The Syrian parliament, a rubber stamp body officially known as the People’s Council, has expelled ten of the 250 members elected in May 2012. On July 30, the parliament’s officialwebsite published a short note mentioning that ten members had been stripped of their offices.
This was said to have been carried out in accordance with section 174 of the parliament’s internal regulations, which allows for the dismissal of members who act in contravention of the constitution or fail to meet parliamentary attendance requirements. According to the United Arab Emirates–based pro-opposition TV channel Orient News, which cites “journalistic sources,” the latter seems to have been the issue in most cases, with members of the group having shirked their parliamentary duties for periods ranging from a year and a half to three years.
The ten parliamentarians affected by the decision, in the order listed in the parliamentary notice, are:
- Nader Buayra, Baath Party, Damascus
- Qadri Jamil, Popular Will Party, Damascus
- Mustafa al-Sayyed Hammoud, Socialist Unionists, Damascus Countryside
- Mohammed Arbou bin Adnan, Baath Party, Aleppo Region
- Abdou al-Najib, Independent, Homs
- Mohammed Fadi al-Qaraan, Baath Party, Aleppo Region
- Imad Hajji Mohammed, Independent, Raqqa
- Said Elia bin Daoud, Baath Party, Hasakah
- Taysir al-Jugheini, Independent, Daraa
- Saleh al-Tahhan al-Nuaimi, Baath Party, Quneitra
The Socialist Unionists are an Arab nationalist group created out of a series of chaotic splits and mergers between the Baath Party and the pro-Egyptian Nasserite movement in 1961. For a brief moment, it was probably Syria’s largest political organization, with power in reach, but the opportunity was squandered. This surviving faction of the Socialist Unionists was first repressed and then domesticated by the Baath Party after its March 8, 1963 coup d’état, only to regain formal legality as a puppet organization after Hafez al-Assad had taken power in 1970.