Abdullah Rimawi

Abdullah Rimawi was the head of the Ba'ath Party in Jordan in the 1950s. He served as Foreign Affairs Minister in Suleiman Nabulsi's government in 1957. A staunch pan-Arabist, Rimawi became one of the most vocal opponents of the Hashemite ruling family in Jordan and favored union with Syria. He fled Jordan in 1957 as the result of a crisis between the leftist government he was a part of and the royal family. He based himself in the United Arab Republic, where he drew closer to UAR President Gamal Abdel Nasser provoking his expulsion from the Ba'ath Party—which was at odds with Nasser—in 1959. Soon after he founded a splinter party called the Arab Socialist Revolutionary Ba'ath Party. During his exile, he allegedly made a number of attempts to attack or undermine the Jordanian monarchy.