The party, whose Arabic name means "resurrection," was founded in Damascus in April 1947 by two schoolteachers educated in France. Michel Aflaq was an Orthodox Christian and Selaheddin Bitar a Sunni Muslim.

In 1954, the party merged with the Arab Socialist party of Akram Hurani and adopted its current name, the Baath Arab Socialist party.

Its slogan is "Unity, Liberty, Socialism."

In February 1963, the Iraqi branch of the party overthrew the country's dictator, General Abdul Karim Kassem, in a coup d'etat.

Only a month later, a military junta seized power in Damascus from a weak government that had emerged following an unsuccessful three-year merger with Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt in what was known as the United Arab Republic.

By July, Syria's Baathists had weeded out any remaining pro-Egyptian elements and taken firm control of power.

But though Baath regimes now governed both Syria and Iraq, the unification of those countries was never to happen.

The Iraqis wanted unification of all "progressive" Arab states, while the Syrians wanted less -- a tripartite union of Syria, Iraq and Egypt.

In Syria, meanwhile, an internal battle raged between the military and civilian elements of the party, the latter headed by Aflaq and Bitar.

Between 1963 and 1970 there were a total of eight changes of leadership either in the party or the government, with the civilian Baathists finally vanquished in 1966.

The Iraqi branch of the party also underwent a power struggle between moderate and extremist elements. The extremists emerged as the dominant force as early as 1963 but were eventually eclipsed the following year by moderate President Abdul Salam Mohammed Aref. He formed a government of moderates, along with army officers, independents and non-party experts.

But by 1968, the Aref government, widely viewed as both inefficient and corrupt, was toppled in a bloodless coup led by General Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr.

Over the years, there was continued talk of unifying the two countries, but rivalries proliferated and, by 1975, the rupture between the two branches of the party was complete.

Among other things there had been disagreement over sharing the water of the Euphrates river, Syria aided Kurdish rebels in Iraq, Baghdad diverted its oil flow to the southern port of Basra from pipelines through Syria to the Mediterranean, Syrian agents were blamed for violence in the Iraqi Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and Iraq criticized Syria for its intervention in Lebanon's civil war.

In 1979, the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel provided the opportunity to find new common ground, but the two countries fell out over how to oppose it. When Saddam Hussein took power in Iraqi in July of that year, the freeze was on again.

Meanwhile, the party's two founders had been condemned to death by Syria and went into exile. Aflaq died in Paris in 1989, but was buried in Iraq where he had lived for many years and which declared a state of mourning for him.

Bitar, who was assassinated in Paris nine years earlier, had said "in reality, the Baath is no more, neither in Syria nor in Iraq."

SPACE.WIRE