Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  By August 1948, Nasser was the deputy commander of Egyptian units surrounded by the Israelis in the so-called Falluja Pocket. It was a formative experience: Nasser was humiliated by the disastrous war effort and on his return he formed with his friend Amer and others the Association of Free Officers. Nasser consulted with the Muslim Brotherhood, but concluded early on that their Islamic program clashed with his own Arab nationalism. The Free Officers selected General Muhammad Neguib to be their front man.

  When Nasser heard in May 1952 that Farouk was planning to arrest the Free Officers, he launched an almost bloodless coup d’état, allowing the king to depart from Alexandria in his yacht with full honors. The revolutionaries were unsure whether to create a democracy or a military regime. Since Nasser was only a lieutenant colonel, Neguib became president of the new Egyptian Republic, but real power was in the hands of the Revolutionary Command Council, which was effectively controlled by Nasser in his role as deputy chairman.

  In 1954, as Nasser pushed land reforms and demanded that the alarmed British should leave the Suez Canal, he clashed with the more moderate Neguib. But he asserted his confidence by taking real power as prime minister. Nasser’s passionate and elegant oratory was already captivating Egyptian audiences. In October, as Nasser addressed a huge crowd in Alexandria, a young Muslim Brother tried to assassinate him but Nasser defiantly and courageously continued his speech:

  My countrymen, my blood spills for you and for Egypt. I will live for your sake and die for the sake of your freedom and honor. 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 … Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation.

  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 leader
s 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.”

  THE CEAUŞESCUS OF ROMANIA

  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 Ceauşescu, December 1989

  The preposterous and merciless Ceauşescus personified the long Communist tyranny over eastern Europe—and their violent fate represented the drama of the 1989 revolutions that overthrew it. Ceauşescu 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, Ceauşescu 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 Ceauşescu 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 Ceauşescu 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, Ceauşescu was able to secure his own position, and when Dej died in 1965, Ceauşescu 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 Ceauşescu’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 Ceauşescu began to fantasize about turning Romania into a world industrial power house; and as he did so, prospects for liberalization receded. Instead, Ceauşescu 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 Ceauşescu, 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 Ceauşescus 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, Ceauşescu 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.

  Ceauşescu 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, Ceauşescu 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, Ceauşescu 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. Ceauşescu 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!”

  MANDELA

  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.

  The privileged son of a Tembu chieftain of royal descent, Mandela grew up in rural Transkei and had a boarding-school education that exposed him to little of the discrimination that most of South Africa’s black population faced. Before Mandela fled his home to avoid an arranged marriage, his most significant experience of oppression had been his naming as Nelson by a primary-school teacher who found his African name too difficult to pronounce.

  But on arrival in Johannesburg the young lawyer began to live up to his birth name: Rolihlahla or troublemaker. Mandela became one of the first freedom fighters for the African National Congress (ANC). He was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned for his nonviolent protests throughout the 1950s. When the ANC was outlawed, Mandela—the “Black Pimpernel”—went on the run, drumming up overseas support and military training for the organization. In 1961 he became the leader of the ANC terrorist wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), planning violence against military/government targets. He regarded terror as a last resort to be used only when peaceful methods seemed hopeless, but he later co
nfessed that the increasingly violent ANC terror and guerrilla campaigns also abused human rights. After being arrested and jailed in 1962 for leaving the country, in the Rivonia Trial of 1964 Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Mandela’s speech from the dock echoed through the townships from the Cape to the Paarl. It helped to politicize a people who had had every opportunity for education, advancement and independence taken away from them by the apartheid policies of the Afrikaner Nationalist government, which had crushed their rights and dignity. His words gave them hope.

  Mandela is a man of awesome obduracy. Sentenced to hard labor in a stone quarry on Robben Island, Mandela transformed his prison camp into the “Island University,” assigning instructors to educate the teams of inmates as they toiled at their back-breaking work. He put on plays and distributed books to fill the hours. After twenty-seven years’ waiting, Mandela delayed his final departure from prison by one more day: “They are going to release me the way I want to be released,” he explained, “not the way they want me to be released.”

  As Mandela’s stature grew across the world, the apartheid government, under hardliners like P.W. Botha, tried to do deals with this prisoner who had become their Achilles’ heel. They offered to release him if he would denounce the ANC; Mandela refused: “Until my people are free, I can never be free.” Peace takes men of vision and courage on both sides, and in 1989 the new South African president, F.W. de Klerk, was courageous enough to take the necessary risks. In 1990 he lifted the ban on the ANC just days before he released Mandela. And once free, Mandela almost immediately renounced violent action, thus making the vow he had refused to undertake while imprisoned.