Arabs (60 page)

“I saluted him and he returned my salute,” Naguib recalled in his memoirs:

General Naguib in fact would be given little chance to govern Egypt. The real leader in Egypt was Nasser, as would soon become apparent.

 

The Free Officers revolution represented the advent of a newer, younger generation in Egyptian politics. Naguib, at age fifty-one, was the old man in a movement whose average age was thirty-four. All were native-born Egyptians of rural origins who had risen through the military to positions of responsibility—much like the men around Colonel Ahmad Urabi in the 1880s.

Like Urabi, the Free Officers chafed at the privileges and pretensions of the Turco-Circassian elites that had surrounded the royal family. One of their first decrees after taking power was to abolish all Turkish titles such as bey and pasha, which they believed had been conferred by “an abnormal King . . . on people who did not deserve them.”
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Stripped of its titles, the Egyptian aristocracy was next deprived of its land. The Free Officers initiated a major land reform, passing laws that limited individual land holdings to 200 acres. The vast plantations of the royal family were confiscated by the state, and some 1,700 large landholders saw their estates expropriated by the government, which reimbursed them in thirty-year bonds. In all, some 365,000 acres were seized from Egypt’s landed elite. These lands were then redistributed to small holders with no more than five acres of property. The program passed over the strenuous objections of Prime Minister Ali Maher, who represented a civilian elite whose
wealth lay in landed property. The Free Officers valued mass support over the wishes of the propertied elite and secured Maher’s resignation in September 1952.

The land reform measure secured tangible political benefits for the Free Officers. Although only a fraction of Egypt’s farming population actually benefited from the land reform measures of 1952—about 146,000 families in all, out of a total Egyptian population of 21.5 million—it engendered tremendous goodwill among the citizens of Egypt.
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With the backing of the Egyptian masses, the military men were emboldened to take the reins of power and play a more direct role in politics.

Once the Free Officers entered politics, they proved very decisive. General Naguib agreed to form a new, largely civilian, government in September 1952. Nasser created a committee of military men to oversee the work of the revolution, ostensibly in collaboration with the government, but increasingly in rivalry with Naguib, called the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). The military men were quick to purge Egyptian politics of party pluralism. In January 1953, in response to pressures from the Wafd and the Muslim Brothers, the RCC banned all parties and expropriated their funds for the state. Working behind the scenes, Colonel Nasser introduced a new state-sponsored party known as the Liberation Rally. Nasser argued that party factionalism was largely responsible for the divisive politics of the interwar years. He hoped the Liberation Rally would serve to mobilize popular support behind the new regime. Nasser made the final break with the old order when the RCC abolished the monarchy, on June 18, 1953. Egypt was declared a republic and Muhammad Naguib named its first president. For the first time since the Pharaonic era, Egypt was ruled by native-born Egyptians. As Nawal El Saadawi put it, Naguib was “the first Egyptian to rule since King Mena in ancient Egypt.”
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The Egyptian republic was now a government of the people, and it enjoyed the full support of the great mass of the Egyptian people. “The atmosphere in the country changed,” Saadawi recalled. “People used to walk along with grim, silent faces. Now the streets had changed. People . . . chatted, smiled, said good morning, shook hands with complete strangers, asked about one another’s health, about recent events, congratulated one another for the change of regime, discussed, tried to foretell future events, [and] kept expecting changes to happen every day.”

The challenge for the new government would be to meet the high expectations of a people eager for change. It would not be easy. The new Egyptian government inherited an intimidating array of economic problems. The country was over-reliant on agriculture, and agricultural output was constrained by Egypt’s desert environment. There was no way to expand the land under cultivation without the water resources for desert reclamation. Egyptian industry remained largely underdeveloped. Whereas agriculture contributed 35 percent of the Egyptian gross domestic product in 1953, industry contributed only 13 percent (with services accounting for the remaining 52 percent of GDP).
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The slow pace of industrialization was in large part
due to low levels of public and private investment. Overall population growth well outstripped the rate of job creation, which meant that fewer Egyptians would get the steady jobs necessary for a significant improvement in their standard of living.

The officers of the Revolutionary Command Council had a radical solution to all their problems: a hydroelectric dam on the Nile. Engineers had identified the ideal place for the dam in Upper Egypt near the town of Aswan. The new Aswan High Dam would store enough water to allow an expansion of land under cultivation from 6 million acres to between 8 and 9.5 million acres, and would generate enough electricity to permit Egypt’s industrialization and provide affordable electricity to the country as a whole.
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Such a project would cost hundreds of millions of dollars—far more than Egypt could raise from its own resources.

To finance the Aswan Dam, and to secure Egypt’s economic independence, the ruling officers would have to engage with the international community. Yet Egypt was intensely jealous of its independence, and sought at all costs to secure its aims without compromises to its sovereignty. The Free Officers were soon to discover how hard it was to engage with the rest of the world without making compromises.

I
n the international arena, the top priority of the new Egyptian government was to secure Britain’s complete withdrawal. It was the unfinished business of Egyptian nationalism since half a century before.

In April 1953 Nasser and his men entered into negotiations with the British, brokered by the United States, to secure Britain’s complete withdrawal from Egypt. The stakes were very high for both sides. Nasser believed that failure would prove the downfall of the Free Officers, and Britain was very sensitive about its international position in an increasingly postcolonial world. The process dragged out over sixteen months, as negotiations broke down and resumed with some frequency. In the end, the British and Egyptians struck a compromise in which the British would withdraw all military personnel from Egyptian soil within twenty-four months, leaving some 1,200 civilian experts in the Canal Zone for a seven-year transition period. It was not a complete and unconditional British withdrawal: the two-year delay for military withdrawal and the concessions for a seven-year British civilian presence were grounds for criticism from some Egyptian nationalist circles. However, it was independence enough for Nasser to secure the RCC’s approval in July 1954. The settlement was concluded between the two governments on October 19, 1954, and the last British soldier left Egypt on June 19, 1956.

 

The new agreement with Great Britain faced criticism within Egypt. President Muhammad Naguib seized on the shortcomings of the agreement to batter his young
rival Gamal Abdel Nasser. No longer satisfied with his role as figurehead, Naguib sought the full powers that he believed were his due as president. Nasser, through his control of the Revolutionary Command Council, was encroaching on the powers of the president. Relations between Nasser and Naguib had deteriorated by early 1954 to what some contemporaries described as hatred, and after Naguib criticized the British withdrawal, Nasser deployed his loyal followers to discredit Naguib and turn public opinion against a man they still revered.

The Muslim Brotherhood also seized upon the incomplete British withdrawal to criticize the Free Officer regime. The Islamist organization, banned along with all the other political parties in 1953, already had its grievances with the new military regime. Early in 1954, Nasser’s clampdown on the Brotherhood made him the target of an Islamist splinter group bent on his assassination. They even considered deploying a suicide bomber wearing a dynamite belt who might get close enough to kill Nasser with the blast—one of the earliest suicide bomb plots in Middle Eastern history. However, the tactic did not appeal to the Islamists of 1954, and there were no volunteers.
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On October 26, 1954, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood named Mahmoud Abd al-Latif tried to assassinate Nasser using a more traditional method. He fired eight bullets at Nasser during a speech celebrating the evacuation agreement with the British. Abd al-Latif was a very bad shot—none of the bullets so much as grazed their target. But with bullets whizzing around him, Nasser performed heroically. He did not flinch under fire and only briefly paused in his speech. When he resumed with great emotion, he electrified an audience that extended via radio broadcast across Egypt and the Arab world: “My countrymen,” Nasser shouted into the microphone, “my blood spills for you and for Egypt. I will live for your sake, die for the sake of your freedom and honor.” The crowd roared their approval. “Let them kill me; it does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor, and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser.”
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The moment could not have been more dramatic, and the Egyptian public declared Nasser their champion. With his newfound popularity, Nasser established his primacy over the revolution and now had a free hand to dispose of both President Muhammad Naguib and the Muslim Brotherhood—his two main rivals for the public’s allegiance. Thousands of Muslim Brothers were arrested, and in December six of their members were hanged for their role in the assassination attempt. Naguib was implicated in the trials and, though he was never charged of wrong-doing, was dismissed as president on November 15 and confined to house arrest for the next twenty years.

Egypt now had one undisputed master. From the end of 1954 until his death in 1970, Nasser was president of Egypt and the commander in chief of the Arab world.
No Arab leader has exercised such influence on the Arab stage before or since, and few would match Nasser’s impact on world affairs. Egypt was on the brink of a remarkable adventure, years of pure adrenaline when anything seemed possible.

 

Once the evacuation agreement had been concluded with the British, the next item on Egypt’s agenda was the unfinished business with the new state of Israel. Tensions ran high along the fragile border between Egypt and the Jewish state. Premier David Ben-Gurion made a number of attempts to sound out the intentions of the Free Officers, but Nasser and his men avoided direct contact with the Israelis (secret exchanges did take place between Israeli and Egyptian diplomats in Paris in 1953, with no result). Ben-Gurion came to the conclusion that Egypt under its new military rulers could turn into the Prussia of the Arab world and as such posed a clear and present danger to Israel. Yet Nasser knew his country was far from the necessary military strength to contain, let alone confront its hostile new neighbor. In order to pose a credible threat to Israel, Egypt needed to acquire materiel from abroad. Nasser quickly discovered, however, that in exchange for arms, foreign governments would inevitably set conditions that would compromise Egypt’s newfound independence.

Nasser turned first to the United States, approaching the Americans for assistance in November 1952. In response the Free Officers were invited to send a delegation to the United States to state their needs: aircraft, tanks, artillery, and ships. The Americans were willing to assist in principal but wanted Egypt to commit to a regional defense pact before processing any orders for military hardware.

In May 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles visited Cairo with the dual mission of promoting a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states, and isolating America’s super-power rival, the Soviet Union, in the Middle East. Discussions with the Egyptian government quickly turned to the subject of weapons. Dulles made clear that the United States remained willing to assist Egypt, on condition that it join a new regional defense pact called the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) that would bring Egypt into a formal alliance with the United States and Great Britain against the Soviet Union.