Arabs (67 page)

Iraq’s decision to stay out of the United Arab Republic was a major turning point. Without the excitement and momentum that the accession of Iraq, or indeed of Jordan or Lebanon, might have brought to the UAR, Egypt and Syria were left to the mundane business of making their hybrid state work. They would not succeed. Arab nationalism turned a corner, and Nasser, having reached the pinnacle of success in the course of the 1950s, suffered a string of setbacks and defeats that turned the 1960s into a decade of defeats.

CHAPTER 11

I
n the course of the 1950s, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers had led Egypt and the Arab world through a string of improbable triumphs. “Nasserism” had become the dominant expression of Arab nationalism. Men and women across the Arab world believed the Egyptian president had a master plan for unifying the Arab people and leading them to a new age of independence and power. They saw their hopes realized in the union of Syria and Egypt.

Nasser’s remarkable run of successes came to an end in the 1960s. The union with Syria unraveled in 1961. The Egyptian army got mired in Yemen’s civil war. And Nasser led his nation and its Arab allies into a disastrous war with Israel in 1967. The long-promised liberation of Palestine was yet further set back by Israel’s occupation of the remaining Palestinian territories, as well as the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and Syrian Golan Heights. The hopes of the Arab world in 1960 had been worn down to disillusion and cynicism by the time of Nasser’s death in 1970.

The events of the 1960s had a radicalizing impact on the Arab world. With British and French imperialism increasingly a thing of the past, the Arabs found themselves drawn into the politics of the Cold War. By the 1960s the Arab states had divided into pro-Western and pro-Soviet blocs. The influence of the Cold War was most pronounced in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which developed into a proxy war between Soviet and American arms. The Arab experience, it seemed, would continue to be one of divide and rule.

T
he United Arab Republic would prove more of a challenge than Nasser had ever anticipated. Shukri al-Quwatli, the twice-deposed president of Syria, reportedly
warned Nasser that he would find Syria “a difficult country to govern.” He explained: “Fifty per cent of the Syrians consider themselves national leaders, twenty-five per cent think they are prophets, and ten per cent imagine they are gods.”
¹

The Syrians chafed under Egyptian rule. The Syrian army, which had initially shown such enthusiasm for the union, hated taking orders from Egyptian officers. The Syrian landowning elites were outraged when Egypt’s land reform program was applied to Syria. By January 1959 over one million acres of farmland had been confiscated from large landholders for redistribution to Syrian peasants. Syrian businessmen saw their position undermined by socialist decrees that transferred their companies from private to state ownership, as the government expanded its role in economic planning. The average Syrian was crushed under the weight of the notorious paperwork of Egyptian bureaucracy.

The Egyptians alienated the Syrian political elites by excluding them from government. Syrian society was intensely political, and the Syrian politicians resented the dissolution of their parties and their subordination to Egypt’s single state party. Nasser named his own right-hand man, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, to be his viceroy over the Syrian regional government, relegating his supporters in the Ba‘th party to posts of second importance. By the end of 1959, leading Ba’thists had resigned from the UAR cabinet in protest—including some of the architects of the union, such as Salah al-Din Bitar. In August 1961, Nasser decided to dispense with the Syrian regional government altogether and to rule Syria through an expanded cabinet based in Cairo.

Having led its country into union with Egypt in February 1958, the Syrian army now organized a coup to sever ties and take Syria back again. On the morning of September 28, 1961, Syrian army units moved into Damascus before dawn, arrested Field Marshal Amer, and secured the radio station. The Syrian interim government, an entirely civilian cabinet, expelled Amer and ordered the deportation of all Egyptians from Syrian soil on September 30—some 6,000 troops, 5,000 civil servants, and an estimated 10,000–20,000 Egyptian guest workers.

Nasser was perplexed by Syria’s bid for secession. His first reaction was to dispatch the Egyptian army to repress the coup with force. He relented hours later and recalled his forces, accepting Syrian secession “so that no Arab blood would be shed.” “Nasser was tormented by the breakup of the UAR,” journalist Mohamed Heikal recalled. “It had been the first international expression of his dream of Arab Unity and it was not revived in his lifetime.”
²

In the aftermath of the Syrian coup, Nasser initially pinned the blame for the breakup of the UAR on its opponents—the Jordanians, the Saudis, even the Americans. Yet the Syrian secession forced Nasser to ask hard questions about his own political orientations and the direction the Egyptian revolution had taken. He never recognized the obvious problem with the UAR—that Egypt had ruled in a quasi-imperial
fashion over the proud Syrians. Instead, Nasser came to the conclusion that Egypt and Syria had failed to achieve the degree of social reform necessary for such an ambitious Arab unity scheme to work. His response to the breakup of the UAR was to introduce a radical reform agenda to strip the “reactionary” elements from Arab society and pave the way for a future “progressive” union of the Arab people.

Starting in 1962, Nasser took the Egyptian revolution down the road of Arab socialism—an ambitious if quixotic reform agenda fusing Arab nationalism and Soviet-inspired socialism. The Egyptian government accelerated the nationalization of private enterprise, which had begun in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis, to create an entirely state-led economy. Already in 1960 the UAR government had introduced its first Soviet-style five year plan (1960–1965) with overly ambitious targets for economic expansion in industry and agricultural output. In the countryside, the land reform measures begun in 1952 were intensified as new laws lowered the maximum land holding from 200 to 100 acres, with expropriated lands redistributed to landless and smallholder peasants. Egyptian industrial workers and peasants were given new prominence in state institutions.

Egypt’s new political orientation was enshrined in the 1962 National Charter, which sought to weave Islam, Arab nationalism, and socialism into a coherent political project. Not only did the National Charter envision a new political culture for Egypt, but it set out ideals for reshaping Arab society at large. And the ideological orientation of the country was entrusted to the official state party, the National Union, which was renamed the Arab Socialist Union.

With his turn to Arab socialism, Nasser gave up trying to subvert the rules of the Cold War and threw in his lot with the Soviet Union, following its model of a state-led economy. Leaving the door open to future unity schemes, Nasser retained the name “United Arab Republic” for his country. It was only in 1971 that the UAR was laid to rest and Nasser’s successor renamed the country the Arab Republic of Egypt.

Arab socialism would exercise great influence in Egypt and divide the Arab world. The language of politics in Egypt grew much more doctrinaire. The ultimate target of Nasser’s critique after the breakup of the UAR was the “reactionaries,” the men of property who put narrow national self-interest before the interests of the Arab nation. By extension, those Arab states that were supported by the West—conservative monarchies like Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and liberal republics like Tunisia and Lebanon—were dismissed as “reactionary” states (in the West they were known as “moderate” states). The revolutionary Arab states all aligned themselves with Moscow and followed its social and economic model. They were known in the Arab world as “progressive” states (dismissed as “radical” Arab states in the West). The list of progressive states was initially quite small—Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—though their ranks would expand with the conclusion of successful revolutions in Algeria, Yemen, and Libya.

Egypt was fairly isolated in this new division of the region, as it had poor relations with the other emerging “progressive” Arab states—Iraq in particular. However, in 1962 Nasser had just gained an important ally. After the bloodiest anticolonial war in the region’s history, Algeria had finally secured its independence from France.

T
he Algerian war of independence raged for nearly eight years, from the first uprising of November 1, 1954, until the establishment of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria in September 1962. The conflict spared no part of Algeria, spreading from the cities to the countryside. By war’s end, over one million Algerians and Frenchmen had lost their lives.

When the Algerians launched their bid for independence, they had every reason to expect high casualties. In 1945 French repression of moderate nationalists in the eastern market town of Sétif (the nationalists wished to carry Algerian flags alongside French flags in their local Victory in Europe parade) resulted in riots that left forty Algerians and Europeans dead. The French overreaction to the Sétif demonstrations set off nationwide protests across Algeria through the month of May 1945. The French deployed warships, aircraft, and some 10,000 soldiers to quell the uprising. Whereas about one hundred European men, women, and children had been killed by Algerian insurgents, many more Algerians had been killed by French retaliatory measures. The French government acknowledged some 1,500 Algerian dead, though the army put the figure at 6,000–8,000. Algerians claims ran as high as 45,000 dead. The French intended Sétif as a warning against further nationalist activity. Predictably, their murderous overreaction had the opposite effect intended, driving many Algerians to embrace the nationalist cause. As Algerian nationalists rose up against the French in 1954, they were still haunted by the memory of Sétif.

The heavy casualties of the 1954–1962 Algerian War reflected an implacable logic of violent retribution. The Algerian nationalists of the National Liberation Front (FLN) believed they had to inflict terror on the French that would provoke a terrible retaliation from them, which would force the colonial power from the country. The French, for their part, had no intention of withdrawing from their oldest and most entrenched North African possession. “Algeria
is
France,” the French insisted—and they meant it. They believed the nationalists to be a marginal force that could be crushed, leaving the silent majority of complacent Algerians to continue under French rule. The resulting savage war of unspeakable horrors shattered Algeria and France alike.

Atrocities against civilians began with FLN attacks on the French settlers in Philippeville in August 1955, when Algerian fighters killed 123 men, women, and children. After the experience of Sétif, the FLN knew the French would retaliate with a vengeance that would generate broad-based Algerian hatred for the French.
They were right. The French acknowledged killing over 1,200 Algerian civilians in retaliation for the Philippeville massacre. The FLN claimed the French had killed 12,000. Thousands of Algerians volunteered for the FLN as a result. In such a way, the small FLN insurgency of 1954 erupted into total war by the end of 1955.

As thousands of Algerians volunteered to join the national liberation struggle, the FLN managed to consolidate its hold over Algerian politics through a combination of conviction and intimidation. The aggressive tactics of the French military encouraged a number of Algerian political parties and movements to make common cause with the FLN. Early nationalists such as Ferhat Abbas, as well as the parties of the left, like the Communists, folded their own organizations into the National Liberation Front. The FLN was ruthless with its internal opponents. In the first three years of the war of independence it is estimated that the FLN killed six times more Algerians than Frenchmen in their operations. By July 1956, the FLN had secured unrivaled command of the national liberation struggle, which it declared both a war of independence and a social revolution.