Vengeance for the Druzes

As Dictator of Syria, Adib Shishekly always feared assassination and took infinite pains to avoid it. He carried one gun in a shoulder holster, kept another in his desk drawer. In Damascus he maintained four homes besides his official palace, slipped from one to the other for a meal or a night's sleep.

His enemies were legion, but none were so bitter as the tribesmen of the Djebel Druze, a rugged group of hills in southern Syria, where in 1954 revolt erupted after years of discontent. Shishekly, in a four-week campaign, crushed the Druzes, hammering their mountain strongholds with tanks, planes and artillery. The powerful Druze clan of the Ghazali took some of the heaviest casualties.

Though the revolt was smashed, it caused Shishekly's downfall. Many army officers opposed the ruthlessness of the campaign and, within weeks, the garrison of Aleppo mutinied against "the despot Shishekly, stepson of imperialism." Not waiting to argue the point, Shishekly abandoned his wife and children in Damascus and fled across the Anti-Lebanon range in a snowstorm to the safety of Beirut. During the next few years he vainly plotted a return to power from Saudi Arabia and Switzerland.

Apparently abandoning political ambition, Shishekly emigated to Brazil in 1958, bought a small rice farm near the town of Ceres, and married a second wife, Therese, a Frenchwoman who bore him a daughter. Life in Ceres was quiet. Shishekly kept clear of politics, gave only a few reluctant interviews to the press, paid his debts promptly, and was respected by his neighbors, some of whom still called him "President."

One afternoon last week, Shishekly was crossing a bridge that spans the river between the hinterland towns of Ceres and Rialma when he was accosted by a young man with long black hair, dark glasses and a scar on his nose. They exchanged a few words, and then the young man whipped out a gun, pumped five bullets into Shishekly, who died almost instantly.

At week's end the Brazilian police arrested two men and were searching for a third, who is the prime murder suspect. No one in Syria was surprised to learn that the man wanted is a young Druze tribesman and a member of the Ghazali clan named Nawaf Abu Ghazali. He also had emigrated to Brazil and waited a decade to avenge the savage reprisals against his people almost 10,000 miles away in the Djebel Druze.

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