraq and wanted to wage war on them, accusing them of being agents of the United Kingdom.
• On August 14, 1949, he supported a coup led by Sami al-Hinnawi, an old friend of the People’s Party and an ally of the Hashemite family in Baghdad, where Hosni al-Zaim was executed.
• Al-Hinnawi established a political committee to run the country in the absence of a regular government and appointed al-Qudsi to head it.
• He enacted a new constitution for Syria and became foreign minister in the first government after the coup against al-Zaim, of which Hashim al-Atassi was the head.
• He held talks with Iraqi Crown Prince Abdul Ilah, offering immediate unity between Syria and Iraq, and made several trips to Baghdad for this purpose.
• He drafted an agreement calling for a federal union, maintaining independent governments in Damascus and Baghdad, while combining the military, economic, cultural, social and political affairs of the two countries.
• He went to Cairo and presented similar programs at the Arab League meeting on January 1, 1951.
• To expedite the unity talks, the newly elected Hashim Atassi assigned Nazem al-Qudsi to form a government on December 24, 1949.
• The military voted against his government and he resigned five days later, arguing that the government did not contain any officers and that its members were opposed to the military’s involvement in politics.
• On June 4, he formed a new, less radical cabinet and secured the opposition’s approval by appointing as defense minister Fawzi Salo, who had been Adib Shishakli’s right-hand man.
• The government lasted ten months, during which it could not move forward on the issue of unity, and he resigned on March 27, 1951.
• On October 1, he was elected Speaker of Parliament.
• On November 28, Adib al-Shishakli seized power and arrested the entire leadership of the People’s Party, accusing them of conspiring against Syria’s republican system and attempting to replace it with a monarchy that was an agent of Britain.
• Fawzi Sallu was appointed interim president and al-Qudsi was sent to Mezzeh prison.
• He was released in January 1952, but was kept under house arrest.
• He secretly worked and supported a military coup that overthrew Shishakli in February 1954.
• In October 1954, he became a deputy in the first parliament after the Shishakli period, and was elected as the parliament’s spokesperson.
• He tried to resist Nasser’s influence, arguing for the importance of an alliance with the United Kingdom and the United States at a time when most Syrians were looking toward the Soviet Union.
• He called for Syria to join the Baghdad Pact.
• On October 12, 1957, he resigned from his post and was replaced by the socialist Akram al-Hourani, a supporter of Nasser.
• He voted against unification with Egypt, and when the merger took place to form the United Arab Republic, he resigned from politics and returned to Aleppo.
• He settled in the city of Aleppo until the separation from Egypt and was chosen to be the president of Syria in 1961, succeeding President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
• In 1962, he won a seat in parliament.
• He lost all his elected positions with the Baath Party’s final takeover in March 1963 and lived the rest of his life in frustration with politicians.
• He died in Amman in 1998, one of the last of Syria’s politicians who witnessed its democratic era.

We at Syrian Future Movement, as we recall the memory of the founding statesmen of Syria, we recall one of Syria’s influential men, and one of the symbols of the first Syrian state flags who contributed to influencing its structure, unique in holding the three presidencies in Syrian history, Mr. President Nazem al-Qudsi, within a sequential file that we present to you to include symbols and flags of the Syrian state, in order to link our contemporary revolutionary present to a solid past and historical stations, hoping to revive in our people the need to build In our desire to link our contemporary revolutionary present with a solid past and historical stations, we hope to revive in our people the need to build and create statesmen par excellence, learn from their experiences, build on their history, preserve the homeland, safeguard the gains, and restore the Syrian state to its glory after years of injustice, tyranny and corruption.