Michel Aflaq

Michel Aflaq (1910 - June 23, 1989) was the ideological founder of Ba'athism.

He was born in Damascus to an Eastern Orthodox Christian family of a middle class background. 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 became an admirer of the German Nazi ideology and Hitler's Pan-Germanism. He tried to combine national socialism with the vision of a Pan-arabic nation. He became committed to Arab unity and the freeing the Middle East from Western colonialism.

Upon returning to the Middle East he became a school teacher and was active in political circles. In 1940, in a time when when Syria was dominated by the fascist Vichy France, itself under control of Nazi Germany, Michel Aflaq founded the Ba'ath Party, together with Salah al-Din al-Bitar.

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.

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 to 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 favour of free speech and other human rights and aid for the lower classes, ideals that were never put in place by the regimes that used his ideology.

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 was a staunch Christian for much of his life. A tomb was built for him in Baghdad designed by Chadagee that is widely regarded as a work of great artistic merit, unlike most of the Hussein regime’s creations.

After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq the United States forces were preparing to destroy the tomb as part of their efforts at de-Bathification. An outcry in the Arab world, and among Iraqi exiles who had supported the invasion, but who shared the wide respect with which Aflaq is still held in throughout much of the Arab world. The American plan has become a common example of the misunderstanding of Iraq and its history by the Americans.