Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil

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СКАЧАТЬ who participated with Nasser and five others in weekly Brotherhood meetings between 1944 and 1948, before being suspended because of the Palestine War. Nasser then asked Hammudah in November 1950 to form a new organization within the army based on the members of the old Brotherhood organization in the military. Hammudah added that during this period Nasser was solely responsible for the military training of the movement’s youth.⁷⁰ Nasser’s wife, Tahiya, wrote in her memoirs that around those years her husband used to receive guests at the house and introduce them to firearms.⁷¹ Clearly, these were not military cadets.

      On the eve of the coup, Nasser realized that in light of the movement’s vast organizational resources and manpower, it was prudent to enlist its support. During a meeting on July 18, 1952, he asked the Brotherhood cadres Hassan Ashmawi, Saleh Abu-Raqiq, and Salah Shadi to order movement sympathizers in the army and police not to resist the coup; to use their militant organ if needed to help the army intercept any British attempt to reoccupy Cairo; and to organize demonstrations in support of the new regime. In fact, the coup did not proceed before the general guide gave the green light on July 21.⁷² To confirm the story, the young Brotherhood member Mahmoud Game’ says he was instructed by his leadership the night before the coup to secure key installations.⁷³ The honeymoon between Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood continued during the first months following the coup. In 1953, he instructed Interior Minister Suleiman Hafez to exclude the Brotherhood from the ban on political parties, referring to them as “our greatest supporters.”⁷⁴ When movement leaders sought to control the government and name its ministers, and when Nasser learned that they supported the artillery mutiny to put him under pressure, the two sides inevitably clashed. But even after the ruthless Nasser disbanded the movement and detained 540 of its members (including the general guide) on January 14, 1954, he continued to appeal to its popular base by, for example, attending the annual ceremony commemorating the birth of the movement’s founder on February 12, 1954 (while preventing Naguib from coming along), and declaring on that occasion: “I am struggling to fulfill the principles he died for and God is my witness.”⁷⁵ This long and convoluted relationship made the Muslim Brothers assume they could trust Nasser—as it turned out, they were wrong.

      Following his fake rapprochement with the Brotherhood, Nasser received a visit from Ibrahim al-Tahawi and Ahmed Te’ima, his security lieutenants, at the Liberation Rally. They offered to organize a general strike, spearheaded by public transport workers, to bring the country to a standstill, and asked for Nasser’s permission to bribe Sawi Ahmed Sawi, head of the transport union. On March 27, one million workers went on strike in support of Nasser. That same day, the Liberation Rally, with the help of the military police, brought truckloads of peasants to Cairo, chanting antidemocracy slogans: “No parties! No parliament! No elections!” The strike and accompanying demonstrations lasted for three days.⁷⁶

      Meanwhile, the security trio of Nasr, Badran, and Radwan launched a petition-signing campaign within the armed services, demanding Naguib’s resignation and the retraction of the March decrees. Officers were reminded that they might lose their jobs, possibly their lives, should the old regime be reinstated. Those who objected were bullied by their colleagues in order to sign, and those who persisted were either relieved from their duties (thirty-four officers) or detained (twenty-six officers). The content of this military petition was broadcast by public radio, followed by similar petitions from the police and labor unions. This was followed by a comprehensive military and police strike, organized by security agents within both. People were made to understand that the state’s coercive organs now stood united behind Nasser, and that pro-Naguib demonstrations would be mercilessly quelled—as exemplified by the brutal clampdown against the Shubra al-Khima workers on March 26. On March 29, Nasser announced that—having heard the “impulse of the street”—the March decrees would be revoked, but to maintain order all strikes and demonstrations were now banned.⁷⁷ It was yet another of those Napoleonic moments when a revolution initially espousing democracy gives way to a military dictatorship by mobilizing the support of its peasant and urban poor beneficiaries, then dismissing them.

      Naguib tried to fight back. He called the interior minister and asked him to crack down on the antidemocracy demonstrations, but Zakaria said he would not do so unless Naguib sent him a signed order authorizing him to shoot unarmed civilians if necessary. Of course, Naguib refused. He then considered deploying his supporters among the cavalry, but Khaled warned him that this would lead to a massacre. He appealed to the head of the Cairo police division, the former army general Ahmed Shawky, for help. But although Shawky supported him, he was in the minority within the Interior Ministry. To make things worse, Naguib learned through French sources that the United States firmly supported Nasser, and that it had asked the British to intervene on his behalf if necessary. Naguib was left with no other option than to accept—stoically—that the coup was a mistake, and that if he was unwilling to drive the country into civil war, he must retire; “I was as exhausted as a boxer in the final round; I was not yet knocked out, but had lost too many points throughout this long game.”⁷⁸

      Naguib’s associates also realized they were on the losing side; some jumped ship, others were pushed over. His legal adviser (the former interior minister Suleiman Hafez) resigned on March 26; his aide-de-camp (Muhammad Riyad) escaped to Saudi Arabia on March 27—after begging him to come along; his ally at the State Council (Abd al-Razeq al-Sanhouri), who was trying to mend relations between him and the Brotherhood, was assaulted at his office on March 29 by military police officers, then spent a few days at a military hospital before being discharged from office; and his main cavalry contact (Khaled Muhi al-Din) was exiled to Switzerland. In April alone, thirty-seven pro-Naguib cavalry officers were imprisoned and dozens were purged. This was followed in June by a more systematic purge, which included another 140 officers. Nasser then followed the stick with a carrot, raising military expenditure from 17 to 25 percent, a conciliatory gesture designed to win the rank and file.⁷⁹

      The security then turned to public institutions, detaining 252 pro-democracy civil servants in what proved to be the opening act in a long series of measures designed to “cleanse” the bureaucracy and the media from “reactionary elements.” On April 15, the RCC stripped anyone who held public office before the coup of all political rights, and later dissolved syndicates and student unions. Police trucks surrounded universities, and professors and students were recruited by the security apparatus to spy on their colleagues.⁸⁰ After the March 1954 crisis, the revolutionary government showed its teeth, considering all those not entirely supportive of it to be enemies of the state and agents of foreign powers. Nasser now assumed full control as prime minister, while Naguib, though still officially the president, rarely left his house, confiding to his journal: “Egypt has now entered a dark age of injustice and terror.”⁸¹ Within a few months Nasser’s camp succeed in securing “total control of the armed forces … the neutralization and eventual destruction of other existing loci of political power … the control of education, the media, professional syndicates, trade unions, the rural structures in the countryside, the religious institutions and orders, the administration and bureaucracy, eventually, the whole society.”⁸²

      Nasser then proceeded to tie his loose ends with the Muslim Brothers. After a highly suspicious attempt on his life, on October 26, 1954, when he was giving a speech in Alexandria and nine bullets were shot at him at close range from a lone shooter (the Brotherhood member Mahmoud Abd al-Latif) but all missed, the greatest crackdown in the history of the Brotherhood in Egypt began, with perhaps 20,000 detained in newly built concentration camps in the desert, and only 1,050 officially tried. Of those, six leaders were executed, and the rest, including the general guide, received long prison sentences. Expectedly, the movement was disbanded, its property confiscated, and the slightest expression of sympathy with it outlawed. On November 14, it was declared that security investigations had uncovered that the Brotherhood was doing Naguib’s bidding, and the latter was placed under house arrest in a secluded, heavily guarded villa on the outskirts of Cairo, where he would remain for the next eighteen years. Though Naguib insisted he had nothing to do with the unimpressive assassination attempt, he expressed no sympathy for the Brothers who walked into the trap with eyes wide open. In his view, СКАЧАТЬ