Titans of History (72 page)

On his return to Cairo, Neguib was deposed; Nasser became the unrivaled president, a position he retained for the next fifteen turbulent years. He appointed his crony Amer commander-in-chief of the army before launching a massive crackdown on communists and, above all, the Muslim Brotherhood. He arrested 20,000 of their members and had their leader and ideologue Sayyid Qutb executed.

Henceforth Nasser, with his tall good looks and superb oratory, was immensely popular, but it was his embrace of pan-Arabist nationalism that excited not just Egyptians but the entire Arab world, which was emerging from a century of foreign domination. Nonetheless he ruled an effective one-party state with the aid of a growing and brutal secret police, backed by an ever more corrupt and oligarchical military junta who swiftly became rich (though he himself had no interest in material matters).

Nasser committed himself to the nonaligned movement, emerging as its leader alongside Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia and Nehru of India. In 1956 Nasser announced the nationalization of
the Suez Canal, outraging British Prime Minister Anthony Eden who, facing the decline of British imperial power, now saw Nasser as a new Hitler. The British responded by putting together a secret deal with the French and the Israelis to attack and destroy Nasser. The Israelis would invade Sinai; the Anglo-French would then “intervene.” The Israelis succeeded in a dazzling campaign to take Sinai but the British intervention was a disaster and US President Eisenhower condemned it. The Israelis were forced to withdraw and it marked the end of British imperial influence in the Middle East.

Nasser's prestige was at its height: his speeches and radio stations beamed out anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist propaganda promising the Arabs pride and grandeur at last. His pan-Arabist ideas excited the Arab people across the region and inspired nationalist officers in most Arab countries. In Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and even in Saudi Arabia, the regimes were shaken by Nasserist infiltration. In 1958, sympathetic officers in Iraq massacred King Faisal II and his family and created an Iraqi republic on the Nasserist model. In Jordan, King Hussein scarcely clung on to power as Nasserist officers dominated the army. King Saud of Arabia ordered Nasser's assassination, but the plot was exposed and he was deposed, replaced by his brother Faisal.

Syria and Egypt formed a United Arab Republic under Nasser as president—though it soon fell apart. Nasser flew to Moscow to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, alarming the Americans: he was anti-communist and persecuted Egyptian Marxists, but despite his nonaligned leadership, he leaned clearly toward the Soviets. A coup in North Yemen by Nasserist officers led to Nasser sending Egyptian troops to fight royalist forces backed by the Saudis.

In Egypt, Nasser—omnipotent, isolated and ill—came to understand that his regime had become a corrupt dictatorship with its
rich army elite and its secret police. Above all he realized that Field Marshal Amer—powerful, hedonistic, and a drug addict—had failed to create a strong army. In 1967, Syrian clashes with Israel challenged Nasser, the most powerful Arab leader of the greatest Arab country, to live up to his years of bombast. Soviet leaders warned that Israel planned an attack on Syria—but this was utterly false.

Nasser probably hoped to raise the tension and demonstrate Egyptian power without actually fighting Israel. He expelled UN peacekeepers from Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran, promising a victorious war and the massacre of the Jews of Israel. At the same time, he allowed Amer to move Egyptian forces up into Sinai and prepare an attack while his officers assumed control of the Syrian and Jordanian armies. At the last moment, he panicked and ordered Amer to desist but the damage was done: Israelis were in a state of existential terror, convinced a second Holocaust was upon them. The prime minister Levi Eshkol was dithering; the chief of staff General Yitzak Rabin had a breakdown. Finally Eshkol brought Moshe Dayan, former general and now politician, famous for his cool intelligence and his trademark black eye-patch into the government as defense minister. Faced with an apparently imminent Egyptian attack coordinated with Syria and Jordan, Dayan launched a pre-emptive strike, wiping out the Egyptian air force in minutes and defeating Egyptian troops on the ground. Syrian and Jordanian forces attacked Israel, which defeated both in turn—while Egypt under Nasser and Amer still claimed victory. In fact Nasser's clumsy brinkmanship and bullying domination of the other Arab countries, combined with Amer's incompetence, had brought about a defeat even greater than that suffered by King Farouk.

Nasser offered to resign but vast crowds in Cairo insisted he remain president. However he was a broken man, dying of a massive heart attack in 1970, succeeded by his vice president, Anwar Sadat.
Sadat was another dynamic and original army officer who was determined to overturn the Israeli military advantage and yet simultaneously to avoid Egypt becoming a Soviet satellite country. He threw out Soviet military advisers and coordinated a secret plan with Syria to attack Israel on Yom Kippur 1973: Israel was totally surprised by the attack. Though Israeli forces ultimately repelled the Egyptians and Syrians and managed to cross the Suez Canal to attack Egypt proper, Arab military pride was restored.

In 1977, Sadat flew to Jerusalem and signed a peace treaty with Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, who returned Sinai in exchange for peace. Yet Sadat presided over a police state that was not delivering economic benefits to his people. There was considerable discontent and riots as well as rising activity by Islamic fundamentalists, appalled by Sadat's growing alliance with the West. In 1981 Sadat was assassinated at a military parade, succeeded by his vice president, air force general Hosni Mubarak. The latter was cloddish and unsophisticated, but conservative and shrewd enough to rule Egypt for the next thirty years: the direct succession of pharaonic dictators had led from Nasser via Sadat to Mubarak, who received vast financial and military aid from America in return for suppressing Islamic fundamentalism and maintaining the peace with Israel. But Egypt was a one-party state with a brutal secret police, a corrupt military oligarchy, faked elections, a controlled press and brazen injustice.

In 2011, as Mubarak, now an octogenarian, planned the succession of his son, a popular revolution—part of a wave of discontent against dictators across the Arab world—overthrew the president. The revolts toppled the long-serving Libyan and Tunisian leaders and sparked a bloody uprising in Syria against Bashar Assad and his brutal dynasty. But after the initial optimism and effervescence, revolutions usually favor those with the best existing organizations and discipline: thus in Egypt, the military
and the Islamists were the most organized. The Nasserite generals, in power since 1952, tried to remain in charge; middle-class Egyptians, who promoted Mubarak's fall through Facebook and Twitter, dreamed of liberal democracy, but the mass of Egyptians seemed to prefer the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists. The outcome of all these events across the Middle East remains unclear: as the Chinese communist premier Zhou Enlai reflected when asked about the outcome of the French Revolution, “It is too early to tell.”

Nicolae 1918–1989 Elena 1916–1989

He always claimed to act and speak on behalf of the people, to be a beloved son of the people, but he only tyrannized the people all the time
.

Prosecutor at the opening of the trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceau
ş
escu, December 1989

The preposterous and merciless Ceau
ş
escus personified the long Communist tyranny over eastern Europe—and their violent fate represented the drama of the 1989 revolutions that overthrew it. Ceau
ş
escu promoted his own cult of personality as self-declared “Conductor” (Leader) and “Genius of the Carpathians” and diverted his poverty-stricken country's resources to vast monuments to his own glory while using his Securitate secret police to murder his enemies. He and his wife Elena ruled as a grotesque partnership.
When the communist Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989–90, they were the only two of the ousted leaders to be shot.

Born into a peasant family, Ceau
ş
escu joined the fledgling Romanian communist movement in the early 1930s. At the time Romania was a conservative monarchy, and being a communist was illegal. In 1936 Ceau
ş
escu was jailed for two years, and in 1940 was interned in a concentration camp. Here he met Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the leader of the Romanian Communist Party, and escaped with him in 1944. That same year a broad-based anti-fascist “liberation” government—including Dej—was set up with Soviet assistance. In 1947 Ceau
ş
escu married plowman's daughter Elena.

Later that year the Communists ousted their erstwhile allies from government, and in 1952 Dej became
de facto
dictator of Romania. With the elevation of his mentor, Ceau
ş
escu was able to secure his own position, and when Dej died in 1965, Ceau
ş
escu became party leader and head of state. Many Romanians hoped their new leader would inaugurate a period of greater liberalization and reform. In August 1968 such expectations intensified after Ceau
ş
escu's denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and his defiant line made him a genuinely popular figure within Romania, and earned plaudits from the West. Nevertheless, he was quick to assure the Soviets that his country would remain a loyal member of the Eastern Bloc.

Early optimism started to dissipate as Ceau
ş
escu began to fantasize about turning Romania into a world industrial power house; and as he did so, prospects for liberalization receded. Instead, Ceau
ş
escu became obsessed with shoring up his monopoly of power, and to this end he introduced a process of continual job rotation by which functionaries at every level were ordered to change position regularly, with the intention that no one would be able to build up a power base to challenge him. The fact that
the system also led to administrative chaos does not seem to have troubled Ceau
ş
escu, who in March 1974 assumed the ability to rule by decree alone. His wife Elena became increasingly powerful as vice-premier, politburo member and self-declared “Mother of the Nation”: the Ceau
ş
escus ruled as a gruesome partnership and stories of her greed, ruthlessness and vainglory abounded.

The role of the secret police, the infamous Securitate, or State Security Department, also expanded. By 1989 it had an estimated 24,000 members, and right across society a climate of fear was inculcated in which everyone was encouraged to spy on everybody else; failure to do so resulted in confinement in prison or a labor camp. At the same time, Ceau
ş
escu became intoxicated with the notion that Romania needed to build an image as a modern socialist utopia, culminating in the 1980s with the construction of a gigantic palace in the heart of Bucharest. This monstrous piece of architecture was built on the back of what was effectively slave labor, and required the eviction of 40,000 people from their homes in order to make space for it.

Ceau
ş
escu determined to combine the values of socialism with an ever more strident Romanian nationalism. This resulted in an increasingly bizarre series of campaigns aimed at cementing Romania's national greatness. In March 1984, for example, concerned at the country's low birth rate, Ceau
ş
escu decreed that women of child-bearing age were required to have monthly gynecological examinations under the watchful eye of the Securitate, and if they were not pregnant had to justify why not.

By the 1980s, as the country faced a mounting debt crisis, Ceau
ş
escu resolved to pay off Romania's creditors by the end of the decade. To achieve this he ordered the mass exportation of the country's agricultural produce and industrial manufactures. The result was a collapse in the standard of living, and the deaths of thousands as a result of poor nutrition and lack of modern medical care.
Ceau
ş
escu responded by introducing austerity measures such as the “Rational Eating Program,” which set per capita limits on consumption. The long-suffering people of Romania were finally released from the tyrant's grip when the popular revolutions of 1989 brought the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe crashing down. The fall of the “Genius of the Carpathians” proved to be bloody: after a summary trial, on Christmas Day 1989 he and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad as he sang the “Internationale” and she shouted “You motherf–rs!”

1918–

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die
.

Nelson Mandela, defending himself at the Rivonia Trial (1964)

In his fight for freedom against South Africa's apartheid system Nelson Mandela has inspired millions across the world with his courage, endurance and nobility of spirit. The transfer of South Africa from apartheid to black rule could have led to vindictive massacres, similar to the slaughter when India became independent, but, thanks to one politician, this revolution was essentially tolerant, peaceful, orderly
and bloodless. This is the towering achievement of a man who embodies South Africa's journey toward democracy and racial equality.

On February 11, 1990 Nelson Mandela walked out of the gates of the Victor Verster Prison in the Dwars Valley near Cape Town. It was the first time that he had been free for twenty-seven years, a triumph of hope that signified the beginning of a new era for a country riven by apartheid since 1948. It was Mandela who in 1994 became South Africa's first democratically elected president.