Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen - Hazem Kandil

Скачать книгу

ASU. Clearly, Nasser perceived state institutions more or less as political power structures, as incubators for a new class of citizens whose interests were tied to his ruling party.

      To empower a stratum of conservative village notables and civil servants appeared much more expedient to Nasser’s security coterie than to mobilize urban activists or unruly peasants. Egypt’s long experience with elections (dating back to 1866) had laid down certain political practices in the countryside, such as having village notables register peasants to vote for their landlords or mobilize them to show support for a particular candidate. All Nasser’s faction needed to do was to utilize this preexisting setup for its own purposes; that is, all it had to do was to lock into existing authority structures instead of creating new ones. In that sense, the emasculation of the upper class in the village was symbolic; its political influence was simply passed on to those next in line.

      With peasant support channeled by rural notables, and employees and workers’ support channeled by their supervisors in the bureaucracy and public-sector companies, the ASU had a considerable social base. These notables and managers, in turn, dominated the apparatuses of the ruling party and got themselves elected to the various representative bodies. That is not to say that this stratum constituted a new “ruling class,” because its role was rather one of sustaining those in power. Its influence was mostly local, and its aspirations were limited to increasing its wealth and status. In Gaetano Mosca’s terms, it represented the “second stratum of the ruling class,” one that mediates power between regime and society without actually holding the keys to political authority.53 According to another political scientist, Timothy Mitchell, Nasser’s experiment provides a good case study of the complex set of relations that constitute the state: “These no longer appear primarily in the form of a central power intervening to initiate change, but as local practices of regulation, policing, and coercion that sustain a certain level of inequality … The center did not initiate change, but tried to channel local forces into activities that would extend … regime influence.”54

      The fingerprints of Nasser’s security elite appear all over this power-building process. The president himself aimed for a wider popular base. For example, in a speech delivered on October 16, 1961, he criticized the National Union for including fewer than 2,000 urban activists among its 29,520 committee members, with the rest representing the forces of reaction in the countryside, and pledged that the new ASU would come up with preventive measures against the infiltration of these elements, the most important of which was that its membership would include 50 percent workers and peasants. The presidential initiative was quickly frustrated when Sabri and the rest of the security crew agreed to include those who owned 50 feddans in the peasant category, and to consider those who sat on the boards of public-sector companies as workers.55 Nasser then delegated to his security men the task of filtering out conservative elements during the transition from the NU to the ASU. The result was that only 1.5 percent of NU members who applied to join the ASU were disqualified, and a striking 78 percent of those in charge of NU village units, and 60 percent of those heading NU secretariat positions in the cities, continued to occupy the same posts under the new organization.56 Not only that, but while village notables occupied 11.7 percent under the NU watch in the 1957 parliament, their share more than doubled (to 30 percent) in the ASU-supervised parliamentary elections in 1964.57 It was the typical “the devil we know” mentality that governs security thinking that assured the continued predominance of the rural middle class and its urban offshoots. As the senior intelligence official Abd al-Fattah Abu al-Fadl concluded after his five-year tenure at the ASU, the new party was not only formed of the same social material as that of the old, but of the exact same people.58

      It is this group of middle-class opportunists that would run and benefit from the ruling party for the next five decades—although it would have to share the spoils with more affluent businessmen after the seventies. Instead of undermining the new class of security officers, the ASU provided this mostly urban class with a bridge to the countryside, thus tightening relations between security and politics more than ever. Eventually, this security-political alliance would succeed in marginalizing the military, but at the price of fortifying the dictatorship. An early demonstration of the fatal consequences of this emerging alliance was there for all to see in 1966 in a small village on the Nile Delta known as Kamshish.

      THE KAMSHISH AFFAIR

      The Kamshish Affair brought into sharp focus the alignment of forces in place during the final days leading up to the climactic 1967 war. This small village of perhaps 10,000 inhabitants and 2,120 feddans in al-Munufiya province on the Nile Delta in northern Egypt (the home province of Sadat and Mubarak) became an international cause célèbre in 1966, receiving extensive coverage from Egyptian and world media, and attracting visits from no less than Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone De Beauvoir, as well as honorable mention in one of Fidel Castro’s fiery speeches. It was celebrated as the only instance of peasant revolt in postcoup Egypt, though the reality was much more humble. Its true significance was that it accurately reflected the political configuration and power balances of the time. Lutfi al-Kholi, editor of the regime’s mouthpiece, Al-Tali’ah, thought it was “a political and economic thermometer” of the state of the country.59 In fact, the GIS director, Salah Nasr, described it as the “apex of the power struggle” that consumed the country during the 1960s.60

      The whole affair began with peasant activists leading a campaign against the large landowning family of al-Feqi, which retained 650 feddans above the limit prescribed by the land-reform laws. Complaints against the formerly dominant landlords also incriminated ASU and security officials, who—together with village notables—facilitated the family’s fraudulent behavior. The campaign, which centered on petitions to the president and the ASU leadership in Cairo, was led by two Communists, Salah al-Din Hussein and his wife, Shahendah Maqlad. But Nasser’s security lieutenants kept a lid on it, making sure he never saw any of the letters addressed to him. But it all came into the open during the president’s tour of the countryside in March 1966, when he heard demonstrators chanting: “The Kamshish Revolution Salutes the Mother Revolution!” followed by Maqlad rushing toward his motorcade to hand him a memo detailing the whole story—how Kamshish peasants were among the first to back up the land-reform laws in 1952; how appalled they were when the “feudal” al-Feqis became the representatives of Nasser’s first popular organization (the Liberation Rally), and afterward made sure that NU and ASU dignitaries in the province were their junior allies; how al-Feqis regularly consorted with security officials to make sure peasant petitions were intercepted and their drafters detained; and finally, how this whole charade made it seem as if the revolution’s political organizations were “born dead.”61 Upon returning to Cairo, Nasser demanded a full investigation. Party and police officials claimed it was a minor affair stirred by Communist troublemakers, and decided to shelve the case. Weeks later, Hussein was shot dead by a police-hired peasant, sparking massive peasant riots that soon made local and international headlines. The press coverage highlighted how little the power structure had shifted in the countryside after a decade and a half of land reform.

      In his dual capacity as intelligence operative and ASU functionary, Abu al-Fadl was asked to investigate the murder. A few weeks later, he reported that Hussein had in fact been submitting one complaint after another to ASU officials and the PBI concerning violations by al-Feqis. The complaints were ignored, and the Interior Ministry detained Hussein twice, once (between November 1954 and February 1956) for being a Communist, and the other (during the second week of September 1965) for being an Islamist.62 Hussein’s widow also provided investigators with a security memo written weeks before the murder (on March 3, 1966), accusing her husband of rabble-rousing and warning of his subversive activities, thus further implicating the security apparatus in his assassination.63 The investigation also revealed that the Speaker of Parliament, Anwar al-Sadat, intervened in al-Feqis’ favor, and that even after the murder he tried to shore them up by claiming that his own investigations (carried out by Mahmoud Game’, a confidant who also happened to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood) confirmed their innocence of all charges—whether land-reform violations or incitement to murder. Sadat further claimed that Hussein and his wife were Soviet agents, who received regular visits and funding from the Russian embassy.64 Sadat was not the only actor in this unfolding

Скачать книгу