Malki Affair

Colonel Adnan al-Malki's assassination on the twenty second of April 1955 marked a watershed in the life of the then youthful Syrian republic. The country's brief flirtation with parliamentary democracy, along with any pretense to the application of habeas corpus, was abruptly all but abandoned in the aftermath, as thousands of "suspects" were rounded-up and imprisoned, some given the death penalty with few actually executed after cursory show trials.

As the perpetrator  belonged to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP also known as PPS or Parti Populaire Syrien), the crime was swiftly used as a pretext to liquidate the entire party apparatus throughout the Syrian land. No one -Right or Left- protested the arbitrariness of the procedures or the extreme measures employed, virtually amounting to martial law. Politicians of all orientations outbid each other in demanding justice (revenge if you wish), allocating accusations of treason and conspiracy without discrimination. It mattered not who planned the murder; it was utterly irrelevant who fired the fatal bullets. Someone -really everyone who happened to be a member of the hapless party and was unfortunate enough to be caught- had to pay; a tactic that would be repeated mutatis mutandis 50 years later when Rafiq Hariri (Lebanon's premier) was assassinated in 2005, unleashing a political storm the consequences of which are still palpable today.

Malki was attending a soccer game at the Municipal Stadium in Damascus when his killer fired the fatal shots. His death had far-reaching sequelae in the immediate aftermath and the purge may -intentionally or not- have facilitated the creation of the United Arab Republic three years later.

The Colonel was to leave a lasting impact on the landscape of Damascus as a bronze statue of his was erected in the middle of a plaza dominating the elegant Malki Street in the affluent eponymous district. Just behind the plaza to the north, a "museum" for the martyr's memorabilia was constructed next to a mausoleum surrounded with an elegant small garden where we identify -almost hidden behind the trees- the beautiful façade and domes of the Mameluke monument known as Turba Adilyia al-barraniyya.


Photo credit: Annales archéologiques arabes syriennes XXIII, 1973.