Michel Aflaq

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Michel Aflaq (Arabic: ميشيل عفلق, born 1910, died June 23, 1989) was the ideological founder of Ba’athism, a form of Arab nationalism.

He was born in Damascus to a middle class Greek Orthodox Christian family. He was first educated in the westernized schools of French mandate Syria, where he was a brilliant student and then went to university at the Sorbonne in Paris where he first developed his ideals. He tried to combine socialism with the vision of a Pan-Arab nation. He became committed to Arab unity and the freeing of the Middle East from Western colonialism.

Upon returning to the Middle East he became a school teacher and was active in political circles. In September 1940, after France's defeat in World War II, Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar set up the nucleus of what was later to become the Ba’ath Party. The first conference of the Ba’ath Party (in full, the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party), was to be in 1947.

In 1949 he was Syria's education minister for a short period. In 1952 he left Syria, escaping from the new regime, returning only in 1954. He played an important role in the achievement of the unity between Syria and Egypt in 1958.

While the ideological founder of the movement he had little connection to the governments that took power in Syria under the name of the Ba'ath party in 1963. Eventually the government and he had a falling out and he was forced to flee to Iraq where another Ba’ath Party had taken power. While this party also failed to follow most of ‘Aflaq's teachings, he became a symbol for the regime of Saddam Hussein that Iraq was in fact the true Ba’athist country. In Iraq he was given a token position as head of the party and his objections to the regime were silenced and ignored.

In his writings ‘Aflaq had been stridently in favor of free speech and other human rights and aid for the lower classes. He stated that the Arab nationalist state that would be created should be a democracy. These ideals were never put in place by the regimes that used his ideology. Most scholars see the Assad regime in Syria and Saddam's regime in Iraq to have only employed ‘Aflaq's ideology as a pretense for dictatorship. John Devlin in his "The Baath Party: Rise and Metamorphosis" outlines how the parties became dominated by minority groups who came to dominate their society. Elizabeth Picard takes a somewhat different approach, arguing both Assad and Hussein used Ba’athism as a guise to set up what were in fact military dictatorships.

Upon his death in 1989 he was given a great funeral. The government of Iraq claimed that on his death he converted to Islam, but many who know him do not believe this claim as he always was a staunchly secular modernist thinker albeit influenced by the Christian mysticism of Dostoyevski to which he was exposed while studying European literature at the Sorbonne.

A tomb was built for him in Baghdad designed by Chadagee that is widely regarded as a work of great artistic merit. It was located on the western grounds of Saddam's Ba'ath Party International Headquarters, at the intersection of al-Kindi Street and the Qādisiyyah Expressway overpass. That area is today at the far western end of the grounds of FOB [Forward Operating Base] Union III in Baghdad's Green Zone.

Although there were rumors the his tomb was destroyed during the war, the burial chamber and building above it were left untouched. Its blue-tiled dome can be seen peeking above the concrete T-walls surrounding the Camp's perimeter.

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