- Salah Khair Salim al-Bitar, whose grandfather was Sheikh Salim al-Bitar, known as al-Faradhi: Sheikh Khair, the father of Salah al-Bitar, Sheikh Muhammad, who held the position of Secretary General of Fatwa in Damascus, Sheikh Abdul Ghani, known as al-Shafi’i al-Saghir, and the fourth, Sheikh Abdul Razzaq, author of the book Hilya al-Bashar in the history of the thirteenth century.
- He was born in 1912 in the Midan neighborhood in Damascus.
- He studied in Damascus schools, and when he finished high school, he went to France to complete his university education at the Sorbonne University, specializing in physics.
- He met Michel Aflaq and the two were united by French socialist principles and began a close friendship.
- Together they founded the Union of Arab Students in France.
- In 1934, he returned to Damascus after finishing his studies.
- He taught astronomy and physics while Aflaq taught history.
- Government authorities banned any activity for him and Aflaq, and they resigned from teaching.
- He and Aflaq chose to locate their headquarters at the Red Mill Café, near the Equipping School, so that they could meet with students every day after school hours.
- With Aflaq, he founded Al-Tali’ah magazine to spread their principles.
- In 1939, he contributed to the establishment of the Arab Revival Organization, which later turned into the Arab Baath Party.
- In 1945, the first political bureau of the Baath Party was elected. In 1947, the Baath held its first congress, at which al-Bitar was elected secretary general.
- In 1953, the party merged with the Arab Socialist Party to become the Arab Socialist Baath Party. The two founders issued a special newspaper called Baath, and the party held its first conferences in 1947, where Salah al-Bitar was elected as a member of the national leadership as the second founder of the Baath Party after Michel Aflaq, the dean of the party.
- In 1948, he was imprisoned outside Damascus for opposing the renewal of Shukri al-Qutli’s presidency of the Syrian Republic.
- In 1949, President Hosni al-Za’im arrested him and other members of the party’s national leadership for their opposition to some of his policies.
- In 1952, Adib al-Shishakli issued an order to arrest Salah al-Bitar along with his companion Aflaq and Akram al-Hourani for inciting university students to oppose his rule, but they were able to leave Damascus secretly to Beirut and from there to Rome.
- In 1954, he contributed to the overthrow of Adib Shishakli’s government.
- He was appointed foreign minister in Sabri al-Asali’s third and fourth governments.
- After the establishment of unity on February 22, 1958 between Syria and Egypt, he was appointed Minister of Culture and National Guidance in October 1958.
- He resigned from his position in December 1959.
- He was one of the signatories of the 1961 secession document in order to participate in the new Syrian government, but he soon retracted it because it was against the unity of the struggle in the Arab world.
- After the Baath Party came to power on March 8, 1963, he served as prime minister four times.
- Following Salah Jadid’s February 23, 1966 movement, al-Bitar was arrested but managed to flee to Lebanon.
- He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1969.
- In January 1978, Hafez al-Assad, who hoped that al-Bitar would settle in Damascus as a counterweight to Aflaq in Baghdad, tried to woo him, but al-Bitar refused.
- He returned to Paris and established a periodical called Arab Revival.
- In his magazine, he campaigned for public freedoms, democracy and human rights in Syria.
- It was rumored that Salah al-Bitar was pressuring the Saudis to cut off aid to Syria, and he became a magnet for different types of Syrian opposition against Hafez al-Assad.
- Hafez al-Assad’s regime felt it posed a real threat to its power.
- Syrian intelligence assassinated him with a silenced gun in Paris in 1980.
- He was assassinated on July 21, 1980, in Paris, France.
- After his death, his body was transported to be buried in Baghdad.
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, the nationalist Baathist “Salah al-Bitar” within a sequential file we present to you to include the symbols and flags of the Syrian state, in our desire to link our contemporary revolutionary present to a solid past and historical stations. We hope to revive in our people the need to build and create excellent statesmen, learn from their experiences, overcome their negatives, 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.
