Early Life and Career
Abdul Halim Khaddam was born on 15 September 1932 in Baniyas, Syria. Abdul Halim was one of the few Sunni Muslims to make it to the top of the Alawite-dominated Syrian leadership. He was long known as a loyalist of Hafez al-Assad, and held a strong position within the Syrian government. In 1969, Khaddam had a major role in sentencing prominent Syrian politicians to death in absentia, among them Amin al-Hafiz, Salah ad-Din al-Bitar, Nasim Al Safarjalani, Khaled Al Hakim and others, through a special military court headed by later Syrian Defence Minister, Mustafa Tlass, and Abdul Halim Khaddam, as prosecutor. He later served as foreign minister of Syria from 1970 to 1984 and as Vice President of Syria from 1984 to 2005. He was interim President of Syria from 10 June to 17 July 2000, between the death of Hafez and the election of his son (the election was symbolic in nature as there was only one candidate and it somewhat represented an approval rating where the ba'ath claimed 97% of the votes), Bashar al-Assad, as the new President. At the time, there were rumours in Damascus that Khaddam would try to seize power.
Read more about this topic: Abdul Halim Khaddam
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“There are in life such confluences of circumstances that render the reproach that we are not Voltaires most inopportune.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)